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On the steps of the US supreme court on Tuesday, a group of women celebrated. They cheered and held up signs with phrases like “Girls’ Sports for Girls Only” and “Truth, Fairness, Biological Reality”. Penny Young Nance, the CEO of Concerned Women for America, told the gathering that after a decade of these conservative women’s activism: “The court agrees with us that a man cannot be a woman.”
“The decision will affect the law across the country,” she said. “We will have a better opportunity to protect young women.”
The court’s decision upheld state restrictions on transgender students’ sports participation. The ruling falls in line with the broader Republican agenda to strip transgender people, especially youth, of rights.
Behind every state law that restricts the sports participation of transgender athletes, young women have been among the most vocal and visible supporters. The Scotus ruling is just the latest sign that gen Z women are emerging as a powerful force within the Maga movement.
As qualitative sociologists, we have spent the better part of a decade studying conservative women’s activism. What we have found challenges the prevailing media narrative that the defining story of the gen Z right is the red-pilled young man.
Gen Z conservative women may be fewer in numbers than their male counterparts, but they are no less consequential, even if they are often reduced to coverage on their fashion or dismissed as tradwives nursing antifeminist grievances.
Instead, we’ve observed how young women are at the heart of the Maga movement: organizing at state and national legislatures, building social media followings, staffing rightwing advocacy groups, and enacting real gains for the Republican party.
Back in 2020, when Idaho became the first state to ban transgender girls from school sports, the ACLU took the state to court, arguing that excluding these students violated Title IX, the federal civil rights law that for decades had guaranteed women’s equal participation in college sports. That case, Little v Hecox, was one of two the court ruled on this week (the other was West Virginia v BPJ).
Since then, young rightwing women have effectively mobilized against the ACLU claims, helping to pass laws similar to Idaho’s in more than two dozen states by insisting that conservatives are in fact Title IX’s true defenders. Their activism is a marked change from the past.
In the 1970s, the antifeminist doyenne Phyllis Schlafly rallied conservative women against Title IX. “This rule is not only unfair but ridiculous because men like to play sports far more than women do,” she stated. Her opposition rested upon what she believed were women’s fundamental differences from men.
Young conservative women activists today still invoke what they believe are women’s innate differences from men, but now they do so using the language of feminism. In the process, they upend the traditional labels of antifeminist conservative and pro-feminist liberal entirely. In fact, the feminism that Schlafly and her peers hotly opposed has become the foundation for young conservative women’s activism.
At state legislatures, in social media posts, and on national bus tours, young conservative women have embraced popular feminist ideas and slogans. Their activism aligns with what is often referred to as “terf” (trans exclusionary radical feminist) ideology, rooted in the second-wave movement as key feminists made it their mission to weed out trans women from feminist collectives.
Conservatives have been more than happy to acknowledge feminists who share their views when it comes to trans people, in order to make the position appear popular and non-partisan. The problem is that, while there are some liberal feminist organizations and individuals in the US who have supported the Republican-led anti-trans agenda, there is no broad feminist movement in the US opposing transgender people. National data, in fact, suggests the vast majority of self-identified feminists strongly support transgender rights across multiple measures.
And this is where conservative gen Z women play a key role. In stark contrast with the image that the Republican movement is led by stuffy, old, white men, these young women make the broader Maga movement seem trendy, modern and even, well, feminist.
They take for granted the ubiquity of messaging surrounding “women’s empowerment” and insist the feminist label can apply to their views, too. Caitlyn, an activist on her South Carolina college campus, said: “If identifying as feminist is you believe that men and women are different but still should be equal in law, to that I say of course.”
In fact, in our interviews with activists, young women repeatedly reference their commitment to protecting the gains of the feminist movement of decades past. Like Olivia, a 24-year-old budding social media influencer in California who works for a rightwing lobby organization. As with many other conservative gen Z women, she first got involved with politics to oppose abortion.
After the US supreme court struck down Roe v Wade in 2022, she shifted her focus to trans athletes. “This is a direct threat for women in sports,” Olivia said. “It is taking a step back in history by allowing men into our sports.” Allowing trans women to play on women’s sports teams violated “everything women fought for”, she added, referring to Title IX.
Young rightwing women like Caitlyn and Olivia receive trainings and support from a network of well-funded rightwing political organizations such as TPUSA and Young Women for America, that have made anti-trans legislation a top priority over the past decade. National groups routinely fly college female athletes to testify before the state legislatures deliberating laws regarding transgender athletes.
But it’s a mistake to see this movement as simply using young women as pawns. Even if groups set the agendas and provide the resources, individual activists carry them out and make them their own.
Gen Z women are reshaping what conservatism itself means – breaking from the Schlafly-era insistence that domesticity defines women, and realigning it with women’s professional ambition, public politics, and a feminist vocabulary repurposed for new ends.
And their efforts are paying off. Public opinion polls suggest that both Republicans and Democrats are more opposed to trans rights today than in 2020. Transgender politics have been marked as a “wedge issue” dividing Democratic leaders and pulling voters toward Republican candidates.
By co-opting feminist language, young conservative women drain their political opponents on the left – which often proclaims itself to be the party of women’s rights – of one of their perennial strengths. As Kamala Harris’s stunning defeat in 2024 showed, Democrats no longer have cornered the market on what counts as “women’s issues”.
Just a month after Trump’s second inauguration, Young Women for America posted an image to Instagram that read: “The future is female under Trump.” The young conservative women we’ve met insist that Trump is one of the most “pro-woman” presidents in history.
Tuesday’s Scotus ruling will prove to them once again that this administration, and the judges aligned with it, speaks the same language of female empowerment as they do.
Whatever comes next in the Maga movement, gen Z women will be at the center. The country’s conservative future is indeed female, narrowly defined by the courts thanks to their efforts.
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Kelsy Burke is professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
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Katie Gaddini is associate professor of sociology at the University College London, visiting scholar at Stanford University, and author of Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right (WW Norton, 2026)
