Survey on culture in the UK - 'trans rights' questions

[ArabellaSaurus]

New survey

19% of people say 'trans rights have not gone far enough' in the UK.
39% say 'trans rights have gone too far'.

That's a really big change in the past five years.

'The proportion who say transgender rights have gone too far in the UK has more than doubled since 2020, from 17% to 39%, though overall there is still no public consensus on the issue, with 19% now saying transgender rights have not gone far enough, 27% saying they’ve gone as far as they should, and a further 15% not giving an opinion.
The proportion of people who say transgender rights have gone too far has doubled among all age groups – even 16-24s, where one in five (19%) now feel this way, compared with around one in 10 (9%) in 2020. However, young people are still more likely to say transgender rights have not gone far enough (36%).'

https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/uks-sense-division-reaches-new-high-culture-war-tensions-grow-study-finds

Article:

https://unherd.com/newsroom/growing-number-of-britons-think-trans-rights-have-gone-too-far/

A man taking oestrogen does not turn him into a female person. Nor does it eliminate male advantage. ( Why is it that men have tended to dominate do you think?)

Women's sports are for female people and are predicated on the facts of biology and the sexed body and the differences that result in that body or physiology on account of it being of the female sex. ( female footballers, for instance, are more prone to certain types of injury than male footballers)

Male bodies are different in many ways; ways that give an advantage to them. This is why we have female only catgeories.....so that female excellence and acievement in physical pursuits can be rewarded, encouraged and made safe for female participants.

If society condones the belief that something in a male person's mind make him "really" a woman, that affects every single woman on the planet because it's added a mental quality to something that previously was just a physical fact.

As a woman, I have no idea what it is that this innate mental "womannyness" is. I do not recognise it from my own experience of living as a woman, nor has anyone bothered to check for it before imposing the usual sexualisation of my body or belittling of my abilities that woman are subjected to.

So I'm afraid to me it just smells a lot like old fashioned sexism and the age old belief of men that they can tell us who we are better than we can.

Bringing that shit back into social acceptance sure as hell affects me, thanks, and I will not accept it quietly any more than I accepted sexism before it carried a pink.and blue flag.

Again, the charitable position is that you haven't thought this through.

Much like allowing black children into white schools

'Race' is just inherited superficial features like relative skin pigmentation. I really hope that that you don't think think that differences in 'race' are equivalent to differences in sex, because that would suggest extreme racism.

there is nothing wrong with trans women in female changing rooms.

There is no objective definition of trans women, so the only policy that organisations have been able to put into practice is allowing anyone to use any changing room according to preference. The only possible choices are intentionally mixed sex facilities, or single sex facilities. There is no women + trans women option.

Quite - these 'black-white' analogies are actually very racist. Skin colour is a really quite superficial difference beiuween human beings, whereas 'Sex' is one of the fundamental categories and differentiations of life on earth ( regardless of skin colour, religion, culture etc) - that has impacts and consequences on many levels.

I realised I hadn't commented on that bit after seeing your reply.

Yes, it's appalling to equate my lack of belief in gender identity with racism.

Transwomen are men. By definition.

Thousands of years of experience of the differences between the sexes and the specific vulnerabilities of females has led to the creation of sex based protections - without which men would continue to dominate for ever, and without which female dignity, privacy and safety when in public spaces would become redundant.

It is important think things through carefully and critically rather than embracing trendy notions and fashions because they are the flavour of the day, or because your social group has adopted them.

Interestingly, I've had many of these tlast. I have been called transphobic a few times because I don't always agre, and it's always by cis women. Trans men don't talk to me about these issues.
I don't think this is a misogyny issue, this is a trans issue.

And Gnasher- please, please dont equate a lack of belief in gender identity with any racial comparisons. It is deeply, deeply offensive, irrelevant and racist.

Welcome to the women's rights part of mumsnet! Women's rights are clearly all new to you, but if you glance around you will notice that mumsnet also offers a wealth of information on women's health.

Just to take your first point about periods:

The absence of periods is always significant for women.

It always indicates something important about health, whether that is pregnancy, infertility, menopause, the impact of medication, malnutrition, or another kind of disorder. None of this has anything to do with identity. The absence of periods is also important for women who identify as trans.

You note that some women can't get pregnant. Infertility treatment places a far greater burden on women than men, and the causes of infertility are sex specific. Inability to access treatment during the pandemic had a greater impact on women because their fertile window is shorter.

Some women do not wish to become pregnant, and they rely on access to contraception, abortion services, and to be blunt, a legal system that criminalises rape.

These aren't random things that anyone might deal with. These are things that only women deal with. Some of the women on this board are old enough to remember a time when we weren't protected by the current framework of rights, and we certainly have mothers and grandmothers who couldn't take birth control or equality law for granted.

If we can't define 'woman' in law, we go back to zero.

And why did they think that? Because they had prejudices about how women think. Exactly as Genderism does.

And was any trans woman affected by those sexist rules that prevented women from voting, or excluded us from many professions?

No. Because the sexism that women suffer isn't about sexist people checking how we identify and then deciding whether their sexism applies, it's about reacting to our bodies by sexualising, marginalising or belittling us.

It astounds me you can't see this.

I don't believe you. I have never seen any "pro trans" group that accepted any meaningful debate. Fiddling around the edges of the different ways trans women can be women maybe, but anything suggesting a balancing of rights or a limit on trans incursion? No. Anything that comes close is piled on and/or banned and deleted.

Then you must agree that transwomen are males, because if we make gender the default, instead of biological sex, as Stonewall and others do, then we will have a situation of chaos, with regard to women's sports, prisons, changing rooms and other sex based safe spaces.

Thank you for mentioning toilet door gaps. I bet your incident was never recorded. Neither was mine (who was a young woman who had choked on her own vomit). She’s probably in her 40s or 50s now.

Collapsing in the toilet happens more than people realise. It happened to the actress Emilia Clarke who was rescued. I know of deaths in offices, doctors surgeries, hospitals, schools, supermarkets…I could probably find examples from most venue types tbh from a quick google. Frustratingly many of these places have defibrillators too.

Changing all the single sex designs to private, sound resistant unisex designs would be hugely costly in monetary terms but the ultimate cost would be vulnerable lives.

I think females can be more prone to 'be kind' rhetoric and wanting to help those considered less fortunate. Also females are as prone to wanting to belong to an 'in group' and be popular and 'liked' as much as men - maybe even more so.

I really don't think it is true that most young women are perfectly happy to get changed with, or share faclities with, strange males. The recent increase in the number of women only gyms or gym changing rooms is for a reason.

I don' understand what you meant by "many of these tlast". Are you saying that you have had your gender identity checked before being subjected to sexism as a woman? Seems odd a sexist someone would be that self aware/controlled in their sexism.

My best friend has argued to me all the same points as gnasher has, but then went further and said that TW actually change biological sex when they say they are women 😵‍💫.

It is actually horrifying that people can believe a) what noone believed until 5 minutes ago and b) what is obviously, evidently completely false just in order to #BeKind to a small group of activists.

It scares the shit out of me.

It has been shown the woman who won Olympic boxing is in fact a cis female.

No. No it has not at all, that is an outright lie. He (Imane Khelif) has failed two separate, independent sex chromosome tests, because he's XY. Male, a man.

A trans woman should he allowed to use a lady's changing room or toilet..

No he should not, that would be a breach of the Equality Act and in some cases, Health and Safety ar Work Act. Please familiarise yourself with the Supreme Court Judgment, in the FWS case, April 16th 2025.

They are explicitly excluded from women's facilities, because they are men. This is medico scientific fact and is enshrined in law.

They have not 'stolen' anything from cis women, they are fighting for their right to exist.

Of course they have, women's prizes for life achievements, sporting medals, places on women only political short lists, rape crisis centre places and jobs. The feeling of safety and dignity in toilets, changing rooms and prisons.

Finally, go to Hell with your unnecessary, grammatically incorrect "cis." It means, geographically, "on this side of." Trans, in that case, means on the other side of.

Trans people use the trans prefix to mean "changed."

Perhaps their opinion will shift gradually as part of the change in views in the UK. It will be interesting to watch these people as they slowly become more isolated. The polling shows a steady direction of travel.

I really hope so.

But the fact that it happened at all is scary.

Sure, but the real true believers are a very tiny minority.

The VAST majority of people don't pay all that much attention. They coasted along assuming it was all rainbow flags and loveliness. They noted some feminists were getting very noisy about something, but decided, because they were told, that it was 'culture wars' and nothing to do with them. 'Love is love' and 'being my true self' sounded fair enough and no big deal.

Then they probably noticed, say, an avalanche of drag queen propaganda. Or heard the 'No debate' mantra and thought 'that's a bit rude'. Saw a woman get punched in the news, assumed it was some kind of in-group spat. Then their child came home talking about Stonewall genderamas. Somebody at school goes non-binary and talks about puberty blockers. Well, they thought, live and let live, and it's probably a bit like the gay/lesbian thing back in the day.

Then there was the Cass Report, and they thought a bit about why 15 year old girls were getting mastectomies. Or they came across a chap in the local swimming pool, using the women's changing rooms. Maybe they were vaguely aware the Scottish government planned to bring in self ID. Then there was Isla Bryson and his penis, sent to a woman's prison.

Maybe then they started noticing more, and wondered how we got here. And opinion has started to shift.

I've watched over the past howeverthefuckmany years as one by one friends and family have had some kind of disconcerting realisation dawn. And every one of them has gone from frowning at me when I've talked about gender stuff to eventually coming and asking 'what the fuck is actually going on?'

No, no point in trying to argue with true believers. But still, most people have only a very sketchy idea of what's going on. Bear in mind the survey that showed a couple of years ago that around 30% of the public still don't really know whether a 'trans woman' is supposed to mean someone who is male to female, or the opposite.

There is a post here from someone on Reddit asking whether men can get pregnant or not.

Some responses are sceptical that its in good faith, but they are forgetting that there is a generation that may well have been taught that sex is something we can change at will, there are more than 100 genders, that sex and gender are interchangeable, etc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1osltj6/cant_men_get_pregnant/

Transwomen are pretend women.
Fact.

You can be a snail if that's what you want. It won't bother me or anyone else or any of the snails.

Except that isn't true, because Bluemin will be treated by the law as a human, and won't be able to e.g. avoid council tax by claiming to be a snail.

💯 this. I think as well lockdown (and covid generally) brought out an extra level of crazy and it's time for it to go back in the box.