instructed transgender people that they could answer the sex question in line with their self-identified gender, rather than the sex on their birth certificate. The proposals for the 2021 Census currently include this guidance, although it has yet to be finalised by the ONS. At a meeting last year with concerned data users, Iain Bell, the Deputy National Statistician, confirmed that this guidance was “added at the request of the LGBT community.”
It is important for both equalities monitoring and resource allocation that the census collects robust data on the transgender population, and campaigners are not objecting to the addition of a voluntary gender identity question on the forthcoming census. However, through a process of policy capture by specific interest groups, our census authorities have conflated the sex variable with gender identity, a situation which in 2018 produced the remarkable suggestion by National Records of Scotland that a "non-binary" option be added to the census within the sex variable. This is a clear example of allowing subjective gender identification to overwrite the recording of biological sex and, along with issues around the guidance, demonstrates that our census authorities have indeed abandoned the principle "of collecting data on biological sex".
This is a matter of considerable concern to data-users, academics who do statistical research, and women’s rights campaigners. In 2017, when the ONS briefly mooted making the sex question non-mandatory, Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at Oxford University, said that without robust sex data, “[w]e would be unable to calculate the most basic of social statistics.” Selina Todd, Professor of Modern History at Oxford, makes clear in the foreword to our report that sex data is vital to illuminating how “participation in key areas of economic and social life has differed according to sex.” Alice Sullivan, Professor of Sociology at UCL, has likewise argued that sex is “a powerful predictor of almost every dimension of social life,” including education, work, crime and physical and mental health. Lastly, sex is also a "protected characteristic" in the 2010 Equality Act, and monitoring data on sex is crucial for institutions to execute their public equalities duties….
Addressing the inequalities women face necessitates that we are able to record, describe and analyse how sex impacts women’s life chances. By prioritising the specific interests of LGBT lobbyists, and consistently refusing to heed the concerns of data users and women’s rights campaigners, our census authorities are now in danger of corrupting the data we need to tackle women’s disadvantages, all in the name of "equality".
Could those "specific interest groups" include Stonewall UK, by any chance?
We've already seen the effect of this slippage – with gender identity replacing biological sex – in the distortion of violent crime statistics. Last month the BBC reported an astonishing recent rise in female child sexual abuse, without noting that most UK police forces are now recording self-identified gender instead of sex for the abusers.
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