Thread by @ExcelPope

There was a thread going on yesterday, asking who was blocked by Edward Lord, which meant I ended up looking at his profile (I'm not blocked, it turns out), and saw this…

One of the slides in a related tweet particularly caught my eye.

As a rule, if a survey result seems drastically at odds with your expectations it's a good idea to go back and look at the survey (in this case a You Gov one from 2015), so I did.

This question is the source of their claim, and with only 52% of 18-24yo respondents picking one extreme or the other, once you've removed Don't Knows and re-based, then the numbers seem to add up.

However, Stonewall's claim is that they "identify" as something other than hetero- or homo-sexual. Which is odd, as the previous question gave them an opportunity to identify themselves.

Those results suggest that only 7% of 18-24yo identify as something other than straight or gay.

Looking at how people describe their sexuality in unambiguous terms, rather than how they place it on an arbitrary 7-point scale shows where the difference comes in.

Five percent of the people who said they were "Completely homosexual" also said that their sexuality was "Best described" as heterosexual.

And more than a third of people who described themselves as point 5 on the scale, where 6 is "completely homosexual" had also described themselves as heterosexual.

The survey went on to ask about the likelihood of being attracted to, having sex with, and having a relationship with a member of the same sex (these questions were only asked to people who'd identified themselves as heterosexual).

We find that of the heterosexuals who claimed they were at point 6 (completely homosexual) NONE of them would even say it was definitely conceivable that they'd be attracted to a member of the same sex.

Neither would any of them who'd put themselves at point 5, and only half of those who put themselves at point 4.

The figures for whether they'd consider having a sexual experience with a member of the same sex tell a similar story, although there was much willingness to definitely have sex…except for those who are "completely homosexual", who were firmly against homosexual sex.

This is junk data. It's a 4 year old survey which doesn't seem to have been very well done. It doesn't say anything about those who identify "outside of the gender binary", because gender was a binary choice for participants.
It should be in the bin, not on a Powerpoint slide.

Final point on this: I could do all of the above because the slide cited its source. A lot of the other slides didn't, and didn't even include basic information, like base sizes. If the data you can check is rubbish it doesn't fill you with confidence in the data you can't.