No, Professor Robertson, young people do not support gender self-ID. They oppose it.

So the exciting news is that we've had another visitation from Professor John Robertson in the comments section.  I was trying to work out what the recurring theme of his comments is, and it suddenly struck me that a lot of his strictures have got a distinctly macho-man feel to them.  "Man up", "grow a pair", "surely you've had harder knocks than that, son".  It's reminiscent of a craggy-faced PE teacher in the 1950s going purple with rage because one of his eight-year-old pupils has a feminine side, spends "too much time with girls", and refuses to take up boxing.

Which is gloriously ironic, of course, because Professor Robertson is in fact the fairy godfather of the snowflake brigade who demand to be "kept safe" from opinions that offend them.  He doubtless earnestly believed that the unlawful cancellation of Joanna Cherry's appearance at the Edinburgh Festival was a "safety at work" issue, ie. the staff would have been so upset by hearing her gender critical views that they would have suffered the equivalent of a serious industrial injury.

Apparently oblivious to the contradiction, about five seconds after telling me last night to be more robust and manly he reverted to telling me to shut up about my beastly opinions because some vulnerable soul might hear them.

"Wow! You really think that? You've gone positively Zionist there son.

However, I must be clear, it was never my intention to sabotage your funding and I don't think I suggested that people should not fund you. I stand ready to be corrected and if I did, I apologise and withdraw the statement.

I am genuinely disappointed in the way Alba has developed and as researcher and teacher with 40 years experience in schools, colleges and universities, I know that the gender reforms are supported by the young who have grown up with trans individuals and by professionals who understand the risks. That SGP and WOS have campaigned against these reforms makes me justifiably very angry."

So that's basically the "not up for debate" entitlement complex in a nutshell. "It makes me very very VERY cross that you haven't abandoned your opinion after I and other unspecified authority figures informed you that you were wrong.  What do you think this is - some kind of liberal democracy?"  

If Robertson spent just a bit less time wallowing in his "justified anger", he might be able to, y'know, actually argue his own case calmly and rationally, but I suspect he's forgotten how to do that by now.  Not much call for debating skills when you've got "safe spaces" to hide in.

I must say that when Robertson describes Scot Goes Pop, it sounds like a blog I don't even recognise.  In reality I've spent a miniscule fraction of the time discussing the trans issue that Wings has, and I've also gone out of my way at times to express my bewilderment at the sheer number of consecutive trans-related posts that Wings has managed to publish.  Stuart Campbell is, if I may say so, almost as obsessed with the bloody topic as Robertson himself.

Is it even true that I've "campaigned" against the introduction of gender self-ID?  I expressed my own view that it was a terrible piece of legislation that would cause immense harm to people's lives, although unlike Stuart Campbell I also made clear that it would be outrageous for the UK Government to veto the law.  Other than that, the only act I took was to commission an opinion poll on the subject, which sought to use neutral, clear and balanced questions to find out what people really thought.  Most of the polls prior to that had been of dubious value due to their use of either leading questions or ideologically-loaded language.  I suspect the poll is what Robertson is really getting at when he refers to my "campaigning" - to a "no debate" zealot, neutrality and balance will look like an all-out attack.

But it's precisely because I commissioned the poll that I know Robertson's assertion that young people support self-ID has no basis in fact.  I had to trawl through my email account to re-find the data tables, and while it's true that opposition to self-ID is significantly lower among young people than among older people, there's nevertheless a clear plurality against self-ID among the young.  Only 34% of 16-34 year olds think that anyone should be able to change their legal sex or gender by simply making a solemn declaration that they are living in their new gender.  A total of  47% of 16-34 year olds think either that no-one should be able to change their legal gender, or that the threshold should be higher than self-ID - either a medical diagnosis or surgery should be required.

Furthermore, by a narrow margin of 37% to 36%, young people say that those who have changed their legal gender from male to female should not be able to access female-only spaces on exactly the same basis as other women.  And by a whopping margin of 46% to 28%, young people think women's sport should be reserved for biological females and should exclude anyone born as a male.

(The above figures are all taken from a Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll conducted 20th-26th October 2021.)

It's a logical fallacy to suggest that because young people hold a particular view, they must be right and the older generations have a duty to fall in behind them.  If that was the case, only under-35s would have the vote.  But if Robertson really believes that's how it should work, the conclusion is inescapable: he must renounce his views immediately and become a TERF.  And we shall justifiably be very, VERY angry with him if he doesn't. 

Listen to the kids, John.  They've suffered enough.  *Listen* to them.