[Séminaire général du CEE] Who Supports the ‘Gender Critical’ Movement in Britain?

There is a growing literature on the ‘gender critical’ or ‘anti transgender’ movement, which generally portrays it as right-wing and anti-feminist. This paper provides the first empirical investigation of movement participants in Britain, using petitions and surveys. Eight transgender-related petitions signed by over 100,000 people provide the distribution of signatories across 632 parliamentary constituencies. An original survey of 1,600 supporters of the organization Sex Matters is compared to surveys of the population. Both sources of data show that the gender-critical movement differs significantly from an anti-LGBT campaign and even from the segment of the public who oppose transgender claims. Surprisingly, perhaps, in their attitudes to women’s rights and sexuality, Sex Matters supporters more closely resemble the public who support transgender claims. These findings suggest that the gender-critical movement in Britain arose from a schism within the family of progressive movements.

Speaker

Michael Biggs is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College. His research on social movements and collective protest appears in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, British Journal of Sociology, European Sociological Review, Politics and Society, and Mobilization. A recent interest is the transgender movement and its consequences. His critique of the 2021 Census of England and Wales forced the Office for National Statistics to retract its figures on the trans population.

Discussant 

Arno Lizet, Sciences Po, CEE