Mick Hartley

Interesting:

Britain has become more liberal towards sexual relationships, non-traditional families and abortion but less tolerant of transgender issues, according to a report.

Data published by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), which has tracked public opinion in the UK for decades, shows that views on cultural and moral issues have undergone “profound” change and rendered the country unrecognisable from a generation ago.

In the 40th annual British Social Attitudes (BSA) report, a survey of social and political sentiment, the centre found that the population is now “markedly more liberal”.

In 1989, 70 per cent of respondents said that people who wanted children should get married. Only 24 per cent express that view today, and the researchers said that most of the change had happened in the last ten years.

There has been a smaller, but still significant, shift in perceptions of family structures. Half of those surveyed said that one parent could bring up a child as well as two parents could, compared with 35 per cent who agreed in 1994….

Positions on gender roles have also changed significantly. Only 9 per cent of people now agree that “a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the family”, compared with nearly half of respondents in 1987.

Asked in 1984 who in a mixed-sex couple should do the washing and ironing, three quarters of respondents said mainly the woman. Only 22 per cent thought the task should be shared equally. Now 76 per cent say the task should be shared, against 16 per cent who still believe it is the woman’s job.

Researchers recorded shifts around same-sex relationships as well. In 1983, 50 per cent of respondents agreed that sex between adults of the same gender was “always wrong”, compared wiuth 9 per cent today. In 1983, 42 per cent said that pre-marital sex was “not wrong at all” — 78 per cent now take that view.

Attitudes towards abortion have also become more progressive. Seventy-six per cent of respondents now believe the law show allow abortion if a woman decides on her own that she does not want to continue the pregnancy. Only 37 per cent held this view in 1983.

The proportion of people holding liberal positions towards transgender issues has decreased, however. Only 30 per cent of those surveyed said that a trans person should be permitted to change the sex on their birth certificate if they wanted to, a fall from 53 per cent in 2019.

Well, there's liberal and there's liberal. The idea that people should be allowed to lie about their sex – or their race, or their height, or their talents – could be described as the more liberal position, but that doesn't mean that it's something positive, to be celebrated.

Liberal is here largely taken as good, progressive, something to be proud of, but there's such a thing as being so liberal your brains fall out. Personally I find all the developments here as positive: attitudes to gender roles, same sex relationships, abortion, and, yes, transgender issues.

Allowing people to change their sex at will, as more and more people are realising, is not a "be nice" gesture to people with gender dysphoria, but a lie that has dangerous consequences – especially for women and for troubled teens.