There are several more questions to come from the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll about GRA reform, but inevitably as a result of polling on such a sensitive topic, I’ve been receiving a certain amount of what might euphemistically be described as “forthright feedback”. So I thought I’d deal with some of the recurring themes in this post.
“Human rights should NEVER be decided be opinion poll!”
This implictly suggests that the act of simply commissioning a poll on any topic somehow carries the implication that the results of the poll should decide the matter. That plainly is not the case, and in fact I’ve spoken out many times against any creeping move towards a “YouGov democracy” – eg. Alister Jack’s suggestion that it might be OK to hold an independence referendum in 2039 as long as opinion pollsters say we want one. In a healthy democracy, nothing at all should be decided simply by opinion poll, but that doesn’t mean that polls shouldn’t be carried out or that they don’t have a role to play.
As far as human rights are concerned, there isn’t yet a consensus among global policy-makers, even those of a liberal persuasion, that gender self-ID forms part of the canon of inalienable human rights alongside the rights to life, to free speech, and so on. If there was such a consensus, we wouldn’t even be having the current debate over GRA reform. But advocates of self-ID themselves clearly feel that public opinion should carry a certain amount of weight in that debate – hence frequently-heard claims such as “a large majority of women support self-ID”. It’s scarcely illegitimate, then, to put those claims to the test and to discover whether they are actually accurate. The results of the Scot Goes Pop poll strongly suggest that they are not.
The erroneous belief that there is huge public support for self-ID appears, ironically, to be derived mainly from YouGov polling commissioned by Pink News – which begs the obvious question of whether Pink News think human rights should be decided by opinion poll. They achieved the results they wanted by asking in very vague terms whether people should be able to self-identify as a different gender from their sex at birth – without specifying that this would be a legally-recognised process that would confer all of the legal rights of belonging to a particular gender, and that would remove any preconditions such as a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. There was other YouGov polling at around the same time that showed a majority of respondents thought any concrete legal rights from a change of gender should only apply to those who had actually undergone gender reassignment surgery. In other words, respondents actually strongly opposed legal self-ID, but hadn’t understood the implications of the extremely ambiguous question they had been asked about it. It’s likely that they assumed they were being asked a motherhood and apple pie question about whether it’s OK for people who were born male to think of themselves as a woman, and vice versa – which, of course, is a right that already exists.
The intentional vagueness of the Pink News question reminds me a bit of a question I asked in a poll eighteen months ago: “Should Scotland rejoin the European Union?” I deliberately didn’t specify that this might involve becoming an independent country – I wanted to see how people would react to the general principle of Scotland rejoining the EU if the baggage of independence was taken out of the equation. By the same token, Pink News wanted people to answer a question about self-ID without any consideration of the issues of a legal process and of legal rights. The trouble is that this produced a result that is almost meaningless – because the proposed reform of the GRA is all about a legal process and legal rights.
“Why the GRA? Aren’t there a whole range of other important subjects to poll about, such as climate change and Covid recovery?”
As there have been polls about pretty much every subject under the sun, including climate change and Covid recovery, the question really ought to be “why not the GRA?” There’s no reason why this should be the only subject that no-one ever feels able to ask about in a poll. As it happens, though, in spite of the fact that this was always intended to be primarily a poll about the GRA, I added on questions about a number of other important subjects such as the devolution of broadcasting, Royal interference in the independence debate, and recent shortages of goods and petrol. I have also asked about many other subjects, including Covid, in previous polls.
“But what has this got to do with independence?”
Nothing, directly. So what’s your point? Are you saying you’ll forego dinner tonight because it doesn’t have anything to do with independence? The SNP government themselves don’t seem to be deterred by the fact that GRA reform will not help achieve independence. And in a way that’s the whole point – I’m heartbroken by the way the SNP leadership’s obsession with this issue has needlessly opened up a rift in the independence movement, and I would like to see a resolution. A clear-sighted view of where public opinion stands, such as this poll provides, might be a small step towards a resolution.
“Urgh! This is so transphobic! Urgh!”
Er, what’s transphobic? What is “this”? If you mean the results of the poll, you’d have to take that up with the representative sample of 1001 Scottish voters who were interviewed and who gave their honest views. If you mean the fact that a poll was conducted on this subject at all, you’d have to take it up with the many different clients that have commissioned GRA-related polls over the last two or three years – including, as noted above, pro-self-ID campaigners such as Pink News.
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SCOT GOES POP POLLING FUNDRAISER: If you’re finding this poll interesting or useful, you can help me commission further polling in the future by donating at the fundraiser page HERE. (Or alternative donation methods can be found HERE.)
