Good News for Feminists: Law Firm Memo Shows Most Americans Support Single-Sex Spaces

In December of 2021, the Transgender Law Center published a messaging guide analyzing polling data regarding a number of issues related to transgenderism. The results are remarkably encouraging for anyone holding a gender critical/radical feminist analysis of the issue and reveal that previous Women’s Liberation Front polling data accurately assessed Americans’ attitudes towards a variety of policies related to “gender identity” and single-sex spaces and activities. 

Memo Highlights

The Race/Class/Gender Narrative

Transgender activists are attempting to garner support for the movement by creating what they call a “Race Class Gender” narrative. This strategy attempts to conflate civil rights activism with “gender identity” activism. The goal is to emotionally sway respondents to support the right of men to self-identify as women to gain access to female-only spaces and services by suggesting it is simply another iteration of the movements against segregation. The memo suggests using emotionally manipulative language like the following in order to convince Americans into thinking the movement for racial justice and for men’s rights to enter female spaces are equivalent:

Whether we are Black, white or brown, Native or newcomer, transgender or not, we want the freedom to be ourselves.

But some people try to get and hold onto power by putting us in boxes based on what we look like, where we’re from, or our genders. They stoke fear so we turn against some group instead of demanding what our families need.

Fortunately, however, most Americans aren’t fooled by the attempt to conflate these men’s policy demands with civil rights movements. In a telling subsection, the Memo admits that attempts to compare prohibitions on men entering women’s sports to prohibitions on Black women entering women’s sports actually alienated Black people. 

A version of this message that named how elite competitions question and disqualify Black women athletes yielded even greater support from our base, but considerably increased the margin by which we lost persuadables and all racial groups, including Black adults.

The suggestion that Black women’s historic exclusion from sports is anything like the exclusion of men from women’s sports carries with it ugly historic racist overtones, like the idea that Black women are more masculine or male-like than white women. 

Trans Activists Fail Big on Sports

Another revealing aspect of the memo is in the subsection on sports. The Memo frankly admits that Americans think putting men in women’s sports is unfair to women, and that no argument successfully challenged this. In fact, the memo admits that even their base has simply incoherent ideas about whether men should be allowed to compete in women’s tournaments: 

Right now, our opposition wins the debate on trans youth in sports against any and all arguments we have tried for our side…When pressed, our audiences hold contradictory views, with a third supporting both a policy to ensure transgender student-athletes can play on the team that matches their gender identity and a policy to require that student-athletes play on the team matching their “biological sex.”

All of the polling figures reported in the memo are terrible for the Law Center, but the polling numbers on women’s sports are so bad the Center didn’t even include them. They know it and we know it: Americans aren’t buying that men competing on women’s teams is fair for women. 

The Future: Increasing Public Awareness of these Issues

As Ryan Grim’s analysis of the memo on the Hill makes clear, gender activists lose when the consequences of their policies become known to the public. They’re more successful when they’re able to emotionally manipulate the public through false analogies with activism for racial justice, and when they’re able to keep the public unaware of the actual consequences of their policies for women and girls. 

Feminists have our work cut out for us, but the path to victory is becoming clear. We have to work hard to highlight the unfairness and misogyny in the movement, and to make sure the public is kept informed. And we need to highlight the bad logic and emotional rhetoric of the pro-gender side. Truth and critical thinking are on the side of feminists; we can and will overturn these misogynistic policies.