Rooky error
Good old trans epistemology.
The fact that trans people think that does not make it true. I know that’s a frightfully sophisticated thought – that people can think something that’s not true – but nevertheless it’s a fact, and it’s a useful thing to keep in mind. Opinion does not invariably line up exactly with the truth.
The YouGov poll, commissioned by the Good Law Project and based on a representative sample of 457 trans adults, shows that 70% of trans people find BBC News coverage hostile.
Ah the Good Law Project. Well there you go then. The GLP is funded by people who see everyone and everything as hostile to trans people, so surveying them about it is going to turn up very predictable results.
Oh, so there are less than a thousand trans people in the UK? Because otherwise, it’s clearly not possible for 70% of 457 trans people to constitute “the majority of trans people.” And one cannot reasonably extrapolate from this figure, because the sample is not representative. (Or rather, there is no reason whatsoever to believe it is representative, and there are lots of reasons to believe it is heavily biased.)
This is peak hypocrisy. In Ophelia’s recent post, https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2025/biter-bit/ , about Jolyon’s whinging that the BBC was anti-trans, the whiny whiner was quoted as saying
The ‘inaccuracy’ was that the poll of lesbians used to determine the claim that many had felt pressured to have sex with trans ‘women’ was ‘self-reporting’; i.e. only lesbians were asked to respond to the poll.
How is that in any way different from this self-reporting, trans-only poll?
When this came out and there was this nonsense backlash, I realized that the blowback was from people who learned their skepticism from social media. How often have you been asked to produce a “Peer reviewed study” to back a claim, when it’s not appropriate to the argument? And further they will demand a sufficient sample size of randomly selected participants in a controlled environment. But they are not actually trained in how research works, there isn’t this shortcut that you can use by listening to “Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” or reading a book by Carl Sagan. If you don’t understand the difference between a survey and a study, you need to go back to square one.
It’s one thing to know the language of science, quite another to know how it works. And skeptics need to know the limits of their own knowledge in order to understand phenomena before they lecture other people on what is nonsense and what is likely true.
The lesbians were the ones who either were or were not being subjected to pressure. Who else besides lesbians would be expected to know whether any lesbians were being pressured by TIMs into having corrective rape sex? And it’s not like there weren’t plenty of male “lesbians” accusing the real lesbians — the women kind — of being transphobic, hateful bigots for excluding the men from their “dating pool.”. The guys were announcing their intent all over the place.