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........

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