Poll claims 87% of women in London think transgender women should have the same rights as other women

[Prawnofthepatriarchy]

DS1 hangs out on Reddit and thought I'd be interested to see this claim. Here's the Reddit thread.

And here's the original article.

I don't know enough about the group doing the poll to evaluate it, but it gives a dramatically different picture to the recent survey done for Pink News, which found almost the opposite.

What do people think? DS1 wonders if the way questions were posed was central.

I'm a bit limited because I'm on my phone. Can't wait for my broadband to be fixed. Web surfing and research is a lot harder on a tiny screen.

The gender critical position says transgender people should have the same rights as anyone else but that doesn't mean that men who identify as women should be given additional rights, i.e be entitled to access spaces and opportunities created by and for the opposite sex.

I wonder how the poll was worded, and I would be interested to know whether the body that paid for it had any particular agenda.

'Same rights as other women'

I would read that as men who have had surgery and drugs - gone the whole nine yards. Not any John who says he feels like Jane.

'Rights' - such as what exactly. What rights to women have that transsexuals don't?

What rights are they claiming they don’t have?

People are hardly likely to answer:
No - People shouldn't have rights

It would be interesting to see what the response would be if the questions were phrased differently and the survey was anonymous.

Do you agree that the definition of a women is someone that feels like one? That would be an interesting question.

Transwomen already have the same rights as women: they can access all privileges under the law accorded to their biological sex.

What were the poll answers to:

Q2. Should women have the right to say no to being incarcerated with a fully intact male bodied rapist who says they are a woman?

How did they define transwomen?

How did they define rights?

Which company did this, how many women, how was sampling done?

Well quite apart from any dubious wording issues, I think that viewing London as a barometer for the rest of the UK has got us into quite enough difficulties as it is, thank you.

The question asked "Should transgender women have the same rights as other women?".

That's not the same as asking if all self identified transpeople should be allowed in female spaces.

If those same people were ask "Should women have the same rights as men?". I would think most people would say yes, but that doesn't mean we should immediately get rid of female spaces.

Being vague about what 'rights' mean and which specific rights are being referred to is really the issue, isn't it?

Should transwomen have the right to:

• be safe and free from violence and harassment, including being protected when in prison;
• be protected from discrimination in the workplace;
• access healthcare specific to their needs?

yes, I'd agree with all of that.

But, should transwomen have the right to:

• be housed in the women's estate when imprisoned;
• have the right to all jobs specifically designated for women under the Equality Act single-sex exemptions;
• be treated on female wards when in hospital in all circumstances, regardless of how other patients feel about it?

No, I don't think so.

In the same way, if you went round asking 'should women have rights?' I bet feminists would say yes, misogynist woke blokes would say yes, fundamentalist Baptists would say yes. But they would not all mean the same thing by 'rights' at all.

Just talking about 'rights' in the abstract lets you know who thinks of trans people as human beings or not (maybe). It doesn't tell you much about how to weigh competing interests, or shed any light on the current debates on this subject in feminist circles.

The spokesperson for the agency mentioned is a media relations officer for 'trans equality' and a person who announces their pronouns on their twitter account. Did they commission this?

Well said, 53rd way.

Most people think that transwomen have had genital surgery and hormone. Most transwomen have not

Obviously a closed yes-or-no question with a leading introduction will lead to "yes" in almost all replies.

Ask the same question but phrased
"Should all male bodied people have unfettered access to female spaces including bathrooms, sports, prisons, refuges and female schools?"

Because this is what is actually meant by "rights".

Transgender women already have the same rights as women based on sex and Transgender status as protected characteristics.

I'd need to see the following before I could comment in a better-informed way:

the accreditation of the people who conducted the poll and that they'd followed industry standards;
to understand more about the selection of the women polled;
to have access to the questions and any accompanying information.

Offhand, of course pretty much most people support universal human rights (I'd hope).

The issue of universal rights rather than identity politics as an extension of the civil rights movement is a rather different matter.

I absolutely think that transwomen should have the same rights as women. But that doesn't mean that they should be able to identify into women's spaces or that they are the same as women.

What 53rdway said.

If they weren’t clear on what the rights were they will get a misleading result.

Plus how widely was this circulated? They didn’t ask me.

Did the poll make it clear that it meant men, not women who were transgender? A woman who is transgender would be a transman.

The question would confuse most. People will interpret it to mean ''should transgender people have the same rights as others'' rather than should women give over the right to women only spaces.

I differentiate between transexuals who have ''committed'' to the change and had surgery and treatment, but if most trans 'women' have not done this so no way should they be allowed in to women's spaces.

If there is any polling going on it needs to be clear about the two types of transexuality, ie, I only learned fairly recently that a large number of trans get turned on by dressing up as women.

I've messaged MNHQ to ask why my post was deleted

The article is written from a very pro-self-ID perspective, and seems almost a pointed way to fire-fight what is going on in the UK, TBH.

Let's analyze what it looks like they've done:
Asked 1000 women (in total!) across 5 major cities in the world. So presumably there were 200 women responding from each city? Lord only knows how they selected these women, and whether this was part of a larger survey. How many of the people asked were actually trans themselves?

The Thomson Reuters Foundation poll asked 1,000 women in Cairo, London, Mexico City, New York and Tokyo: "Should transgender women have the same rights as other women?". In total 798 answered yes, 37 said no and 165 declined to answer.

First question is obviously "what do you mean by trans woman, because you no longer really need to do anything apart from be a male who says you're a woman nowadays?"

So actually, I think it is very significant that even if this one question was phrased exactly like this one fifth of respondents said no or didn't want to respond. I probably would instinctively say yes, of course we should all have equal rights but males cannot declare themselves women and demand access to female-only facilities like prisons, sports, rape shelters and changing rooms. Eg, I am for trans rights BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF WOMEN'S RIGHTS, AND SELF-ID IS STUPID.
But they would probably have counted my "yes"?

I am going to stick with the PinkNews YouGov data with 82% against self-ID specifically. That seems far more reliable.

I would find the question very confusing. I know a transwoman is a man who identifies as a woman, but if it said 'transgender woman' I would assume it meant a woman who is trans, a woman who identifies as a man.

Doesn't it depend how questions are asked? If I filled in a questionnaire that asked "should trans women have equal rights with biological women?" I'd say Yes. If the question was about access to women-only spaces I'd say No.

I think transwomen should have the same rights as other men, they should not be discriminated against due to their trans status. They are not women.