More than half of the American states have passed laws restricting sports participation by transgender youth (1).¹ In addition, the Trump administration has taken actions such as executive orders and… to block transgender women and girls from competing in women's sports at all educational institutions covered by Title IX (2). In general, these bans have been pushed by conservatives for the electoral advantage of Republicans (3). Indeed, the issue of transgender participation in sports was extensively used by Republican candidates during the 2024 election cycle (4, 5). This strategy was arguably effective as an electoral tool because there is no strong public support for transgender participation in sports (6), and transgender rights have broadly become more partisan over time (7, 8). To counter these trends, transgender advocates need to change public attitudes toward transgender participation in sports.

Using a preregistered experiment, we examine activist-recommended communication strategies regarding transgender youth participation in sports (9). These strategies include the deployment of egalitarian or loss-based frames and acknowledging that some people may feel discomfort with transgender people. We find that utilizing egalitarian frames can slightly influence attitudes toward transgender youth participation in sports.

Research on public attitudes toward transgender rights shows that a portion of the public feels uncomfortable with transgender people and tends to view them less warmly than other minority groups (10). However, public support varies across different transgender-related issues (11). For instance, there is greater support for traditional civil rights concerns (11).

However, issues involving transgender bodies, such as restroom access or sports participation, generate greater public opposition (11), especially among Republicans and conservatives (7). Individuals who are more religious also tend to oppose transgender rights (12, 13). In contrast, women and those having interpersonal contact with members of the LGBT community are more supportive of transgender rights (14). Personality traits and dispositions, such as authoritarianism, moral traditionalism, and disgust sensitivity, are negatively associated with support for transgender rights and comfort with transgender people (10, 13). Conversely, egalitarianism, a concept rooted in principles of equality and fairness, is positively associated with support for transgender rights (6, 15). Finally, we know that partisan elite messaging shapes public attitudes toward transgender rights (7).

Political actors seek to shape public opinion by providing cueing and persuasive messages (16). Cueing messages provide contextual information about the political implications of an issue, whereas persuasive messages present arguments that support a position. These arguments are framed in ways that influence how individuals perceive issues (17, 18). For instance, by providing cues, values-based messages can reframe policy discussions and facilitate changes in public opinion (19). People are also more persuaded by arguments that emphasize the losses incurred by a policy (20).

We know that every issue has more than one dimension. The issue framing literature suggests that invoking one dimension of an issue over others can persuade the audience to consider that dimension over others. This frame can then shape subsequent attitudes. For example, if a speaker discussing gun policy frames the issue in terms of public safety, that frame becomes more accessible in the mind of listeners, and the audience member may be more likely to consider public safety when considering the regulation of firearms (21).

In LGBT rights policy discourse, proponents often deploy equality-based frames to shape public attitudes (22), while opponents often emphasize morality and traditional values (22). Tadlock (23) examined frames for transgender rights and found substantial overlap between the framing of gay and transgender rights, suggesting that equality and morality frames both dominate both discourses. In addition to equality frames, education frames are also important in transgender rights advocacy. This framing helps the public understand transgender people and transgender identity, given the lack of contact and greater discomfort that people have with transgender individuals (10). Relatedly, acknowledging personal discomfort with transgender identity may increase receptivity to persuasive messages (24).

We contend that value activation occurs when specific issue frames make certain normative considerations more cognitively accessible, thereby guiding how individuals evaluate policies related to transgender youth participation in sports. In this case, any given policy issue has multiple potential dimensions, and framing works by highlighting one dimension—such as equality or loss—so people rely more on that value when forming opinions. An egalitarian frame, for example, explicitly cues concerns about fairness and discrimination (“we shouldn't discriminate against kids and ban them from playing because they're transgender”), which activates egalitarian predispositions and leads some respondents—especially those with mixed egalitarian and inegalitarian values—to interpret bans as unequal treatment, rather than as a matter of competitive fairness or moral order. In contrast, the loss frame attempts to activate empathic concern by stressing the developmental and psychological harms that follow from excluding transgender youth from sports. However, respondents who lack strong empathic bonds with transgender people are unlikely to change their views. We also know that motivated reasoning will likely dampen the impact of such appeals. Thus, the psychological mechanism of value activation in this context is a selective accessibility process, in which frames highlight particular values (equality vs. harm/loss), and these activated values then shape attitude formation, with egalitarian cues perhaps increasing support for inclusion of transgender youth in sports.

The Movement Advancement Project (9), a pro-LGBT think tank, recommends best practices for communicating about transgender youth participation in sports, including equality and loss framing and acknowledging discomfort as useful approaches. We concur and argue that such frames activate particular values and make them accessible to respondents. Therefore, we propose the following hypotheses:

H1: Acknowledging discomfort will positively influence attitudes toward transgender sports bans.

Table 3 presents the results for the two dependent variables by treatment status. A large majority of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed with policies that would require transgender youth to participate in sports based on their sex assigned at birth. Although opinions did not differ much between the control group and the loss-frame group, there was a reduction in strong agreement and an increase in strong disagreement with this policy proposal among those exposed to the egalitarian frame. A test of independence indicated an association between frame assignment and agreement with the policy. Attitudes toward this policy did not differ statistically between respondents whose discomfort was acknowledged and those whose discomfort was not acknowledged.

Similarly, the average scores on the transgender sports scale were slightly and significantly higher among respondents in the egalitarian frame condition relative to those in other conditions. However, average responses did not differ between the control group and those in the loss frame condition, and average responses did not differ between respondents whose discomfort was acknowledged and those whose discomfort was not acknowledged.

Figure 2 presents the regression-adjusted treatment effect estimates, along with estimates of Manski–Horowitz worst-case bounds. For the policy about sex assigned at birth, the models controlled for age, partisanship, egalitarianism, disgust, gender roles, traditionalism, church attendance, born-again identification, and sports fandom and had an R² = 0.29 before assessing treatment effects. For the transgender sports scale, the models controlled for gender, partisanship, egalitarianism, traditionalism, comfort, ideology, and sports fandom and had an R² = 0.46 before assessing treatment effects.

Figures 2a,b present the regression-adjusted average treatment effects on the policy and the transgender sports scale. For both dependent variables, we found that the egalitarianism frame increased the likelihood of a more favorable stance toward transgender participation in sports. However, the effects were not large. For the policy question, opinions were about 0.08 points higher in the egalitarian frame condition than in the control condition. On the transgender sports policy scale, opinions were about 0.08 SDs higher in the egalitarian condition relative to the control. We also did not observe significant treatment effects for the loss framing condition or the acknowledging discomfort condition on either dependent variable. We further found that the worst-case bounds and their confidence intervals did not differ much for any average treatment effect estimate, suggesting that our findings were not highly sensitive to missing post-test observations. Thus, we are confident that egalitarian framing changed opinions to be more supportive of transgender youth participation in sports, although the effect size was small.

Our preanalysis plan suggested that we may be underpowered to detect fully interactive effects, and we did not find a statistically significant interaction between the frame arm and the acknowledge discomfort arm of our experiment. However, our findings were adequately powered to investigate conditional average treatment effects of the frame arm depending on whether discomfort was acknowledged. Figures 2c,d plot these conditional average treatment effects for the policy concerning participation based on sex assigned at birth and for the transgender sports scale. The loss frame did not produce statistically significant treatment effects relative to the control frame, regardless of whether discomfort was acknowledged, for either dependent variable. Interestingly, we found that the egalitarian frame produced a statistically significant effect only when discomfort was acknowledged, while the effect was not statistically significant when discomfort was not acknowledged.⁴

The rapid diffusion of policies restricting transgender participation in school athletics is not unexpected. Under the right conditions, such morality policies can spread quickly (33). In this case, many states operate under unified Republican control, and nationally networked activists are working to spread these policies (34, 35). The American public's position on this topic appears to be ambivalent at best (6). Because of this ambivalence, political elites can shape public attitudes (7). It is in this context that we examined issue frames that may be used by LGBT activists interested in combating policies that ban transgender participation in sports.

We found that acknowledging discomfort with transgender identity or deploying loss frames was not noticeably effective in shaping attitudes toward transgender people participation in sports. Thus, H1 and H2 were not supported. This result was surprising, as previous research has reported a significant impact of acknowledging discomfort (24). If one considers acknowledging discomfort as an opportunity to provide insight into transgender lives, it can function as an education frame, which has long been a component of transgender rights advocacy (23).

Perhaps the increasing salience of transgender rights, combined with the increasing partisan divide over transgender rights, has decreased the need for this type of education framing (7); people are increasingly familiar with this topic. However, there is a difference between familiarity and being knowledgeable. We suspect that, although more Americans have become familiar with the topic of transgender people, this familiarity may still reflect relatively shallow knowledge. We also suspect that the lack of value activation may have resulted from low empathy toward transgender people or from motivated reasoning by participants that prevented value activation.

It is possible that our efforts to measure discomfort or use a loss frame were not powerful enough to influence participants’ attitudes. However, given the strong role of motivated reasoning among those who are less comfortable with transgender people, attempts to shift these attitudes are difficult (24).

Interestingly, H3 was supported. We found that deployment of an egalitarian frame could provide a small shift in respondents’ attitudes regarding sports participation by transgender people. This framing is consistent with longtime frames used by LGBT advocates (22, 23). Egalitarian framing may help people contextualize the issues in terms of values related to equality and discrimination. For instance, our heterogeneous effects analysis of the egalitarian frame by respondent egalitarianism suggests that individuals with a mix of egalitarian and inegalitarian values are more persuaded by the egalitarian frame. Their predispositions and the linkage of LGBT rights with egalitarian appeals may make this subset more ready to shift their attitudes; whereas high egalitarians are already more approving, low egalitarians are already less approving.

Finally, we found very limited support for H4. There were no interactive effects between acknowledging discomfort and the loss framing condition on attitudes toward transgender participation in sports.

However, an interactive effect was observed between acknowledging discomfort and the deployment of the egalitarian frame on both dependent variables, although not to a degree that we can say that the effect of the egalitarian frame was significantly different when acknowledging discomfort than not.

The effectiveness of the egalitarian frame may be rooted in classical arguments for LGBT rights (22, 23). The failure of the loss frame may stem from low empathy toward transgender youth. Prior research by Broockman and Kalla (36) shows that increasing empathy for transgender people may change opinions, suggesting that empathy is low. The loss frame emphasized that transgender youth may miss out on many of the benefits of sports while also suggesting that transgender kids were already “at-risk.” Perhaps that treatment requires stronger empathic bonds with transgender people; however, Flores et al. (37) provided little evidence in other areas of transgender rights attitudes that interventions to increase empathy enhanced the effectiveness of arguments favoring transgender rights.

Our study has several limitations. First, our study may have been underpowered to investigate interactive effects. Second, our study design did not address how countervailing messages might affect respondent attitudes. This is important because conservative advocacy groups and Republican candidates actively communicate on this topic (4, 5, 38). Given that the sample was largely opposed to transgender inclusion in sports, conservative messaging may be working. Further, the nature of our sample limits the generalizability of our findings to the larger population. Finally, our study is limited by the fact that we were unable to conduct a second-wave survey to assess the durability of our treatments over time.

In addition, although we asked respondents whether they identified as LGBTQ, we did not ask about specific identities within this category. Although the number of respondents is likely to be small, future studies should try to better account for LGBTQ status. Likewise, because most state policies restricting transgender athletes focus on sex assigned at birth rather than whether an athlete is male or female, our questions about transgender athletes did not make a distinction. Although Republican messaging on transgender athletes has focused on transgender girls and women, the enforcement of the laws in places such as Texas has also applied to transgender boys (39). Future research should examine whether respondents respond differently to transgender athletes depending on whether they identify as male or female. We suspect that transgender boys are generally not the “problem,” only transgender girls.

Despite these limitations, our work provides useful insights for those advocating in this policy space. Egalitarian framing remains a useful tool for groups advocating for LGBT rights.