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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32151 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I remember reading something, and I don't remember whether it was here or elsewhere, about TRA groups saying their best strategy was to approach MPs or other people with power quietly, and try and keep what they were asking for out of the media and away from the spotlight. The public must not be told. They must not find out. Because the public will oppose them. But if they can convince these key people, they can bypass the public and force their will on them anyway.

It was Joyce's book.

And yes, it was exactly as you framed it.

This stealthy approach has been central to transactivism for quite some time. In a speech in 2013, Masen Davis, then the executive director of the American Transgender Law Center, told supporters that ‘we have largely achieved our successes by flying under the radar . . . We do a lot really quietly.

We have made some of our biggest gains that nobody has noticed. We are very quiet and thoughtful about what we do, because we want to make sure we have the win more than we want to have the publicity.’

The result is predictable. Even as one country after another introduces gender self-ID, very few voters know this is happening, let alone support it.

In 2018 research by Populus, an independent pollster, crowdfunded by British feminists, found that only fifteen percent of British adults agreed that legal sex change should be possible without a doctor’s sign-off. A majority classified a ‘person who was born male and has male genitalia but who identifies as a woman’ as a man, and only tiny minorities said that such people should be allowed into women’s sports or changing rooms, or be incarcerated in a women’s prison if they committed a crime.

Two years later, YouGov found that half of British voters thought people should be ‘able to self-identify as a different gender to the one they were born in’. But two-thirds said legal sex change should only be possible with a doctor’s sign-off, with just fifteen percent saying no sign-off should be needed. In other words, there is widespread support for people describing themselves as they wish, but not much for granting such self-descriptions legal status. The same poll also asked whether transwomen should be allowed in women’s sports and changing rooms, sometimes with a reminder that transwomen may have had no genital surgery, and sometimes without. The share saying yes was twenty percentage points lower with the reminder than without – again demonstrating widespread confusion about what being trans means, and that support for trans people does not imply support for self-declaration overriding reality.

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