Perhaps the most over-looked poll finding

Welcome to this week’s edition, taking a look at perhaps the most over-looked finding in opinion polling, even though it’s about a topic that generates an awful lot of commentary.

But first, the latest burst of childish petulance/visionary business leadership (delete as you wish) by Elon Musk is to start blocking links to email newsletters like this one from Twitter. Twitter has been an important route for this newsletter to reach new audiences and get a plausible route to financial sufficiency. So while Musk is playing games/being brilliant, it’d be great if you can help this newsletter find new readers by sharing it yourself. Thank you!

As ever, if you have any feedback or questions prompted by what follows, or spotted some other recent polling you’d like to see covered, just hit reply. I personally read every response.

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Women are more supportive of rights for trans women than men are

I am usually very bullish about the importance of using polls to understand other people’s opinions - both because polls are a good, pretty accurate way of doing so (and much better than alternatives, such as reading op-ed columns) and also because in a democracy what the public thinks is the fundamental verdict that matters. Just as with a jury in a court trial, you might think you are smarter, better informed, wiser, more humane and less outrageous than them. But in the end, it’s their verdict that matters.

Trans rights are a good example of the limitations to that outlook. There are plenty of good reasons to limit the importance given to public opinion when discussing them or making decisions about them.

Yet public opinion - or rather, an accurate account of public opinion - is also curiously missing from many such discussions.

It’s common for those opposed to or worried by trans rights to depict the issue as one of trans rights being imposed on women, taking away women’s rights.

There’s a lot that could be said about whether trans rights and women’s rights are at odds with each other, and whether supporting trans rights is really inimical to supporting women’s rights.

But as this is a newsletter about polling, I want to pick up a different angle: the claim that supporting trans rights is something imposed on women. That’s the tenor of Jenni Russell’s much discussed recent piece for The Times, headlined, “Starmer is taking 99.9% of women for fools”. Trans rights are presented as something supported by men, despite opposition from women.

Yet the polling tell us something very different. Let’s take the example of which toilets trans women should use.

More women support trans women using women’s toilets than oppose.

What’s more, support for trans women using women’s toilets is higher among women than men.

And to round it off, as the majority of people are women, what flows from the above is that the majority of supporters of trans women using women’s toilet are… women.

This applies on other aspects of trans rights too. For example, last year YouGov found women on balance supporting trans women using women’s toilets (45%-34%), using women’s changing rooms (40%-37%), and using women’s refuges (45%-30%). In each case, support among women was higher than among men by an average of thirteen points.

Opposition to trans women using women’s facilities is much more the viewpoint of men than it is of women.

Which makes claims that supporting trans rights is something men are imposing on women a really strange when of framing the debate, a way that’s hard to reconcile with the actual evidence of women’s views.

Saying that women should be listened to is good point to make. It’s an even better point to make if it’s then acted on with good evidence.

Marios Richards

wrote an interesting piece about the difference between the framing and evidence over trans rights back in February. It’s still well worth a read.

I have omitted trans men from the above as the debate about trans rights usually is shorthand for trans women and certainly most heated over women’s facilities and events. Hence, that’s where the gap between what people say the public thinks and what the polls show the public thinks therefore seems most relevant to discuss.

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National voting intention polls

Here’s the latest from each currently active pollster:

Every poll in that table has the Conservatives on less than Corbyn’s Labour got in 2019, Major’s Conservatives in 1997 or Hague’s Conservatives in 2001.

For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here.

Last week’s edition

Why Wikipedia has too many voting intention polls.

Know other people interested in political polling?

How Starmer is faring after three years, and other insights from this week’s polling…