Results of Kings College London Research

[LadyMuckish]

Have you seen this? futureoflegalgender.kcl.ac.uk/attitudes-towards-legal-gender/

It makes interesting reading. Nice to see the majority aren't agreeing with the science deniers.

Been following this for awhile. I DO have to give them some credit for at least trying to honestly portray the feminist position here. In fact sometimes they are so honest that I think it is self defeating?? I found this in their Q&A section describing the distinction between sex and gender.

“ For some, sex is a scientific fact of bodily difference on which gender is imposed. “

Clear. Self evidently true.

“For others, gender provides the framework within which bodies are given meaning as being either one sex or another, and sometimes not comfortably either.”

What the Ever lovin... is this supposed to mean??

Existential challenge

Best cured by forcing ones eyes away from the navel

"“For others, gender provides the framework within which bodies are given meaning as being either one sex or another, and sometimes not comfortably either.”

What the Ever lovin... is this supposed to mean??

I missed the release of this survey, but from what I gather feminist groups attempted to meet with the researchers, some thought the language was very trans-speak but it appears not much came of their attempts to reach out. Even with that the results speak for themselves.

I think it means some people ignore science and just make up what they want gender/sex to mean. Which we knew about them already.

I'm not an academic, but I'm a bit dubious about 'research' based on self-selecting samples of respondents. I skimmed through that blog earlier. The responses were very polarised. They were extremely naive if they expected anything else in the current climate.

Looking at the survey results, I'd imagine many people would have not really been able to grasp what some of the questions were about. Some questions were comprehensible. Take for example the questions about the government needing to know if people are male or female, the characteristic of male or female needing to be on passports, and the proposal to remove male or female from birth certificates. For these questions, a strong majority were able to see that these ideas are not sensible.

If you got people to answer those questions and then asked about self-ID in particular contexts, where the relevant identity is effectively sex, I'd imagine a strong majority would end up looking pretty gender critical.

As an example of how I think the survey is in parts calculated to deceive, one question asked whether there is a difference between sex and gender. Nearly 80% agreed while less than 12% disagreed. Knowing this and still presenting questions that conflate sex and gender looks dishonest to me.

This is quite old now although for some reason WPUK published a link to day as well.

Its been the subject of a number of threas, not just for the project but as an example of how funders dont check the validity of surveys they fund. This survey was so slanted any result is invalid.

Dont have time to do clicky link but here is a list of some if not all of them as search results www.mumsnet.com/SearchArch?mustmatch=legal+gender&dontmatch=&nickname=&src_displ_option=s_t_d_t&fromDate=01%2F01%2F19&toDate=31%2F03%2F20&topicmode=chs&chosentops=5365

Is the full research published? I love a good piece of research - might have a look later.

“For others, gender provides the framework within which bodies are given meaning as being either one sex or another, and sometimes not comfortably either.”

What the Ever lovin... is this supposed to mean??

The way I would interpret it:

There are different kinds of bodies. Gender is a set of ideas or social categories within which we interpret the different kinds of bodies as particular categories.

Maybe you could compare it to race or ethnicity to some extent you could say people have different ancestries or genetic groupings, but race or ethnicity is the set of cultural ideas and names and categories within which we interpret that ancestry. So for example the same set of facts in terms of ancestry could in different settings be seen and understood as British or Canadian or European, or Anglo-Saxon or western, or lots of other things potentially. And which of those is used by others, or primary to us, will have a lot to do with how we experience the facts.

It doesn't work as well with sex though, even though there is probably some of that it's pretty minimal IMO and every society recognises sex in what is a remarkably objective fashion. Maybe more objective than any other fact about people that gets interpreted by culture, really.

Though, thinking about it, in modern western society less than in most others - that might be significant.

As an example of how I think the survey is in parts calculated to deceive, one question asked whether there is a difference between sex and gender. Nearly 80% agreed while less than 12% disagreed. Knowing this and still presenting questions that conflate sex and gender looks dishonest to me.

I agree. And then also bemoaning that people challenged the questions and framing themselves.

Oh sorry, I thought you meant this nonsense

futureoflegalgender.kcl.ac.uk/2019/09/20/engendering-criticism-reflection-on-feedback-to-our-attitudes-to-gender-survey/#more-1008

Anything these people write just comes across to me as entirely dishonest and disingenuous. What a waste of education they are.

Statement 1: ‘There are two genders, female and male.’
Over half (53.1 per cent) of respondents selected ‘disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’ in answer to this statement, with 29.5 per cent selecting ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’. At first glance these figures appear to suggest that a large percentage of respondents were supportive of the view that gender is not binary, and that genders outside of female and male exist and are valid.

Because that's what you meant them to affirm by framing it in terms of nebulous "gender", eh? What a shame that it didn't go that way.

futureoflegalgender.kcl.ac.uk/2019/11/08/moving-beyond-the-binary-the-enduring-power-of-biological-sex-in-our-survey-responses/#more-1058

Early in the survey recruitment period a thread on our survey appeared on Mumsnet, an online platform, which appears to favour ‘gender critical’ perspectives (Forstater, 2019). A gender critical perspective is the view that gender, especially a felt sense of gender identity either doesn’t exist or is less important than there being two groups of people differentiated by binary sexed characteristics that society treats unequally. The initial post on Mumsnet under the ‘feminism chat’ heading was entitled ‘Attitudes to Gender – a survey being used to write a new gender bill in the UK’ (21.10.2018, our emphasis) and comprised 90 posts. The way in which the survey was framed in this online space, plus the comments written by those who reported completing the survey via this platform, would suggest that engagement from women with a gender critical perspective was greater than might have been generated from our broader-based survey recruitment plan.

Virtual platforms such as Mumsnet were mobilised a number of times during the recruitment window for the survey. Cooper (2019) has referred to current gender debates as ‘a very binary drama’ and there was evidence of polarised binarisms within the survey respondents themselves with references made to ‘mumsnet brigade’ and ‘transphobic bigots’ on the one side, and ‘transgender activists’ on the other. One respondent reflected on the engagement from certain stakeholders as a ‘transphobic deluge from Mumsnet and a “woman’s” place who have a coordinated campaign to skew this study’ (trans woman, 49, lesbian).

I can't say what I think or I will be banned

That section leapt out at me as well, Eresh. One side name-calling, the straightforwardly factual. Same old, same old.

Also somewhere there was a comment that the majority of responses were from women, despite them trying to recruit more men. I wonder how true that statement would be if they used the standard definition of woman: adult human female.

They just don't seem to really understand what we've been saying.

"For online survey research, is it problematic when the status or legitimacy of the quantitative response is undermined by an explanation that challenges the premise of the question? For example, criticizing a statement because of an objection to the use of the word gender (rather than sex) rather than simply responding to it on its own terms."

Yes, it's 'problematic', because substituting the word gender for sex in a survey like this isn't just playing semantic games. It's at the heart of the issue. It's impossible to respond to a question 'on its own terms' when that means accepting false premises as true.

Survey response: "Male and female are biological sexes. They are not genders. There are two sexes. (Intersex people make no difference here as they are outliers which do not disprove the existence of sexual dimorphism and certainly don’t demonstrate that sex is a spectrum"

Researcher's commentary: "The problematic erasure of people with intersex variations in the second response (above) also demonstrates a highly ‘endosexist’ (non-intersex) perspective."

How exactly can you interpret 'people with intersex conditions don't demonstrate that sex is a spectrum' as 'erasing intersex people' unless you've already been subjected to ideological capture? Surely 'erasure', if you have to use the term, would be saying that intersex conditions don't exist - which is not what the respondent said at all.

"At first glance these figures appear to suggest that a large percentage of respondents were supportive of the view that gender is not binary, and that genders outside of female and male exist and are valid."

Language capture. What does it mean to be 'valid' in this context?

"While the first example here does highlight the increased receptiveness to gender as a ‘fluid concept’, the perceived fixedness of biological sex is reinforced."

Perceived?

"The influence of biological sex in shaping people’s lived experience was evident, and persistently used as a bottom-line argument to counter any challenges to the gender binary through its placement as a central, undisputable [sic] fact."

This is the kind of nonsensical conclusion you draw about GC views when you conflate sex with gender.

As an alumna of King's I find this depressing.

Yes, it's 'problematic', because substituting the word gender for sex in a survey like this isn't just playing semantic games. It's at the heart of the issue. It's impossible to respond to a question 'on its own terms' when that means accepting false premises as true.

Yes, I rolled my eyes when I read that and thought exactly the same as you.