Three in five Brits comfortable with LGB monarch, poll finds
Painting of Queen Anne in the 18th century next to Olivia Colman as Queen Anne in The Favourite. (Twentieth Century Fox)
A Sky Data poll on attitudes towards the LGBT+ community found that 63 percent of Brits would be comfortable with a LGB monarch.
The poll’s results, released on Sunday (February 24), indicated a wide acceptance of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in society—but also high levels of confusion with regards to pansexuality, asexuality and non-binary.
The poll surveyed 1,119 Sky customers representative of the general British population in November, asking a series of questions related to the LGBT+ community.
More people comfortable with LGB prime minister than LGB monarch
A majority of respondents indicated they would be “very of fairly” comfortable with a LGB monarch (63 percent), a LGB prime minister (68 percent) a LGB boss (77 percent), or a LGB child (60 percent).
Stereotypes against the LGB community were opposed by a majority of respondents. Only 12 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: “People who are bisexual are on their way to coming out as gay.”
About two thirds of respondents (64 percent) deemed the statement “LGBT+ rights threaten heterosexual rights” as not true.
An even higher percentage (76 percent) dismissed the statement “Homosexual relationships are less serious than heterosexual relationships.”
Poll highlights confused Understanding of non-binary people
When it came to the understanding of gender identities, opinions were more split.
Half of the respondents disagreed with the statement “there are more than two genders”—despite several cultures acknowledging non-binary genders and data estimating that more than 1 percent of the population is born with intersex characteristics.
Non-binary model Rain Dove thinks labels shouldn’t be a requirement. (PinkNews)
When asked whether they’d be confident in defining “non-binary sexuality,” 63 percent of people admitted they would not quite be able to, despite the term meaning more or less what it states literally.
In the words of non-binary model and activist Rain Dove: “You don’t have to say: ‘I’m non-binary,’ you just simply say: ‘I am I and I don’t identify as male or female. I don’t identify as anything except for myself.”
Pansexuality confused respondents even more, with 71 percent of those polled expressing little or no confidence in their ability to offer a definition for the term—which denotes the attraction to people regardless of their gender, as drag queen Courtney Act helpfully explained.
More than 70 percent of people claimed to be comfortable in defining bisexuality—but often the term is associated with the misconception that bisexuality involves attraction to “two” genders, whereas bisexuality is simply defined as being attracted to “more than one gender.”
