The Transgender Gender Gap

And an intriguing puzzle around gender and authoritarianism

I am a dung beetle.

In any contentious issue there is a whole tiered ecology of participants in the discourse. At the top tier there are the people who are directly effected and/or work in the areas effected. Then there are people not directly effected/working in the area but passionate about the issue. Then there are people not passionate about the issue, but passionate about the political divide that cuts across it. Then there are the people who have a column that needs filling. Then - right at the bottom of the twitter-conflict food chain - are the people for whom the conflict is fascinating by virtue of the squishy lumps of data that descend from above. The dung beetles[1].

With that in mind, this bloglet is going to focus on some interesting gender gaps in public attitudes to transgender rights. This is potentially contentious - beyond the background levels of contention that come with the area - because the debate is often(!) framed generally as Women's Rights vs Transgender Rights and specifically as Listening To Women vs Not Listening To Women. That is not particularly unusual - you can look at it variously as a triumph of social liberalism / the socially liberal skew of places like twitter where these discussions often occur that debates are as likely to be framed as Rights vs Rights/Minority vs (pseudo)Minority[2] as Rights vs Natural Law.

The problem with this is that the reality of public attitudes is the other way around - men are consistently and significantly more opposed to transgender rights than women (10-20pts), however the question is framed, even when it's explicitly cued as a trade-off between Transgender Rights and Women's Rights or in terms of managing risks that would specifically fall on women.[4]

Is this pattern an artefact of this one question? No.

Does this auto-invalidate the 'Trans-Skeptical' or 'Gender Critical' positions[5]? Also no.

Not just because plenty of people *don't* frame their stance in terms of the attitudes or concerns of women. But also because it's possible to feel that people are simply wrong about their interests. That is more or less where I am with nuclear power - I've got two degrees in physics, one specifically on nuclear reactors - and an *alright* grasp of the political economy involved. Public attitudes on civil nuclear power basically echo attitudes on military nuclear weapons - support for civil nuclear power tracks with support for the political Right and male (presumed) risk-tolerance. Which, in my opinion, is the exact reverse of what it should be (civil nuclear power is the acme of state planning and risk aversion).

But it’s also not something to just lightly dismiss. To say that the public is *just wrong* about how their interests mean they should align on an issue[6] is a substantial claim meriting substantial evidence - one that probably ought to be revisited regularly just to be sure.

In practice, the easier option (as some already do) for people on that side of the debate - beyond ignoring people quoting polling! - is just to resist the rhetorical gravity of Speaking For Women/Listen To Women.

So - a whole lot of words to resolve quite literally nothing? Yes, but it does leave us looking at an intriguing gender gap (red) - alongside the party/euref politics and age breakdown (blue). And there’s good reason to be confident that this isn’t some anomalous result because we see the exact same pattern with questions about all minority (and some pseudo-minority) rights.

The pattern is more or less identical across all minorities/pseudo-minorities (note that “Christians” seem to be perceived as a ‘pseudo-majority’ while “Working Class” aren’t perceived as a majority or minority)[7]

In fact, knowing nothing about the subject at all other than that it involved minorities, you could have guessed party/euref political and age pattern simply because they're all driven by one variable - authoritarianism[8].

What's interesting - really, enduringly fascinating - is that by the standard measure of authoritarianism[9], men and women are more or less identically distributed. And the answers to these questions are clearly principally driven by an individual’s authoritarianism. But - on a whole bunch of similar issues - women answer like significantly less authoritarian men/men answer like significantly more authoritarian women.

Will try to see if I can discover an answer to why by looking at which variables this is true/not true for and/or beg experts to show me what I couldn't find in the literature and put the results in a future bloglet.

[1] ‘Vulture’ feels a little too grandiose

[2] Women are obviously not a numerical minority but in living memory they were a de facto political minority through franchise restriction - I’m not asserting or defending the logic here!

[3] There's also the natural rhetorical gravity pulling people to frame their own position in terms of the most sympathetic group they can think of ("Won't someone think of the children?")

[4] Inspired by Shreya Nanda’s tweet and Yougov’s 2022 polling and article and full poll tables

[5] I'm endeavouring to use the very blandest of language possible within the constraints of semi-brevity and I’ve thrown in/made-up “Trans-skeptical” for people who want to distinguish between a neutral/trans-friendly “Gender Critical” position and an actively skeptical position

[6] Before someone says "But it's only a 10-20% gap". Yes - on any one question. But different questions have different midpoints - over the whole set of questions a strict majority of women are more supportive of transgender rights than men.

[7] I’ve dropped Social Grade and Region because the effects are small and you’re not seeing much beyond education and age effects

[8] I’m using the British Election Study Internet Panel Wave 23 data here. And here’s the full question text:

[9] Authoritarianism is a technical term referring to a specific measure (add up the answers to al1-5, divide by 20) in political science that lines up with one of the two major axes of attitudinal variation. Feelings you might have about the non-technical term may or may not line up with this!