Lionel Shriver: How the US Left has warped our view of the UK

[ResisterRex]

In this follow-up article, Shriver outlines out we misunderstand and overestimate the size of different groups in the UK. Apparently the UK thought 5% of us are transgender, when it's really more like 0.3-0.6%:

How US left has warped our view of the UK

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/9f8b3ed8-e1c0-11ec-baab-53d14c642149?shareToken=7127f3710833cc9a7a7455c047700211

It's interesting to see those numbers. I've certainly noticed here in Canada that media representations over the last few years have spun out of all proportion with actual demographics.

I wonder how much people's misapptrehentions are to do with what they see representativly in fiction as opposed to what they read and hear in news type sources.

Yes, hardly anyone is trans - it is just that those who are seem to have loud voices.

I was watching Andrew Doyle's 'Free Speech Nation' last Sunday evening and he had a piece on about a new civil rights movement for black people that's been founded here in the UK. He had 2 male guests discussing it - one was Femi Someone (sorry, forgotten his name) who was pro and Calvin Robinson who was against. Femi was asked 'what rights do black people not have in the UK?' No answer (familiar to us on this board) and he kept banging on about MLK, slavery as it pertained to the US, George Floyd .... all American issues. It was startling.

Robinson very much disagrees that the UK is structurally racist and was actually refused ordination by the Church of England recently because they say they are structurally racist and he says they aren't. It's quite something to watch the white upper echelons of the CofE arguing with a black man about this.

Robinson very much disagrees that the UK is structurally racist and was actually refused ordination by the Church of England recently because they say they are structurally racist and he says they aren't. It's quite something to watch the white upper echelons of the CofE arguing with a black man about this.

This is Pythonesque in its absurdity. I wonder if he will rethink his position after this experience 😆

This isn't just a UK thing. There are black Americans who make the same argument, and they are similarly sidelined. There's an old interview with Dave Rubin and Larry Elder where Elder pretty much challenges Rubin to come up with a clear example of systemic racism in current day America, and Rubin really struggles - apparently it changed his whole approach to thinking about progressive politics. Even Adolph Reed, who is a marxist, says systemic racism isn't that useful a model in an American context.

It's worth understanding that this idea colonizing British politics isn't even uncontested where it originated.

I have a different interpretation from Shriver. I think that the reason that Americans overestimate the size of the black proportion of the US could just as well have to do with rightwing rhetoric that encourages the white population to feel that they are under threat. Similarly, while British public overestimation of the numbers of black people, Asians and Muslims might be partly down to US cultural influence or London-centric media, it probably has as much or more to do with Daily Mail xenophobia encouraging the white population to think that there are more people of colour than there really are and that whites are at risk of being "swamped", as Thatcher famously put it.
On trans rights activism, like most people here, I am critical of the TRA point of view, but I would still be hard-pressed to say whether public overestimation of the number of trans people is primarily due to gender activists talking about how important trans rights are, or whether it is due to sceptics drawing attention to the problems with self-ID etc. Both come together to increase the visibility of the minority in question.

The article was rubbish. Its a well known statistical phenomenon that people over report small numbers.

For ethnic minorities its also a familiar pattern that people over report to a greater extent following xenophobic campaigns. 40 yrs ago minorities were over reported in surveys after prolonged campaigns and violence from the National Front. Each time there is a wave of racist ideology or xenophobia the same happens. We have had several years of this in the Brexit campaign with dog whistle racism and overt racism telling people that "they" are stealing jobs.

It’s the media. News websites absolutely adore writing about trans issues, particularly if they can illustrate the article with a photo of someone proudly displaying their post-surgery body. It’s in the news pretty much every day, not because it’s news, but because journalists find it titillating.

This gives the false impression that many people are trans. (Actually it’s inaccurate to say someone “is” trans. As gender is a social concept, to reject it is a choice (unlike eg sexuality, as sexual urges are biological, not a choice). And to make a choice is an action. So it’s inaccurate to talk about how many people “are trans” what we really mean is how many people are choosing a trans lifestyle. Trans is something people do, not something people are.)

He's just been on Triggernometry, has Calvin.

Some more on this: "Ukip supporters grossly overestimate the number of immigrants living in Britain" (other parties' supporters also overestimated it, but to a lesser extent: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/there-are-half-as-many-immigrants-living-in-britain-as-ukip-supporters-think-10195060.html ) and "In a survey of 1,000 people, weighted to represent the nation’s demographic profile in terms of age, gender, ethnicity and other factors, respondents claimed that, on average, 15 per cent of the UK population are EU immigrants. That would be 10.5m people. The correct figure is 3.5m. Those who intend to vote Leave in the referendum put the figure at 20 per cent. ‘Remainers’ put the figure at 10 per cent." (So, both Leavers and Remainers overestimated the numbers - but Leavers much more so. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-british-public-wrong-about-nearly-everything-survey-shows-a7074311.html )

Shriver's statistics on the number of gay people are also dubious because essentially they rely on self-id. Not everyone who is gay is willing to say so, whether to pollsters or even to themselves, especially to older generations.

I think it has to be both, you really can't separate the two phenomena, they are interdependent.

But the practical issue is that people are working from incorrect information.

Piecing together several sources to understand distortions is rarely linear. As a snapshot, in 2019 Nusrat Choudhury made a statement that everyday a black unarmed black man is shot by police.

policetribune.com/federal-judge-nominee-claimed-cops-shoot-unarmed-black-men-in-america-daily/

I've seen that cited in several places and it was used as a means to undermine her in her nomination hearing for a position as a Federal judge in New York.

www.reuters.com/legal/government/republicans-seek-rare-2nd-hearing-biden-judge-pick-over-police-comments-2022-05-19/

However, on checking, it seems as if the event where this alleged statement is said to be have been made is 2015 (not 2019), and Choudhury says that she didn't say it and there's no official record of her having said it.

www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/QFR%20Responses%20-%20Choudhury%20-%202022-04-27.pdf

Not entirely tangential to that, Douglas Murray claims:

A poll in 2020 asked Americans how many unarmed black men they think are killed by the police in America the previous year. More than a fifth of people who described themselves as “very liberal” said they thought it was over 10,000 unarmed black people in America killed by police every year. Among self-described “liberals,” around 40% said they thought that the figure was somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. The actual figure was around 10. Meaning that liberals in America were off by several orders of magnitude. They had a completely wrongheaded idea of what America is actually like.

nypost.com/2022/04/07/black-lives-matter-just-another-racket/
This is a summary of the survey:

nypost.com/2021/02/27/cases-of-police-brutality-against-black-people-are-overestimated/

This is the actual survey and report:

www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf

The very kindest interpretation would be that inadvertently somebody misreported Nusrat Choudhury and, given her status, it was accepted and treated as accurate. It was repeated often enough that it took on a life of its own across the years and in the context of some egregious events it was increasingly repeated in high profile media until it became fact through repetition.

Nusrat Choudhury denies saying it. Maybe it wasn't even the misreporting of her but someone else or a different misunderstanding is at the root of this.

There is plausibly a lot of motivated reasoning behind the survey.

Somewhere along the way, there does seem to be a lot of distortion and warping of views. And this feels like a distraction from the reality that being killed by gunfire is a public health issue in the US and it's one that disproportionately affects black and hispanic communities.

Nobody knows why Robinson was refused ordination. The press reported Robinson's claims that it was "wokery".

Frankly having heard his views on women and his general populist politics and apparent lack of empathy it could well have been that he simply wasn't a good candidate for a job which requires objectivity and empathy.

I do think the UK is structurally racist, I'm sorry. And I agree that overestimating the size of a minority group is often done by people who think negatively about that group. When I spent some time in Judaism classes, I found that British responses to polls will estimate the UK Jewish population at around 20%. It's 2%. Antisemitism is endemic in British culture and I didn't have much of an idea about it until I married a Jewish man.

Overestimating is common across the board, and also for things unrelated to demographics.

People are not very good at guessing about quite a lot of things. They overestimate the safety of some things and the danger of others, for example.

As an aside, the Canadian census shows numbers in that country:

Canada’s trans population size is 0.33 percent
Census data released Wednesday offers an unprecedented snapshot of Canada’s transgender population, showing 0.33 per cent of residents identify as a gender that differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.

The data collected during last year’s national household survey shows about 100,815 people are transgender or non-binary, including 31,555 who are transgender women, 27,905 who are transgender men and 41,355 who are non-binary.

That the non-binary category is the largest of the three is fascinating, as it is the one I would think most likely to fluctuate over time.

This is the first time data on trans and nonbinary numbers were collected. The percentages are higher for those born since 1981 (three to seven times higher than for older generations).

Lionel Shriver wrote an early article about the disappearance of the kind of feminism which tries to enlarge the boxes gender norms put us all in and minimize the impact of biological sex in areas where it is clearly not relevant. She lamented the fact that the trend is now to the reverse direction, with gender norms becoming more central, and even things like differences in hair styling coming back to somehow signal gender. And that is intertwined with the concept of gender identity.

On this piece, yes people overestimate the size of small communities, tend to overestimate the size of communities they fear, and yes, the media does present a society in the West which looks much more racially diverse than reality might be.

I understand what this policy aims at: greater acceptance and normalisation of all racial, ethnic, and religious groups in a country as well as sexual minorities etc.

Many fictional representations of, say, police stations or academic departments in universities probably show more women in leadership roles than we would find in the real world even today, but I may be behind the times there.

Still, those who watch these shows might get a different perception of a country overall, even if the area where they live is quite homogeneous.

I have noticed that young people assume the number of trans and nonbinary people to be much, much larger than it actually is, and that is almost certainly based on the online world where people segregate themselves into ideological bubbles and spend a lot of time with like-minded others. But it is also true that transgender women do seem to take more central roles in many organisations than their actual numbers would predict, and this, in turn, makes them more noticed and that makes people think that they are representing a much larger demographic.

DH and I were discussing this, about why peoples perceptions are skewed - some of it is fairly banal eg if you've got a drama or advert with a small cast then the only possibilities are to over-represent minorities or not represent them at all. In general we've moved from the latter to the former.

Thinking about 'protected characteristics', the same effect, afaik, does not apply to people with disabilities, probably the reverse ...am I right about that and if so why the difference?

I think that's probably true. Over the past year I've noticed more attempts to include people with disabilities in media representations, but I don't think it compares.

I suspect there are a few reasons. One is that plenty of disabilities are not all that noticeable, so how would you signal them? As opposed to including more racially diverse people say, which is very easy to see. Plus, some disabilities that are more immediately obvious would make a difference to the story. Probably you will not have a blind police constable. Other cases it would just make production more complicated I remember watching a show where a charachter in a wheelchair was introduced, and while it was fine as a viewer, you could see that it affected some of the way shots and such were set up. (The same happens with people like very tall actors, but it's sometimes why those people may not get roles, it's a pain.)

Racial diversity really doesn't need to be included in the plot, you just need a different actor, female roles are often similar. Sexual diversity can be trickier because often it would not be obvious, so can require heavy-handed writing or presentation, but still does not typically impact the action of the story much.

So you get narratives that tend not to show disability much at all but rely on things like ethnic diversity, or in things like advertisements, they tend to be very obvious ones like someone in a wheelchair.

There is no such thing as the "American Left." The whole system is shifted right. Democrats are in the center, while the American right wing is very far right and increasingly so. Democrats are really more like the Tories; there is no correlation in the US to Labour. There are 42 million African-Americans, less than 13% of the population. There are fewer than 16 million Jews worldwide.

I don't think American and British politics map onto each other like that. The cultures and the political assumptions are too different.

I fully agree, and yet I have frequently spoken to young Brits who believe that things from American history or politics are true here.

That's the impact of the internet

I was thinking about the impact of the internet in this. Because sometimes the numbers on apparent issues of the day don't match the alleged size of the purported problem. Malcolm Clark's thread on conversion therapy for example, set out what we could all clearly see when we cracked open the "research":

twitter.com/TwisterFilm/status/1460054790717808646

But somewhere, somehow, this is an "issue" that "needs legislation". There was such little evidence offered on the gender identity element of that consultation that it was unbelievable we were about to legislate on it.

And yet...spend time on Twitter, get hauled into some E&D re-education training, and you'd think it's quite a big problem. Instead, another group has been ignored - the one we're all well versed with here - conversion of gay kids. So knowing the real size of groups does matter because getting it wrong and people believing it can have real world impacts.

That's a good example, and the interesting thing with conversion therapy bills is they were introduced in a number of places - the UK, Australia, Canada, some states in the US - all around the same time. And there wasn't in any of those places a serious discussion about whether this was something that still happened in the way they were dealing with, whether it was already illegal, etc.

I mean, lobotomies are still legal in most places, which is to say they have never been legally banned. They don't really happen because they are no longer considered medically legitimate, and a doctor who performed one would probably be struck off by the relevent professional organizations, maybe would be sued, and could even face other kinds of criminal charges because of the harms involved.

Yet when you talk to people they get quite worked up that anyone would think that banning conversion therapy was not necessary.