SCOT GOES POP / PANELBASE POLL: Substantial majority of Scottish public think gender critical views should be “respected as a legitimate part of democratic debate”

As previous questions in the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll have established, there’s a difference of view between the Scottish Government and the majority of the public on the proposed introduction of legally-recognised gender self-identification.  The vast bulk of voters oppose self-ID, and also feel that if self-ID does reach the statute book, individuals who change their legal gender from male to female under the new rules should not be able to access female-only spaces on exactly the same basis as all other women.  It’s not that strange in a parliamentary democracy for the government to push through a reform that the public opposes, but what makes this debate highly unusual is that the government not only wishes to face down majority public opinion, it also wishes to pathologise majority public opinion as a form of bigotry, and thus silence it completely.  Some of the responses that the majority of voters have given in this poll would clearly fall foul of the SNP’s working definition of “transphobia” as developed by the controversial Equalities Convener Fiona Robertson.

So the next question in the poll is about the legitimacy of holding views that are at odds with the government’s worldview on the gender debate.  It’s not about whether such views are right or wrong – it’s just about whether it’s acceptable to hold them and express them, or whether they fall outside the boundaries of what must be tolerated within democratic debate.  Essentially this question covers the same issues that were weighed up in the Maya Forstater legal case.

Another unambiguous outcome.  The disconnect between the government and the public therefore goes beyond the principle of self-ID itself. Most voters think that the normal rules of democratic debate must apply to this topic, while the SNP leadership and the Greens (most especially the Greens) insist there can be “no debate”.  That begins to look like an unbridgeable ideological gulf.  Is it really possible to police language and thought without popular consent?  We may be about to find out.

The data tables show a familiar pattern to previous questions.  Women are slightly less likely than men to feel that opposing the government-approved view is democratically legitimate, but they still break by a decisive 50% to 20% margin against the idea that gender critical views should not be tolerated.  There’s a reasonably pronounced generation gap, with 30% of under-35s feeling that gender critical views are unacceptable, compared to only 16% of 35-54 year-olds, and 16% of over-55s.  

Bigger minorities of SNP and Labour voters are intolerant of gender critical views than is the case among Tory and Lib Dem voters – but intolerance is very much a minority pursuit across all parties.  For example, 50% of SNP voters chose the “these beliefs should be respected” option, and only 24% plumped for the “these beliefs should not be tolerated” option.

Of course the comparison that the minority of people who want to shut down debate would make is with gay rights in past decades – they would point out that homophobia was never acceptable, even when the majority of people held such repugnant views, as they undoubtedly did until at least the 1960s and 1970s (and possibly a lot, lot later).  But there are two things to say about that.  First of all, it’s by no means clear that the comparison is a valid one – gender self-ID, at least in some circumstances, appears to interfere with the rights of others (most obviously women as a sex-based class) in a way that equal rights for gay people never did and never will.  But even if we assume for the sake of argument that the comparison is reasonable, it was nevertheless the case that intolerance of homophobia didn’t exist as a concrete reality until there was a degree of ‘critical mass’ in public opinion as voters gradually became more enlightened.  The pro-self-ID activists seem to think it should be possible to rush their fences and get an enforceable doctrine without that critical mass even existing – in other words without anyone bothering with the hard work of persuading the public to change its thinking.  It’s as if they believe they can just clap their hands and expect the world to instantly reflect back at them in their own image.  It would be great – and sometimes fairer – if life really were that simple, but it isn’t.

And because of that bracing reality, it has to be very doubtful that what appears to be a coordinated campaign to get Joanna Cherry out of the SNP parliamentary party can or will succeed.  We’ve seen tweets from Emma Roddick, Mhairi Black, Fiona Robertson, Kirsty Blackman and even – disappointingly – Julie Hepburn, all clearly attempting to prepare the ground by establishing a coded ‘discourse of expulsion’.  It’s almost like the “stab in the back” myth of the interwar years in Germany – a false history is being seeded that promises of disciplinary action were made and broken, that the righteous folk have been patient beyond all reasonable endurance, and that the only reason a few bad apples hold gender critical views is because of dark interventions by the far right.  Apart from all of that being patently untrue, it isn’t going to resonate with people in the real world because the concepts are all totally alien to most of the public.  The well-known (albeit very young) SNP activist Lloyd Melville clearly felt the ideological ground had by now been well enough prepared that he could afford to dispense with the coded language of others and openly call for Ms Cherry’s expulsion from the SNP parliamentary group – and in my view he’s likely to discover that he’s extremely badly mistaken about that.

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