Stonewall resurrecting the 'conversion therapy' bill

If we're talking about the young lesbians who are into yaoi porn, who describe themselves as gay men and only date other lesbians who think they're gay men, I'm not sure whether they'd give a sensible response to a survey.

That goes double for the straight women who are also into yaoi porn, who describe themselves as gay men and pop up on Reddit complaining that their boyfriend won't accept that they're in a "queer" relationship.

Gawd missed out 'that I know' there.

But pretty much every trans person and several of the gay ones would only ever refer to themselves as queer. Which I do see the point of.

But they’ve changed sex so they aren’t attracted to the opposite sex.

I know, I know. It’s illogical, but in their heads it’s totally logical. (Or alternatively, they know it’s illogical but it serves their purpose to pretend otherwise. I think both can be true.)

Re gay/homosexual and another gender, a trans-identified woman I know calls herself a gay man. And many trans-identifying men call themselves lesbians.

Also, if you're talking about 10% or fewer of a population... well, pollsters know that you can get 10% of respondents to agree to pretty much anything. There are probably 10% of the population who would tell a pollster that Elvis lives in an immortality clinic on the moon.

It becomes even trickier when you're trying to get meaningful data from small subsamples.

@TheCourseOfTheRiverChanged that's a very thoughtful post. But it's true I would like to see all organisations operating in the UK to be put on notice that it is against the law to work on individuals to change their sexuality. Maybe I'm unusual on this board in wanting to see a form of this law for gender identity as well, because I think it could be a law that could operate against some of the social contagion aspects. Thinking for example of that horrific cluster of looked-after children in the Blackpool area who are identifying as trans with the same doctor IIRC.

"Gay/homosexual and another gender" boggles my mind.

If I'm reading the crosstabs correctly, they have bisexual outnumbering homosexual among women, but the reverse among men. That actually does make intuitive sense to me.

Opinium are a reputable firm as far as polling goes - we're not talking about those Pink News surveys where Benjamin Cohen would announce that 97% of Pink News readers agreed with him. I think the problem is that they're having to reconcile their polling methodology with the categories/questions that the customer finds meaningful.

So I think the problem is less in the polling and more in Stonewall's batshit ideological stance.

I used to attend an Evangelical church that started a group for gay men and cross dressers after I'd left. Two friends attended. One I tried to convince not to get involved. The other I didn't know was involved until after the group imploded. I'm wary of telling their stories, but will say alot of damage was done.
My concern, in relation to proposed legislation, is that one friend was enthusiastic about recruiting other men to the group. The other had some level of responsibility in the church (volunteer, not paid), I don't know if it extended to helping coordinate the group for gay men (he's the one who I hadn't known was gay until after). How would it help either of them to be facing legal repercussions for their involvement at the same time as they deal with the fallout of their involvement, come to make sense of their faith and their sexuality in an affirming way - I think it may be hard for those outside the tradition to understand. This group was a peer support group, noone involved was straight. Lots of internalised homophobia and wishful thinking and no clear delineation of the baddies who must be prosecuted and the goodies who just need to be loved. I can't see how the heavy hand of the law would help.

Thanks for the link to the Opinium tables @ArabellaScott.

Is there an explanatory key somewhere? In the Gender sections, why does the total number of respondents add up to more than 2,000?

I've worked out that NET means the overall total of sub-categories. So "NET Yes" means all those who answered Yes regardless of which time period. Does "NET Transgender" means all respondents who said they were transgender, regardless of TW or TM?

And Unweighted and Weighted: does Unweighted mean the answers that the respondents actually gave, and Weighted are the answers that would have been expected if the sample group matched the proportional occurrence of those categories of people in the UK?

The weighted distributions under LGBTQ+ Umbrella are very interesting, if I'm interpreting them correctly. More people identify as bisexual than homosexual? In a group of 2,000 LGBTQ+ people, 915 men/women would be expected to say they were bisexual, compared with 830 men/woman saying they are homosexual?

The exorcism response is a tell for it not being credible. Exorcism barely happens in the Catholic Church these days - a priest will have to jump through all sorts of bureaucratic hoops to get permission - and I'm assuming it's rarer still in the CofE.

Where it does exist is in African ethnic churches, which suggests that either the alphabet community is disproportionately Nigerian and Congolese, or that the figures are bullshit.

I suppose it's possible that conservative religious families praying for their kids is being interpreted as "exorcism", but surely we can be confident that members of the alphabet community would never dream of over-dramatising their history for victim points.

I think the figures are generally not believed. And Stonewall hasn't released the research, which was supposed to happen on Friday.

The exorcism issue is interesting. Here is a 2017 article about another survey suggesting a sharp rise in exorcism practices in the UK used particularly in Pentecostal and West African- associated churches, and used to 'treat' mental health issues (I'm reminded of Victoria Climbié). If the Stonewall survey has shown up big cluster of exorcism experiences, it suggests some form of bias in how it recruited participants, despite its attempts to avoid this. It also suggests that homophobic religious groups are a much bigger problem for LGBT rights in this country than TERFS (i know many would see is as the same). I'd approve of Stonewall being a lot louder in the specifics it identifies in this survey - unless of course they don't trust their own figures.

The results were weighted to be nationally representative on region, age, gender, and gender identity. Weightset targets have been taken from Annual Population Survey 2022, 2021 England and Wales census, and Scottish Public Health Network Estimates.

gender but not sex, gender identity not gender reassignment and would that be the discredited census data around LGBTQ+?

im sure it’s all water tight methodology though

I wish everyone would stop tiptoeing round the obvious: this is overwhelmingly a ND and same sex attracted phenomenon. A few outliers are traumatised and / or narcissists and the middle aged men are largely fetishists (some are autistic and have sex as their 'special interest', others are just straightforward fetishists).

I'm so bored of all this now. The world is on the verge of implosion and we are STILL having to focus on this made up bs. I had to sit in training a few months ago with a perfectly obvious (and lovely) autistic lesbian who had decided she was a 'they / them'. Woman in her later years in a patient facing role. I just thought wtf is going on for you? It just all smacked of adolescent attention seeking.