51% think children should be taught about gender identity

A majority of the public want children to be taught about gender identity in schools, a new poll has found. The poll, conducted by YouGov and commissioned by The Sun newspaper found that 51% of the public think gender identity should be taught in schools, compared to just 36% who thought it should not.

According to the poll, even 34% of Tory voters think children should be taught about gender identity.

The poll’s findings come despite overwhelmingly hostile coverage of trans people in the British media, and senior members of the Conservative Party seeking to stoke a culture war on trans rights. Among the most recent proposals from the government is that schools should be forced to out trans and non-binary students to their parents.

The YouGov study also found that the overwhelming majority of the country has progressive attitudes to elements of sex and relationships education. 92% think that children should be taught about pregnancy and 89% that they should be taught about safe sex.

You wouldn’t know all this from The Sun’s front page today, which promoted the poll. The Rupert Murdoch owned newspaper headlined the story “Brits say no to woke”.

The basis for this claim? According to The Sun, “Brits are opposed to explicit sex education in class, have strong views on what a woman is and are proud of our nation’s past.”

Digging into the numbers behind the YouGov poll, the claim about ‘explicit sex education’ appears to relate to the poll finding that 72% of the public don’t support schools teaching children about ‘sex positions’. The poll also found that 33% of people think transgender women are women, compared to 47% who do not. And while 45% of the public said they feel ‘proud’ about Britain’s past, 18% said they feel ’embarrassed’ (presumably the remainder answered, ‘don’t know’).

That’s the evidence on which The Sun‘s Harry Cole relies to claim that the public ‘reject Labour’s woke ideas’. There are three big problems with that claim.

Firstly, the rest of the poll suggests that the public actually has more socially liberal attitudes than The Sun would like. In addition to the attitudes on education discussed above, the YouGov poll also found that a majority (53%) of people think the UK should remain in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and a plurality (40%) think the UK should follow EHRC ruling’s on migration policies. On the issue of migration, the just 12% of the public think the government is handling small boat crossings well, despite it being one of Rishi Sunak’s so called ‘five priorities’.

Secondly, the positions that Cole suggests the public are rejecting aren’t being championed by the Labour Party. Labour aren’t proposing to teach children about ‘sex positions’ in school. Under Keir Starmer’s leadership, Labour has become less supportive of policy changes which would strengthen the rights of trans people and allow them to more easily live as a gender different to that which they were assigned at birth.

And finally, the headline voting intention figures suggest that 43% of people are planning on voting Labour at the next general election, compared to just 29% for the Tories.

Despite the Tories spin, it doesn’t looking ‘Brits say no to woke’ or ‘reject Labour’s woke ideas’ after all.

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward

Image credit: Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office – Creative Commons

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