On the internal Labour stuff, it's not exact but generally there's a big overlap with 'trans rights' and Corbyn supporters. After the Corbyn leadership, and all the arguments over that, and anti-semitism, the party has been in no mood for another big fight. Especially on this issue. So a lot of people have tried to avoid or downplay the issue. As you say, I don't think that can hold until the election. The tories, and campaigners on both sides in the party are now pushing the issue to the fore. We have to deal with it in some way and I don't think there is a fudge which pleases both sides.
This is spot on and before I left the Lib Dems, I explained over and over that their ‘no debate’ stance on self-ID meant that a reasoned respectful debate could not be had, which would push this issue into the pages of the Daily Mail, play into the hands of the Tories looking for a post-Brexit anti-‘elite’ lever to pull at election time and give this topic a life of its own.
The saddest part is, people with severe gender dysphoria, the sort for whom surgical and social transition is the only option, are increasingly harmed by the tactics of the trans activists who proclaim themselves allies (and usually ‘cis’ or ‘queer’). Self-ID is not necessary. It isn’t possible to change sex, and there is already a route to change legal gender for paperwork purposes, which includes a sensible degree of safeguarding. If it ain’t broke...
I’m also glad, so we have that in common. I do not believe in gender identity ideology. I know that the needs of people with severe gender dysphoria are not aligned with the middle class mens rights activists who use genuine mental anguish and disorders of sexual development as a cloak to push through divisive legislation which society at large does not agree with. There is no party I can vote for at the moment. I doubt it will make a dent in the fortune of Lib Dems as they are hardly cleaning up in the polls as it is! The author’s point about foot soldiers, canvassers, fundraisers, people who would give up their spare time to deliver leaflets is on the nose. Women called TERFs by their own parties will not put themselves forward for the thankless tasks required to get votes. The whole issue is a sad mess and the ship has sailed on the opportunity to have a fair discussion, unfortunately.
> I know that the needs of people with severe gender dysphoria are not aligned with the middle class mens rights activists who use genuine mental anguish and disorders of sexual development as a cloak to push through divisive legislation which society at large does not agree with
The group "More in Common" released an interesting report last year on the public's opinions of various trans-rights issues, which I recommend to readers. https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/our-work/research/britons-and-gender-identity/ (Although personally I found that their summary and press release was somewhat more rosy than the content of the report itself actually supported.)
One of the big problems with all this is that a lot of people now talk as if there was some clear, well-defined distinction between "sex" and "gender" - on the basis that people can change gender (or, in a more trans-rights phrasing, be recognised as having had that gender all along) but cannot change sex.
That really wasn't normal usage in 2004 when the GRA was passed nor in 2009 with the Equality Act was drafted. The two words were much more interchangeable; lots of organisations used "gender", just to avoid the connotations of "sex" (I remember being told to design forms that asked for gender because annoying teenage boys would put "yes, please" when asked about sex, this back in the days of paper forms in the early 2000s).
It's remarkable how quickly that has changed, especially among people deep in this discourse. But it creates a lot of confusion when reading the law. It's not at all clear that there is any legal basis for "single sex" exemptions to the Equality Act being based on biological sex or even on the specific form of legal sex that is dealt with by the GRA.* There is a legal argument that the definition of sex for trans people for the purposes of the Equality Act for trans people is that given under the definition of gender reassignment (which is not self-ID in the purest sense, but is very broad+). The question of when a trans person has the protected characteristic of sex in their assigned gender has never been tested in court. But you can see that that sentence, which uses the exact legal terms, shows how sex and gender are used interchangeably in law.
Aside: there are various exceptions under the Equality Act to the general case, which is that all facilities and services must be available to both men and women without discrimination between the two. Those exceptions do not allow for the exclusion of trans people for being trans - whether excluding a trans woman for being a man constitutes excluding her for being trans is a question that has not been tested in court. There is a separate exemption that says that if you're providing a single-sex or sex-segregated service and you can justify excluding trans people, then you can (if you're not already discriminating on sex, you can't discriminate against trans people under any circumstances).
The net effect of all this: if the Equality Act is understood the way that trans people think it should be understood (which was the way that the pro-trans lobby groups like Press For Change understood it to be at the time it was passed), then the only thing that the Gender Recognition Act affects is births, marriages and deaths. If it's understood as making a sharp distinction between sex and gender and saying you only change sex when you have a GRC, then the GRA makes a huge difference. This is a really important legal question that someone needs to get to the Supreme Court and decide on.
* You can change all your identity documents without going through the GRA and had been able to for decades before it passed, with the exception of births, marriages and deaths - if someone has F on their passport and M on their birth certificate, their legal sex is female for some purposes and male for other purposes. Which one it is for the purposes of the Equality Act is a difficult question as there is no useful definition of sex in the Equality Act (it just says men and women), while there is a definition of gender reassignment, it doesn't say that a person with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment is of their reassigned sex for the purposes of sex discrimination. But it also doesn't reject that and someone needs to go to court and work out whe
+ " if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex."
My general test for any political discussion is to replace one group of protected characteristics with another and see if the discussion still seems reasonable - would we be using the terms the "race debate" or the "disabled debate"?
A good starting point would be for everyone to admit trans people exist and deserve dignity to live their lives but also there are some practical concerns, particularly for Women. What we should be talking about is safe-guarding, provision of social care / prison services and design of toilets / changing spaces to maximise dignity and safety for all.
PS. I bet if we went with public opinion polling at the time, I'm pretty sure we would still have race segregation, homosexuality would be illegal etc. E.g. have a look at the polling around repeal of Section 28 in 2000: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/public-attitudes-section-28
On your first point, I'm not sure that really solves "what to call it", as it implies a second order question – "what characteristics should be protected?" – which itself is contested in this circumstance (whether you agree it should be or not, again, there are clearly two pools of people with very divergent views!)
And I take your point about things we now look back on as universally good polling badly at the time. I had a whole cut section on this, citing the gay marriage debate as an obvious one that basically everyone agrees is good now, and the Iraq war as an instance where there was a thing that previously polled (relatively) well that everyone now agrees was a disaster. But I guess my point here is _because_ not everyone agrees, there's an electoral trade off to be made with doing what you feel is the most right. (Again, to draw an analogy, look at how Obama had to pretend he opposed gay marriage until public opinion caught up.)
That probably links in quite well with your Starmer piece previously.
I am very wary with the polls about this - the sheer quantity of questions, and the whole garden path of them, in the YouGov poll could well be leading a lot of respondents to respond in a way that is negative towards trans people.
The explanations provided by YouGov with the questions don't go into enough detail for anyone to proclaim that they show a truer picture than the more general polls.
Fully Agree - I'm sure on this topic, subtle changes in wording will prompt different responses. Also I might be cynical but polls are generally commissioned by newspapers who have a particular agenda in asking questions.
There's also a question of weighting. It's often described as what the public things but it's more likely to be weighted to people voting. Considering the young don't vote as much and likely to be more liberal on these matters, it could be misinterpreted.
On weighting, maybe, but I presume YouGov would have weighted it in the same way they do normal political polls - so unless they also systematically under-count young people, I’m not sure why this would be an exception.
On changes in wording - agree that makes a big difference, as demonstrated by the questions on trans people using changing rooms and the big shift once the question specifies that the hypothetical person has had not surgery. Given this though, I’m sceptical of how you could ask a similar question about another downstream policy outcome from Self-ID and get a more positive response vs the vaguer question.
Political polls are generally weighted to represent the 67% of people that vote, not the general public. This is reinforced by Redfield and Wilton describing their sample as "British Voters". Although yougov says "Britains"? so it's not clear that they do.
So we have to be really careful here that we are not confusing voters with the public. Adults as a whole will be younger and likely to be less conservative on these issues.
I suspect you could get different answers if you didn't include the word trans, whether the changing room was communal or not. Actually they completely miss the real question which is would you prefer trans-men or trans-women to use your facilities? (It is sex as originally assigned or outward gender that matters more?)
I realised that Yougov are good at publishing their data tables. I checked the aged splits and they are proportional to the age groups so it does represent the adult population not voters. I shouldn't have been cynical!
If Labour truly cannot be neutral politically you just take the “gender critical” side as that’s the position that if forced most of the swing voters would take.
Yes you’ll upset a bunch of your activists and get smaller majorities in London. But you’ll be OK in the seats you need to win.
The GC side could just as easily say the trans rights side are throwing women under a bus. Neither statement would be very helpful. We probably need to lower the temperature so we can talk about details and nuances of what a workable compromise might look like.
I really wonder about people who call themselves feminists and yet think women are such delicate flowers that they are threatened by the mere presence of transwomen. I can see maybe being annoyed if it comes to an argument over who is more feminine, but that’s kind of silly. I am personally kind of annoyed at seeing terms like “pregnant people” or the idea that someone’s medical ID should reflect their legal gender and not their sex at birth, but none of this is personally threatening to me as a woman.
I do wonder if the habit of trans allies all announcing their pronouns muddies the debate by making it look like there are far more trans people than there really are--if a lot of fear is that you never know what sex someone is, really, and that’s very disorienting to a lot of people.
Like, what actual workable compromise are you imagining? Transphobia is literally killing people and the so called gender critical concerns are just modern "gay people are pedophiles" bullshit. The UK press is far too soft and both sides on this stuff when there's a very clear power imbalance.
I'm afraid I don't have a solution. I was saying we might be able to begin to figure out some kind of solution that all sides can agree on, if only the tone of the debate were to become less heated.
You're assuming both sides are here in good faith but I think we can see clearly from the open far right culture war approach in the USA that the "gender critical" approach is just the transphobic wedge. This is like assuming we need to find a middle ground between teaching evolution and intelligent design.
But we do actually have more than a century of scientific proof of evolution--gender science, such as it is, is pretty new, which is not to say it isn’t real, just not as solid because it is an area that people are still feeling their way along and don’t really know cause/effect. I’ve seen stuff about transpeople who might have been born intersex, but that’s not common enough to account for everyone who identifies differently from their birth sex. There is news about gender fluidity being associated with autism.
One thing that comes out quite clearly from the survey, and that makes a lot of sense, is that a lot of people are very confused by the whole issue. The worst thing that trans rights people do is accuse anyone who confused (ie not automatically on board with trans rights and self ID) of being a TERF or transphobe. That is political suicide.
What’s most concerning, though, since it very much impacts everyday life, is the majority being afraid of transwomen using the women’s restroom--what is with this? What do you people do in restrooms that this should be an issue? Do people have sex in the restroom a lot over there? (I’m in US) I figure public restrooms are a place where you go in, close the stall door, do what you need to and leave. Don’t understand this notion that a rapist would go to the trouble of not only dressing up but inventing a persona for the sake of attacking women in the restroom, rather than just wait until someone is alone in there and just go in and attack them. It’s bizarre. Making a transwoman use the men’s room seems like the kind of thing that is more likely to lead to an attack, on the transwoman.
As it’s a human rights issue one would expect the activists who care about it as an issue to be focused most strongly on persuading suburban swing voters that they are right.
And the traditionally best method for persuading people is to tell a good story - so you’d expect them to focus on that.
Great piece. One thing I’m not completely clear on: if you are sure it won’t decide the outcome of the election, then what exactly is your concern for how the rising volume of this debate will affect Labour? Do you just worry it could affect the size of their majority and therefore their ability to govern? Or something more specific?
I think that's basically it - I guess I'd ultimately rather have a Labour government with a sizeable majority able to deliver on the core tenets of O'Malleyism (invest a tonne of cash into renewables and nuclear, liberate the postcode address file) than have one with a feeble majority.
Obviously I'm not a psephologist and haven't studied the numbers deeply, but it stands to reason that the swing constituencies are more conservative than Labour's safe seats, and majorities will be tighter – so turning off even a relatively small pool of voters could have an impact on the margins.
As a middle-aged, white, cis-male, I would fake death over being asked what I think on this subject, but I do remember some polling by YouGov, not as detailed as that in the article and not impacted by the salience that exists in Scotland. Nevertheless, the red wall voters don't differ from the country at large on the one relevant question.
On the internal Labour stuff, it's not exact but generally there's a big overlap with 'trans rights' and Corbyn supporters. After the Corbyn leadership, and all the arguments over that, and anti-semitism, the party has been in no mood for another big fight. Especially on this issue. So a lot of people have tried to avoid or downplay the issue. As you say, I don't think that can hold until the election. The tories, and campaigners on both sides in the party are now pushing the issue to the fore. We have to deal with it in some way and I don't think there is a fudge which pleases both sides.
This is spot on and before I left the Lib Dems, I explained over and over that their ‘no debate’ stance on self-ID meant that a reasoned respectful debate could not be had, which would push this issue into the pages of the Daily Mail, play into the hands of the Tories looking for a post-Brexit anti-‘elite’ lever to pull at election time and give this topic a life of its own.
The saddest part is, people with severe gender dysphoria, the sort for whom surgical and social transition is the only option, are increasingly harmed by the tactics of the trans activists who proclaim themselves allies (and usually ‘cis’ or ‘queer’). Self-ID is not necessary. It isn’t possible to change sex, and there is already a route to change legal gender for paperwork purposes, which includes a sensible degree of safeguarding. If it ain’t broke...
Tell me you're a terf, without telling me you're a terf....glad you're no longer a LibDem.
I’m also glad, so we have that in common. I do not believe in gender identity ideology. I know that the needs of people with severe gender dysphoria are not aligned with the middle class mens rights activists who use genuine mental anguish and disorders of sexual development as a cloak to push through divisive legislation which society at large does not agree with. There is no party I can vote for at the moment. I doubt it will make a dent in the fortune of Lib Dems as they are hardly cleaning up in the polls as it is! The author’s point about foot soldiers, canvassers, fundraisers, people who would give up their spare time to deliver leaflets is on the nose. Women called TERFs by their own parties will not put themselves forward for the thankless tasks required to get votes. The whole issue is a sad mess and the ship has sailed on the opportunity to have a fair discussion, unfortunately.
> I know that the needs of people with severe gender dysphoria are not aligned with the middle class mens rights activists who use genuine mental anguish and disorders of sexual development as a cloak to push through divisive legislation which society at large does not agree with
Who are these men's rights activists?
The group "More in Common" released an interesting report last year on the public's opinions of various trans-rights issues, which I recommend to readers. https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/our-work/research/britons-and-gender-identity/ (Although personally I found that their summary and press release was somewhat more rosy than the content of the report itself actually supported.)
One of the big problems with all this is that a lot of people now talk as if there was some clear, well-defined distinction between "sex" and "gender" - on the basis that people can change gender (or, in a more trans-rights phrasing, be recognised as having had that gender all along) but cannot change sex.
That really wasn't normal usage in 2004 when the GRA was passed nor in 2009 with the Equality Act was drafted. The two words were much more interchangeable; lots of organisations used "gender", just to avoid the connotations of "sex" (I remember being told to design forms that asked for gender because annoying teenage boys would put "yes, please" when asked about sex, this back in the days of paper forms in the early 2000s).
It's remarkable how quickly that has changed, especially among people deep in this discourse. But it creates a lot of confusion when reading the law. It's not at all clear that there is any legal basis for "single sex" exemptions to the Equality Act being based on biological sex or even on the specific form of legal sex that is dealt with by the GRA.* There is a legal argument that the definition of sex for trans people for the purposes of the Equality Act for trans people is that given under the definition of gender reassignment (which is not self-ID in the purest sense, but is very broad+). The question of when a trans person has the protected characteristic of sex in their assigned gender has never been tested in court. But you can see that that sentence, which uses the exact legal terms, shows how sex and gender are used interchangeably in law.
Aside: there are various exceptions under the Equality Act to the general case, which is that all facilities and services must be available to both men and women without discrimination between the two. Those exceptions do not allow for the exclusion of trans people for being trans - whether excluding a trans woman for being a man constitutes excluding her for being trans is a question that has not been tested in court. There is a separate exemption that says that if you're providing a single-sex or sex-segregated service and you can justify excluding trans people, then you can (if you're not already discriminating on sex, you can't discriminate against trans people under any circumstances).
The net effect of all this: if the Equality Act is understood the way that trans people think it should be understood (which was the way that the pro-trans lobby groups like Press For Change understood it to be at the time it was passed), then the only thing that the Gender Recognition Act affects is births, marriages and deaths. If it's understood as making a sharp distinction between sex and gender and saying you only change sex when you have a GRC, then the GRA makes a huge difference. This is a really important legal question that someone needs to get to the Supreme Court and decide on.
* You can change all your identity documents without going through the GRA and had been able to for decades before it passed, with the exception of births, marriages and deaths - if someone has F on their passport and M on their birth certificate, their legal sex is female for some purposes and male for other purposes. Which one it is for the purposes of the Equality Act is a difficult question as there is no useful definition of sex in the Equality Act (it just says men and women), while there is a definition of gender reassignment, it doesn't say that a person with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment is of their reassigned sex for the purposes of sex discrimination. But it also doesn't reject that and someone needs to go to court and work out whe
+ " if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex."
My general test for any political discussion is to replace one group of protected characteristics with another and see if the discussion still seems reasonable - would we be using the terms the "race debate" or the "disabled debate"?
A good starting point would be for everyone to admit trans people exist and deserve dignity to live their lives but also there are some practical concerns, particularly for Women. What we should be talking about is safe-guarding, provision of social care / prison services and design of toilets / changing spaces to maximise dignity and safety for all.
PS. I bet if we went with public opinion polling at the time, I'm pretty sure we would still have race segregation, homosexuality would be illegal etc. E.g. have a look at the polling around repeal of Section 28 in 2000: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/public-attitudes-section-28
On your first point, I'm not sure that really solves "what to call it", as it implies a second order question – "what characteristics should be protected?" – which itself is contested in this circumstance (whether you agree it should be or not, again, there are clearly two pools of people with very divergent views!)
And I take your point about things we now look back on as universally good polling badly at the time. I had a whole cut section on this, citing the gay marriage debate as an obvious one that basically everyone agrees is good now, and the Iraq war as an instance where there was a thing that previously polled (relatively) well that everyone now agrees was a disaster. But I guess my point here is _because_ not everyone agrees, there's an electoral trade off to be made with doing what you feel is the most right. (Again, to draw an analogy, look at how Obama had to pretend he opposed gay marriage until public opinion caught up.)
That probably links in quite well with your Starmer piece previously.
I am very wary with the polls about this - the sheer quantity of questions, and the whole garden path of them, in the YouGov poll could well be leading a lot of respondents to respond in a way that is negative towards trans people.
The explanations provided by YouGov with the questions don't go into enough detail for anyone to proclaim that they show a truer picture than the more general polls.
Fully Agree - I'm sure on this topic, subtle changes in wording will prompt different responses. Also I might be cynical but polls are generally commissioned by newspapers who have a particular agenda in asking questions.
There's also a question of weighting. It's often described as what the public things but it's more likely to be weighted to people voting. Considering the young don't vote as much and likely to be more liberal on these matters, it could be misinterpreted.
On weighting, maybe, but I presume YouGov would have weighted it in the same way they do normal political polls - so unless they also systematically under-count young people, I’m not sure why this would be an exception.
On changes in wording - agree that makes a big difference, as demonstrated by the questions on trans people using changing rooms and the big shift once the question specifies that the hypothetical person has had not surgery. Given this though, I’m sceptical of how you could ask a similar question about another downstream policy outcome from Self-ID and get a more positive response vs the vaguer question.
Political polls are generally weighted to represent the 67% of people that vote, not the general public. This is reinforced by Redfield and Wilton describing their sample as "British Voters". Although yougov says "Britains"? so it's not clear that they do.
So we have to be really careful here that we are not confusing voters with the public. Adults as a whole will be younger and likely to be less conservative on these issues.
I suspect you could get different answers if you didn't include the word trans, whether the changing room was communal or not. Actually they completely miss the real question which is would you prefer trans-men or trans-women to use your facilities? (It is sex as originally assigned or outward gender that matters more?)
I realised that Yougov are good at publishing their data tables. I checked the aged splits and they are proportional to the age groups so it does represent the adult population not voters. I shouldn't have been cynical!
If Labour truly cannot be neutral politically you just take the “gender critical” side as that’s the position that if forced most of the swing voters would take.
Yes you’ll upset a bunch of your activists and get smaller majorities in London. But you’ll be OK in the seats you need to win.
Amazing take. Just throw trans people under the bus because magically the bigots will stop being Tories. No wonder the UK is cussed.
Which part of my analysis do you disagree with?
I'm replying to Matthew's comment here
The GC side could just as easily say the trans rights side are throwing women under a bus. Neither statement would be very helpful. We probably need to lower the temperature so we can talk about details and nuances of what a workable compromise might look like.
I really wonder about people who call themselves feminists and yet think women are such delicate flowers that they are threatened by the mere presence of transwomen. I can see maybe being annoyed if it comes to an argument over who is more feminine, but that’s kind of silly. I am personally kind of annoyed at seeing terms like “pregnant people” or the idea that someone’s medical ID should reflect their legal gender and not their sex at birth, but none of this is personally threatening to me as a woman.
I do wonder if the habit of trans allies all announcing their pronouns muddies the debate by making it look like there are far more trans people than there really are--if a lot of fear is that you never know what sex someone is, really, and that’s very disorienting to a lot of people.
Like, what actual workable compromise are you imagining? Transphobia is literally killing people and the so called gender critical concerns are just modern "gay people are pedophiles" bullshit. The UK press is far too soft and both sides on this stuff when there's a very clear power imbalance.
I'm afraid I don't have a solution. I was saying we might be able to begin to figure out some kind of solution that all sides can agree on, if only the tone of the debate were to become less heated.
You're assuming both sides are here in good faith but I think we can see clearly from the open far right culture war approach in the USA that the "gender critical" approach is just the transphobic wedge. This is like assuming we need to find a middle ground between teaching evolution and intelligent design.
But we do actually have more than a century of scientific proof of evolution--gender science, such as it is, is pretty new, which is not to say it isn’t real, just not as solid because it is an area that people are still feeling their way along and don’t really know cause/effect. I’ve seen stuff about transpeople who might have been born intersex, but that’s not common enough to account for everyone who identifies differently from their birth sex. There is news about gender fluidity being associated with autism.
One thing that comes out quite clearly from the survey, and that makes a lot of sense, is that a lot of people are very confused by the whole issue. The worst thing that trans rights people do is accuse anyone who confused (ie not automatically on board with trans rights and self ID) of being a TERF or transphobe. That is political suicide.
What’s most concerning, though, since it very much impacts everyday life, is the majority being afraid of transwomen using the women’s restroom--what is with this? What do you people do in restrooms that this should be an issue? Do people have sex in the restroom a lot over there? (I’m in US) I figure public restrooms are a place where you go in, close the stall door, do what you need to and leave. Don’t understand this notion that a rapist would go to the trouble of not only dressing up but inventing a persona for the sake of attacking women in the restroom, rather than just wait until someone is alone in there and just go in and attack them. It’s bizarre. Making a transwoman use the men’s room seems like the kind of thing that is more likely to lead to an attack, on the transwoman.
They'd be wrong though
I don’t think referring to people as “bigots” is particularly productive.
Especially when by the standards of 30 years ago they’d be judged as extremely progressive.
Referring to human rights as the mere concern of "London activists" isn't particularly helpful either
As it’s a human rights issue one would expect the activists who care about it as an issue to be focused most strongly on persuading suburban swing voters that they are right.
And the traditionally best method for persuading people is to tell a good story - so you’d expect them to focus on that.
Great piece. One thing I’m not completely clear on: if you are sure it won’t decide the outcome of the election, then what exactly is your concern for how the rising volume of this debate will affect Labour? Do you just worry it could affect the size of their majority and therefore their ability to govern? Or something more specific?
I think that's basically it - I guess I'd ultimately rather have a Labour government with a sizeable majority able to deliver on the core tenets of O'Malleyism (invest a tonne of cash into renewables and nuclear, liberate the postcode address file) than have one with a feeble majority.
Obviously I'm not a psephologist and haven't studied the numbers deeply, but it stands to reason that the swing constituencies are more conservative than Labour's safe seats, and majorities will be tighter – so turning off even a relatively small pool of voters could have an impact on the margins.
As a middle-aged, white, cis-male, I would fake death over being asked what I think on this subject, but I do remember some polling by YouGov, not as detailed as that in the article and not impacted by the salience that exists in Scotland. Nevertheless, the red wall voters don't differ from the country at large on the one relevant question.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/05/17/stereotypical-image-red-wall-residents-accurate