Starmer and the Labour Party Really Cannot Read the Room

I think you’re right @peadarm. They also don’t realise that nowadays Trans doesn’t just mean transsexuals, people that have gone through gender reassignment. It now means any man can say he feels like a women and we have to accept it. I.e No Debate. I mean even transvestites fall under the trans umbrella according to Stonewall, whether they like it or not.

Why any women would vote Labour I really do not know.

For the most part it's because they don't have the full picture.
Many people (women and men) still think the 'trans rights' Labour defends just means the rights of gay men who dress up and otherwise perform as women.

YouGov is a private global market research and data analytics company. Their sampling is taken from a self selecting group of people who sign up to participate in surveys on line. In your last link there is an asterisk which indicates part of that survey was conducted separately for Pink News. I don't believe their surveys are impartial and the customer can certainly control the data they present so I take anything they publish with a mountain of salt.

Just to go back to the thread - We're all hoping someway, somehow, that KS will do a great big reveal and show the world he was really GC all along.

KS has been well and truly stonewalled and I believe he believes Stonewall Law is the right sort of law and that we are misguided idiots.

We've got news for you KS (I get so fouqing mad that long, long time supporters like me have been made homeless because a trend from the US has, by stealth and without debate, taken over our institutions.

I wonder if KS has looked at Wales and thought 'that's what we should do'

And that view - that you need people to vote for you - isn't a sell-out, doesn't make someone a Tory-in-disguise, isn't collusion with being-liberalism - it's just a fact in a democratic system.

I really wonder what it's going to take for Labour members t- all members - to understand electoral politics is about getting the electorate to vote for you - rather than just shouting at people who disagree that they are wrong, bad, and evil. 🤷‍♀️

You Gov poll: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/07/16/where-does-british-public-stand-transgender-rights

It's the detail that matters.

As WeeBisom points out.

Selectively quoting - which is what happens a lot - is massively unhelpful when it comes to actually doing politics, as opposed to using it as a playground to reconfirm your own beliefs.

I'd be interested to know, among the general public - what they understand a "transgender woman" to be.

Other polls have shown a large percentage of the public logically take that to mean transmen, who are indeed transgender women.

If you're not familiar with the word games, it's not clear what is meant.

So often when asked "should transgender women be allowed in women's sport", some people think they're being asked whether some females should be excluded.

Have Novara really shelled out for a YouGov poll of their own?

I'd be surprised. They seem far too ramshackle an outfit for that.

Aren't Novara using an d YouGov poll?

It looks similar to the poll WeeBisom and I are referencing.

Similar results: generally pro 'self-id' but then becomes clear, as questions progress, people have no clarity on what terms such as 'trans women' or 'self-id' mean. Which is unsurprising, given that the contention, right now, is about what those things might mean in law.

Polls aren't, generally, done in order to provide people with something that confirms their own opinion, or to provide people with a Twitter 'gotcha!'.

I disagree. An official poll may be intended to illicit information but when an organisation such as Novara Media commission a survey from a company like YouGov they will have the final say in how questions in the survey are worded, they are the customer after all and we know that the way way questions are worded can influence the way people answer.

The purpose of these surveys is to sway public opinion, it gives the impression self ID is a fait accompli because it has such wide support therefore objection is futile and in a climate of cancel culture they become very powerful tools in silencing people and enabling those with an agenda and no respect for democracy to get their way.

I'd be interested to know, among the general public - what they understand a "transgender woman" to be.
Are people assuming fully medically transitioned with surgery / hormones etc. Or transgender as in the Stonewall umbrella defintion which is much broader?
Was this clear in the question?

I have my own opinion on exactly what Owen Jones is doing and why...

Yes, WeeBisom.

And I think it also highlights something about polls.

Polls aren't, generally, done in order to provide people with something that confirms their own opinion, or to provide people with a Twitter 'gotcha!'.

They are done to elicit information which can then be used.

The polling on public opinion around trans issues is really interesting - and potentially useful.

It provides a really interesting snapshot of what people know/don't know and what they (presently) think.

It really annoys me when Owen Jones trots out selected information because he's doing it very disingenuously and in a very unhelpful way.

He does it as a call-out to his chosen ideological community to dig in harder. To abandon nuance, communication, and pluralism and to don the mantle of righteous intransigence instead. He's encouraging his people to believe in conspiracies, basically - that malign forces are holding back the majority of people from the progress they crave.

But the truth is far more nuanced than that.

And unless the Labour Party starts putting itself where the majority of the electorate are - where they are in reality, not fantasy - we are going to carry on getting Conservstive governments.

The yougov poll actually indicates that the more information voters have the less supportive they are of trans stuff. And they also indicate a confusion among voters. They appear to hold contradictory ideas. For instance the majority of people in the U.K. agree that “people should be able to self identify as a different gender from the one they were born in.” Brilliant; a resounding success for self id. However, British people also overwhelmingly are against measures that implement self id! The vast majority agree that trans people need to see doctors for a gender dysphoria diagnosis and also that they need to live for two years in the acquired gender. What is going on? U.K. people say they support self id but actually support the status quo.

You can also see this when the question is phrased to include trans women with male parts who haven’t had surgery. There the support for them being in female spaces and female sports radically drops to almost nothing.

I think these polls show the public don’t have a lot of information and are confused about this issue. On the surface , people want to be supportive so they say they support self id. But when you describe what self id actually means in detail - no medical diagnosis of dysphoria, no living as the acquired gender, no surgery - people change their mind. What this shows is it is disingenuous to pluck a random poll result and say “BRITISH PEOPLE THINK TWAW” because to be honest the polls show contradictory thoughts. If the public really thinks that trans women are women they should automatically agree they belong in female sports, prisons etc, but they don’t.

This is good:

www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/keir-starmer-must-show-courage-and-protect-women-and-their-hard-fought-rights-susan-dalgety-3269707

MishyJDI

Googling YouGov and Novara Media might be useful. You can commission a survey from YouGov to say anything you like if you're willing to pay for it, it's not the official authority you seem to think it is.

mishyjdi

Those stats are fine but ... you realise that's not the whole picture?

Polling suggests many people are in favour of self-id and will agree with a statement such as the one you've linked to.

However, when questions progress to more detail, such as, should biological men play in women's sports, there is a resounding, 'no'.

Now, that response means that people - generally - in that first question ('are transgender women women' etc) understand very different things when they answer the question.

Some people think they are answering this question: 'should trans women be afforded every legal and social right to be understood to be women, with no exemptions?'

Other people think they're answering, 'would you, personally, go out of your way to make a transgender woman as comfortable as possible in her identity?'

And there's a massive difference between the two.

Which is why there is such a seeming illogicality between many people answering, 'yes' to a first question such as that, and then 'no' to questions which are a logical consequence of that first 'yes'.

And, you know, it's in that gap that the political work of persuasion takes place. Which is work that people need to do.

Simply pointing to polls that show a 'yes' to that first question isn't enough.

Lastly, there is something so, so, so delusional about this.

I can't stress this enough: we are looking at a situation where there is a Conservative government with an 80-seat majority.

And it's not shifting.

The electorate are telling us lefties and progressives what they think at the polls.

At some point, we have to listen to them.

Otherwise ... what? 10 years out of power? 20? 30? Labour won't survive being out of power for another 10 years.

There is something truly mad/delusional about the denial inherent in just ignoring what the electorate is telling us.

Mumsnet isn't the echo chamber you think it is. Mumsnet is more leftie than the outside world.

A lot of people here are still voting Labour.

In the U.K. - less so.

Honestly, I hear you. I get where you're coming from. But if we ever want to form a government, we need to dump the whole binary way of thinking ('My opinion is right. My opinion is on the side of the angels. Anyone who doesn't hold it is morally bad and evil.') and start listening - and engaging in a pluralistic dialogue.

Here are two polls that do not show the same as the Pink News commissioned poll:

fairplayforwomen.com/poll/

wingsoverscotland.com/nobody-cares-what-you-think/

@MishyJDI are you the same person who was posting that graphic all over Twitter? It’s very misleading.

Also the small fact we have a Tory government with a majority of 80, and not a government run by any of the other parties, might suggest to you that a poll from “stats for lefties” isn’t really representative of the opinions of the wider public.

If the public wanted a “woke” party they wouldn’t be flocking to vote Tory in droves.

I was sure earlier this week I had seen the Pink News Tweet had been reshared by the official Labour Party? I cannot find this now. Have they deleted it?

I cannot find the original tweet on the twitter feed of Pink News as they have posted about a thousand tweets in the last 2 days so I can't check who's retweeted it. But I was absolutely confident it had been retweeted officially, and now seems to have been taken down.

Is there a list of the Fringe Groups who HAVE been accepted?

There is no detail about the program on the website yet.

Lesbians Labour refused permission to run a fringe zoom meeting at the virtual Labour Party Women's Conference.

twitter.com/LesbianLabour/status/1403113383088607233?s=20

Is this Labour declaring all out war on women?