Yesterday I posted about a YouGov poll commissioned by Liberal Voice for Women. At the time I hadn’t had a chance to see the full dataset, and from comments by LVfW members in other threads I’d got the impression it hadn’t been published. It apparently had. Here’s my assessment now I’ve seen it in full.

The claims being made about this poll include that it shows “the majority of the party agree with us on single-sex spaces” and that “most actual party members are sex realists.” Neither holds up.

On single-sex spaces: every result LVfW are citing comes from questions specifically about trans women who have not had gender reassignment surgery. They present these as findings about trans women in general. They are not. For trans women who have had surgery the results are substantially different: hospital wards splits 43% allowed versus 37% not, toilets 51% allowed versus 32% not, changing rooms essentially even at 40/41. The only result showing a clear majority is the no-surgery changing rooms scenario at 53%. For no-surgery toilets it is 46%, not a majority. For no-surgery refuges it is 49%, also not a majority.

On sex realism: the poll asks whether people who believe biological sex cannot be changed are “bigoted.” 44% say they are not. LVfW infer from that result that 44% of respondents are themselves sex realists. The question does not ask whether respondents hold that belief. It asks whether holding it makes you bigoted. Those are completely different things. And 44% is not most.

The intimate care question asks whether a trans woman should provide care without the patient’s specific consent. 79% say no. That is a result about consent process, not categorical exclusion.

There are also real questions about the sample itself. This is not a poll of Lib Dem members. It is a poll of people who self-identify as current or past members within YouGov’s opt-in panel. Nearly half the sample is over 65, which is not representative of the active membership. Those are not minor caveats when the claim is that most party members believe X.
And here is what does not appear anywhere in LVfW’s materials: 84% of respondents think conversion therapy away from a person’s birth sex should not be allowed. When asked what should happen if women’s and trans people’s rights conflict, 59% say find a compromise, 12% say they don’t conflict at all, and only 22% say women’s rights should take priority.

It is also worth asking what is driving shifts in public opinion on this issue more broadly, because those shifts are real. A major Amnesty International report found that just five UK newspapers published almost 17,000 articles about trans issues over five years, an average of nine stories every single day, for a community that represents around 0.5% of the population. That coverage persistently associated trans people with controversy and harm, and rarely included trans voices. Meanwhile the UK branch of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the US Christian right organisation best known for helping overturn Roe v Wade, increased its UK spending by 258% between 2019 and 2024, spending over £1 million in the UK in 2024 alone.

Attitudes do not shift in a vacuum. The poll is legitimate, but methodologically flawed, research. The conclusions being drawn from it go well beyond what it actually shows.

This post was originally published on a Facebook group and is reproduced here with Tanya’s permission

* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.