July 20, 2022 - 6:39pm
New YouGov polling should be a wake-up call to campaigners and politicians who have been playing politics with transgender rights. The headlines look dreadful. “There has been an erosion in support for transgender rights since 2018”, YouGov finds. But dig a little deeper and a different story emerges.
The key finding for me is that most people don’t much care. Of the 1751 Britons surveyed at the end of May, only 8% had paid “a lot of attention to the trans debate”. Meanwhile two thirds had paid either no attention or “not much attention”. But they still have opinions. Among the “not much attention” crowd, 49% suggested that discrimination against trans people was a significant problem, compared to 37% who disagreed. But we don’t know how those opinions were formed.
The polling focussed on details. Should transwomen be allowed to compete in women’s sports? 61% disagreed. But that is hardly a litmus test for transphobia. I would be one of the 61% — sport is segregated because male bodies and female bodies are different, and they remain different even after transition.
Meanwhile a plurality (41% to 38%) held that transwomen should not be allowed to use women’s toilets. And at the same time, more people than not (39% to 36%) thought that transwomen should have access to women’s refuges for victims of rape or assault. I disagree with them — refuges cater for women fleeing male violence. I think that all male people should avoid them.
Unfortunately we don’t know if those polled were sympathetic to specific refuges for transwomen because that question was not asked. Neither were they asked the crucial question, “should trans people be treated with dignity and respect, and not less favourably than anyone else?” That may have uncovered widespread transphobia in the UK, though from my own experience transphobia is restricted to the margins of society.
However, I have noticed a hardening of attitudes. Interestingly, YouGov compared the current data to earlier polling in 2018 and 2020. It makes for sobering reading: fewer people think transwomen are women or transmen are men; more now think transgender women accessing women’s spaces poses a genuine risk. There is yet more confusion: while fewer people now think that it should easier to change legal gender, opinion has shifted against a doctor’s approval or evidence that the trans person has “lived in their new gender”.
But – significantly, I think – fewer people now think that transwomen should be allowed to use women’s toilets. It would have been hard to imagine that happening when I transitioned in 2012. Transsexualism — as it used to be called — was recognised as a medical issue. Those of us diagnosed with gender identity disorder, or gender dysphoria as it became known, were treated with compassion and accommodated without fuss.
But since around 2015, transgender ideology has become a political issue. Campaigners for self-identification have made repeated calls to dismantle the checks and balances that I believe underpinned the acceptance that transsexuals had taken for granted. Disgracefully, politicians and policy makers have caved into them and, seven years later, we are now seeing the deleterious effects.
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SubscribeThe transgender movement has set the gay rights movement back by decades. The tolerance that was around back in the 90s and 00s is rapidly being eroded by a small group of people intent on bending reality around their warped little worlds.
This article sums it up really well:
https://www.thinkinghousewife.com/2016/12/the-manufactured-insanity-of-transgenderism/#
I’d say its actually rect ‘um…
Painful!
SOS!
I follow alt right media from the US as I am interested in what everyone is saying. In just a year many posts on these sites have become explicitly homophobic – I think due to trans activism and overreach. Don’t get me wrong – the posters were always homophobic – but they are riding a wave of disgust and unease as we hear stories of make bodied rapists in women’s prisons, of the insistence of activists that they need to have access to very young children in schools to educate them, etc. I think the LGB movement is wise to drop the T and distance themselves from this movement. For the record I do believe in gender dysphoria and I have real sympathy for trans people whose issue has been highjacked by radicals.
“I have real sympathy for trans people whose issue has been highjacked by radicals.”
Hear hear!
It all began with a lie. That males can safely be given female levels of access to females & infants. This has never been true in any civilisation or for any mammalian species. Y chromosomes aren’t a figment of my imagination. I’ve had enough of being told they are.
I can’t think of any other rights movement that made me feel *less* sympathetic the more I learned about it. Probably because I can’t think of any other rights movement that’s so hellbent on denying the material reality.
Another sensible article from Debbie Hayton.
A recent Daily Mail report starts as follows:
“A transgender NHS worker has won a discrimination case against the health service after being left ’embarrassed’ when her boss confronted her over concerns that she was ‘naked from the waist down’ in shared changing rooms.”
When transgender “women” behaved with discretion around women they attracted the protective instincts of most women. As the above report illustrates as soon as they started behaving in an entitled manner that women identified as showing typically male traits that tolerance began to wane.
We as taxpayers are now having to pay out because an NHS manager attempted, perhaps in a cack handed manner, to resolve a problem brought about by complaints that this transgender woman had been showing himself naked from the waist down in a women’s changing area. If you want to be a woman the least you can do is to comply with the gender behaviour norms of the sex you wish to present yourself as.
The fact that we are having to pay for this man’s embarrassment is a disgrace. I can’t imagine Debbie Hayton would have behaved as this man did either before transition or after.
I thank the LBGT Q activists as they supply the most fabulous source of jokes and quips that keep a smile on a dull day via the e mails and texts that go round!
This man was taking advantage of the decriminalisation of flashing. The NHS was complicit in his fetish
“…cack handed…”
Is that a typo?
‘Cack handed’ means clumsy.
I’m pretty sure that ‘clumsy’ is one modern meaning of cack-handed, but that the original meaning is ‘left-handed’, the hand used to clean excrement from the nether regions in older cultures, ‘cack’ being one word for it (as it is in Welsh still, though spelt differently: ‘cachu’).
This is one reason why left-handedness is regarded with distaste by certain religions, eating being done solely with the right hand, and the left being banned for that reason.
The advent of toilet paper may have inadvertently led to fewer left-handers being persecuted these days.
Left handed people must seek reparations for countless years of persecution. Cack Hands Matter.
When they refer to Trans Rights can someone tell me exactly what that means? What rights do trans people want that they and myself don’t have already?
Ah, that’s a big mystery. Nobody really ever explains it.
The rights I think trans people deserve: protection from being fired for transitioning or denied a job in a field where sex is irrelevant (jobs that don’t involve personal care); access to affordable, respectful medical care; right to foster or adopt children based on the same criteria required of “cis” people; the right to marry.
The “rights” trans activists are fighting for:
The right to force everyone to validate EVERY trans person’s gender identity, to redefine biological sex as a “vibe” rather than flesh & blood reality, to impose language restrictions on institutions & on the general public, to persecute people for “thought crimes” against gender identarians, to force women to deny their physical bodies & biological realities, to erase being genetically female from womanhood.
I vehemently oppose every single one of those “rights”.
I agree with every word of your comment.
The right to be perceived by the rest of the society the way they perceive themselves? It’s a just a shame for the activists that no such right exists.
This will help:
https://twitter.com/Perrykymata/status/1543488411792642048?s=19
The ‘right’ to be loved and approved of, officially. Modern law is now full of instances that place certain random groups outside of criticism of their behaviour.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, gay rights for gay people just seemed common sense, and basic fairness. I’d always have viewed anyone who doesn’t support gay rights as some sort of crank. However, I have no time for trans rights. First, it involves a ridiculous semantic distortion of the word gender, which until fairly recently was just a more vicar-friendly euphemism for “sex”. Now, apparently, we’re meant to believe that “gender” means a set of mere behaviours and predilections. The problem with transactivism is that it can only derive from an acceptance of rigid and very outdated sex-based social stereotypes. The idea that your “gender” is not aligned with your sex only makes sense if you accept, as a given, that men and women can only express themselves inside a narrow set of cultural/social parameters.
But I, and millions more like me, have never had a “gender”.
I’m a person, who happens to be a man. I don’t have a “gender” on top of that. I like boxing and motorsports and football. I also like poetry. And if at some point I decide to learn how to darn my socks whilst reading Victorian poetry, I am free to do so. I do not need to “change my gender” (whatever that means) in order to behave in un-stereotypical ways. If you’re a woman who likes drinking beer, playing rugby, and rolling home singing bawdy women’s rugby drinking songs (I used to share a house with women from Cambridge univ rugby club lol), then, as a woman, you’re perfectly free to do that. Those women (they were great fun) did not feel they needed to “change their gender” to behave in un-stereotypical ways. Boy George, as a gay man in the 80s, was able to dress up in conventionally-feminine clothes and wear conventionally-feminine makeup etc. He did so as a gay man. He did not consider that he needed to “change his gender” to exercise his freedom to behave in un-stereotypical ways.
That is, trans ideology resurrects and foments (because it has to) some very regressive notions:
First, trans ideology depends on the rest of us accepting that males and females should be incredibly constrained in their cultural, sporting, social or sartorial behaviour. That trans myth is extremely regressive, and socially conservative. It assumes, indeed needs, that we all buy into the fiction that men and women are already forced to live according to outdated small-town 1950s US stereotypes (“rugged capable emotionally constipated men in suits” and “twittering featherheaded weak women in pinafores” etc). That is, trans mythmaking would have us believe that we’re all living in the past, and that being all you can be involves a whole lot of performative cod-psychology bumkum about gender.
Second, trans ideology operates as a form of women cancellation, and of gay, especially lesbian, cancellation. We are frowned upon for using words such as “woman” and “breast-feeding”. Instead, we have to accept that a hairy bloke with meat and 2 veg is a “woman” *merely because he says he is*. And that, based on this imagined nonsense, it’s OK for a big hairy bloke to be sent into a women’s prison, with inevitable consequences:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/trans-inmate-convicted-murder-caught-27091342
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nj-trans-prisoner-impregnated-2-inmates-transferred-mens-facility-rcna38947
This is complete madness. Culturally, it also means that insecure young women who may be gay are being offered a fashionable way to avoid coming out as gay in the normal fashion. Instead, they now declare themselves to be “trans”.
So-called “gender” is merely the resurrection and ossification of social stereotypes. You take 50% of a behavioural spectrum and call that “gender”. It’s hilariously conservative, and regressive, and de facto tells us that a man, or a woman, cannot access a full spectrum of lifestyle choices without resorting to trans nonsense.
A man does not need to cut off his bits to wear a frock. Ask any Scotsman at a wedding. Nor does he need to call himself “trans” to wear a frock. He’s just a bloke who likes dresses. Big deal. Nor does a woman need to have surgery to play rugby and get drunk with the team, for heaven’s sake. Nor does she have to call herself “trans” to do so. She’s just a woman who likes rugby and the occasional piss-up. Again, big deal. If you’re anorexic, and are convinced that you’re very fat (even though you may be wasting away), no Dr. will indulge your delusions – they will intervene and seek to have any such mental disorder treated. It should be no difference for trans people. Just because you are a man or woman who wishes to dress, live or behave in an unconventional manner, that full range of behaviours or lifestyles are 100% available to you as a (straight or gay) man or woman already.
How much longer do we need to indulge these attention-seeking bores?
If you want to see a good discussion on this area, check out this discussion on “The Illogicality of Transgender Theory”:
https://youtu.be/ThAhHhVNcAE
Hi, Debbie! Thank you for all you’re doing. I found your story after I googled “terf” to see why I was called that, and after many books, lectures and speeches on YouTube (the pandemic gave me so much time to actually explore the history of feminism), I came across your story; there was an interview on YT and a podcast. I listened to it twice: you have mu deep respect. I would stand next to you in any protest.
Of course that ridiculous ideology has fewer and fewer supporters; it has nothing to do with reality. It allows men to tell me to stfu, I can lose my job because of it, this is the first time in my life I am afraid to say what I think! I am as radically left as you can imagine, yet trans activists have called me a fascist! This theory is an alibi for the omnipresent misogyny we all know so well, that’s why it’s so strong and thriving.
So, thank you again, my fellow human. You might feel you’re a woman, which must be an interesting feeling. I never felt that way.
Terf?… it’s just a dyslexic name for a rather good club in London of which I used to be a member…
I’ll bet they have their finances taken care of my Terf Accountants?
The obvious thing is numbers. The Problems arise when people with penises want to go into Ladies spaces, hospital wards, prison cells etc. This is understandable, unwanted penises attached to a male body, are a threat to ladies.
But it seems very few people with vaginas are seeking to get into Men only spaces. Surely the proportions should be the same ?
Actually, many millions of women do indeed enter what were once considered men’s spaces–not in washrooms or prisons, to be sure, but at work, in the military, in the family and so on. My point here isn’t to attack them for doing so but merely to point out that fact.
I’m pretty sure most of us do not equate women wanting equal access to what we’re once male only social power spaces to transwomen wanting access to female only spaces that exist to protect them from male predation.
This is exactly why I hate trans activists: my adorable, kind, reasonable, pro science, compassionate son is a trans man & these insane trans activists – most of whom are NOT trans – are fueling a backlash that may end up harming him & wonderful women like you, Debbie (sorry, but I do think of you as a woman & I would be lying if I said otherwise).
Thank You for fighting for ACTUAL trans rights.
I won’t respect people who ask me to deny reality. Simply, I’m not going to lie for people. If they want my respect, they have to respect that.
I’m subscribed to three different transwomen on youtube, in fact. None of them are authoritarian. They don’t demand people speak a certain way, use certain words.
I’m not on earth to entertain people’s delusions, it’s as plain and simple as that. Biological reality doesn’t mean I can’t accept actual transpeople, I can. What I can’t accept is the political activism that doesn’t want anything but complete control over what people say.
Until they accept that most people are going to feel that way when pushed, there will be a continual loss of acceptance until they might actually lose rights they currently take for granted. Which I don’t actually want.
Interestingly, a narrow majority thought that transgender people should be able to change their legally recognised gender, but a strong majority thought that the process for doing this (eg living for at least two years as that gender, doctor’s certificates etc) *shouldn’t* be made easier. And a very, very strong majority opposed kids getting access to puberty blockers and gender reassignment treatment. People, rightly, don’t trust the biotech industry to mess with their kids’ bodies.
Leave those kids alone.
The last paragraph is telling but doesn’t quite go far enough. This is not about actual transsexuals it’s about attacking Western culture and our Christian foundation in particular.
This has nothing to do with it. The “Christian foundation” as you use it is a myth, quite comparable to the fairy tales of transideology. Besides, transsexuality in itself is a product of Western culture and Western culture alone. Which doesn’t make it any less of an issue for people afflicted, such as Debbie Hayton, by the way. Transideology, propping up on transsexualism, is likewise a product of contemporary Western culture. One could actually call it the embodiment of how Capitalism has permeated even the most private aspects of our lives and seeks to incorporate them.
What does any of that actually mean?
I would say that Christianity has always been ambivalent about sexuality, from about the time when the original purely Jewish movement was taken over by Greek-speaking Romans (‘Hellenists’) in the 2nd Century.
Origenes, a a 2nd C. ‘Church Father’ castrated hinself to perfect himself for transition to ‘heaven’. The 3rd C. Gnostics were in various ways comtemptuous of human sexuality, because it led to procreation and the maintenance of earthly life, which they saw as a kind of evil. One sect believed that the original ‘Man’, Adam, was hermaphrodite, and that this state should be the heavenly goal of salvation, to make the two sexes ‘one’ again and ‘Man’ whole (cf. ‘The Gospel of Thomas’). Even the Catholic Church promoted celibate priests.
Sexual ‘hangups’ are nothing new in ‘the West’.
I agree that the vast majority of people don’t care, they are happy to treat people as they wish to be treated as long as it doesn’t unduly affect anyone else (as with anything really). But surely crucial to such surveys is the definition of what a ‘transwoman’ is, and that ain’t defined here?
I disagree. When people learn ”transwoman” encompasses part-time cross dressers who sometimes put on lipstick and a dress and say they are “women”, they very much care about whether such men must be allowed into women’s spaces.
Isn’t that Tom’s point?
Thanks Arkadian, you are correct, but it’s Tony not Tom! Fear not, I’ve been called much worse.
Exactly my point – what does ‘transwomen’ encompass?
This will sound very cynical, but the thinking I’ve is that the trans movement as it’s conceived is downstream of a society that values pleasures and experiments in living above the boring things like raising families and looking after people. How one has pleasure becomes the foundational view to organise society where gender is fluid and there are unlimited desires and role-plays one can do than how one cares for children and others with closer ties to biology or our nature if you want to call it that.
One issue here is the use of language. The article uses the terms “transwomen” and “transgender women”. But unless the term “woman” is unambiguously defined by the trans lobby, then these terms are useless.
They are useless anyway because a woman is an adult human female where female denotes sex. And if “trans” means “transition” and that means “the process of changing”, then “transwoman” is an oxymoron”. One cannot change sex.
Further, the attempt to change “woman” into a gender term as a form of performance, also strikes the definitional brick wall. A performance of what?
There will have to be a new, negotiated nomenclature to describe a trans person, that does not seek to deny observed reality and does not seek to annex already existing terms used for categorising reality. Until that happens, this issue is going nowhere IMO.
It may be better to understand Trans activism not as a ‘liberation’ movement, designed to right some genuine injustice, but as a political wedge, to be hammered in, to overthrow the whole apple cart.
If you can demonstrate that what most people regard as the most fundamental division in human society, that between biological males and females, is nothing more than a social construct, ‘assigned at birth’, then not only can the walls of the loos come down, everything comes down.
Most people really try to be decent human beings to others, except when the others are out right jerks. you can’t keep pushing people and not expect a backlash at some point. (This exactly how America ended up with Trump. Pissed off people who weren’t going to take it any more.). There’s just a lot less tolerance when people start speaking in scream and refuse to answer rational questions.
I am sure Debbie is right when she says that checks and balances underpin acceptance. A bandwagon has been made and this usually undermines acceptance or tolerance.
Again, how far can we trust polling data without knowing the questions and the order? Suppose you were asked two questions in this order:
Should there be separate refuges for transwomen?
Should transwomen be allowed to use refuges for women?
Now imagine that you were asked the same questions in the opposite order. You could also change the second question to:
Should womens’ refuges exclude transwomen?
Again, I expect that the question would give different results.
A woman is only a woman, and a good Cigar is not Woke.
It is all as much interest to 99 pc of people as the molecular construction of the planet Pluto… ( lucky I didnt say Uranus)….
I think you will find you did actually say Uranus, and for the record planets (or planetoids) are not constructs.