1 in 67 English/Welsh Muslims are transgender

@Ofcourseshecan Very well articulated.

I can see that would be v.handy.

Whenever I read about companies aiming to up their employee diversity statistics I always think - ‘at this rate the lesbians are going to have to do three full-time jobs apiece!’

Does your gender identity match your birth sex?

I am a woman and would never deny it. But I haven’t got a ‘gender identity’ any more than I have a spirit guide or a totem animal. I don’t share those particular belief systems. I don’t identify as a woman, I just am one.

So it’s impossible to answer that question honestly without giving incorrect information. As pointed out by feminists and other rational people, and ignored by the Stonewalled bureaucrats.

I agree it's a very difficult question to try to ask and quite arguable that they shouldn't have tried. One of the reasons for asking was to ensure that the sex question could remain firmly about biological sex without pressure to change it to (self chosen) genders or fear that people would answer incorrectly as a protest against being able to have their perceived gender recorded. Though the numbers are so small I really don't think they need have worried.

I repeat though that it is so useful to have some reasonable data on the numbers who are trans (by using the numbers who wrote in "trans man" or "trans woman" as answers, rather than the overstated 0.5% who initially answered no). I'm dealing with one group at work who set a "representative target" of 16% to be LGBT+ based on some really dodgy figures from I don't know where (possibly Stonewall). I'm in the process of getting this target figure revised to 3-4%, which is the actual proportion of people who are LGBT according to the census. This is a big improvement and saves them trying to proactively find more LGBT+ people to address this "under-representation". So I think the data does really help to push back against cries of under representation when necessary.

🤣😩

This stuff is so bloody depressing.

Or is the football team that you support the same as the football team you supported as a child?

Is the musical instrument that you play the same as the musical instrument that you'd like people to think you play?

I think the fact it’s so woolly, so poorly defined, so lacking in consensus (especially from within the movement’s activists), so lacking in widespread social meaning, so inherently political and ideological means that it was not an appropriate thing for the census to be asking about in the first place.

Just because an ideology or an identity matters a great deal to a small number of people in niche areas, or is currently fashionable among young people, doesn’t make it reasonable for inclusion in a national census. You may as well start asking people what football team they support (which may structure their lives in all sorts of ways) or what musical instruments, if any, they play, or whether they identify as whatever categories and tribes of youth culture currently dominate how young people see themselves in the world.

Any of them might be reasonable research topics. But the census should be asking about the big stuff about which there’s broad societal understanding and which significantly affects national planning and policy (like age distributions or sex distributions or disability). How people feel or how they’d like to be perceived isn’t really suitable for this kind of exercise.

The amazing thing is how effectively special interest groups persuaded the government that gender identity should be treated like the standard big demographic categories. Not even just asking about what’s in the equalities act (gender reassignment) but how people want to understand themselves with gender identity ideology.

What a diabolical waste of money. The census is an important data source for civic planning.
Turns out it's got a big pile of shit data in it.

I agree with that assessment.

This is a scandalous waste of public money, will result in misdirected public money and underserved communities including trans people. Trying to inflate numbers of people who identify as transgender by obfuscating language is shameful and is literally taking services away from those who need them both. Absolute bastards. This should be the subject of an urgent enquiry by a commons select committee of MPs with the topic investigating whether the ONS data isreliable and whether it needs to stop trying to be an advocacy organisation and be just a mirror to society. The government must commit to funding additional user testing in ALL future UK population wide communications to ensure that genuinely vulnerable and minoritised groups can access them clearly. We predicted all of this on FWR and it’s absolutely exasperating.

That is not good enough though. If the question is too woolly to mean anything then it should not be asked.

“Gender Identity” should have gone under beliefs with a subquestion asking about how you identify yourself.

This makes me worry for young Muslims experiencing emergent same sex attraction who are often negotiating quite a complex emotional push-pull between what is taught via faith & family and what is taught via school & secular society.

The last thing they need is Stonewall, Mermaids et al shoving their nosy, self interested beaks in the middle of it!

I can’t imagine the hoo-ha that went on in Birmingham over No Outsiders ‘Queering the Classroom’ will have had a positive impact on the Muslim kids from that school who do grow up to be gay, was probably really frightening witnessing the protests.

To be fair in the ONS I think the whole definition of what "trans" actually is is so woolly and ill-definable that no questions they could have asked would have made sense to everyone. They were trying to ask whether people were or weren't something that some other people don't have a linguistic or psychological concept of, as beautifully illustrated by the Google translate efforts. I defy anyone to write a question that counts how many trans people there are which works in other languages!

I’ll just copy a bit from the link I posted above:

We have a responsibility to make our surveys easy to understand and use. We do the hard work to make our surveys simple, which removes that burden from our staff and respondents.
We prioritise the respondent experience because we know that without doing so, we risk us not achieving our goals. We develop surveys that meet the needs of respondents and data users by investing time and resources into the early research, design, and testing phases of a project. We monitor respondent burden and use the insights to inform decision making.
We develop surveys that do not rely upon staff intervention and lengthy help and guidance to get the data we need. Instead, they are clear and highly usable on their own, without the need for much additional support or advice. Through good design we empower our respondents to take part in our surveys and provide us the data we need. We only add additional help where research shows that further support is needed.

Yeah, right.

This is a scary, but plausible, possibility. We've already seen how eager TRSOH are to misuse other (boringly marginalised in old-fashioned ways) people to polish their rainbow-glittering haloes.

The ONS has some Survey Research and Development principles now (published 30/03/23)

https://analysisfunction.civilservice.gov.uk/policy-store/office-for-national-statistics-ons-survey-strategy-research-and-development-principles-ssrdp/#it-s-our-responsibility-to-make-things-simpler

It fits the agenda for the “majority” of Trans people to be POC and poor people. Then, when people point out this is a movement of middle and upper class white people they can scream “actually, Muslim and black people are most likely to be Trans so you’re racist!” And “trans justice means racial justice and trans need to be centred in campaigns for Muslims.” And piggy back onto real campaigns for marginalized people like inserting trans literature into literacy and ESL programs. They will love and use this data and pretend they don’t know it’s a mistake.

It was a free text question with people writing in their own answer. So the figures for "trans men" are just those who ticked the box and then wrote in "trans man". I don't think people who didn't understand the question or dispute the existence of gender identity would have done that.

This is so frustrating. Sensitivity and specificity are basic concepts in statistics. A question/ test is useless at a population survey level if the number of false positives (people who accidentally marked themselves as transgender) is comparable to or higher than the true positives (people who correctly identified themselves as transgender).

Given that activists make a lot of noise about how small the trans population is, you would think someone could have anticipated this issue and found a different wording!

Not testing the question for false positives is such an idiotic fail.

@Fireyflies it makes a difference whether the trans sub-categories include checkboxes for trans woman and trans man. Or if it was free text entry.

People who’ve misunderstood may also wrongly select trans man or trans woman because the only bit they understand is man or woman.

There’s also the fact that people often want to complete things. So they’ll try to answer further questions if it’s an option. Even if they don’t understand.

Sorry that first post from me at 15.03 should have read "0.5% of people said no"

Thanks for that link Fireyflies; that's useful.

This government publication sets it out pretty well and, as discussed, focussed just on those who named their gender identity or said they were trans men or trans women https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/2021-census-what-do-we-know-about-the-lgbt-population/

The fact that they've chosen to focus on this way suggests to me that they're aware there's a problem with the first question, though they should in my view have been more explicit about this rather than waiting for other people to spot it and point it out (With the resultant confusion as sone people don't read the detail and start asking "is there really a hidden trans Muslim population we never knew about?!!)

https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/censustransformationprogramme/questiondevelopment/sexandgenderidentityquestiondevelopmentforcensus2021#research-that-led-to-the-recommended-census-2021-question-designs

The questions were "developed and evaluated via community testing at LGBT History Month events"

FFS did they not think that they needed to test a little wider??

Surely it's not OK that such an expensive data gathering exercise ends up as such a useless shambles?

The census is - despite all this - a completely invaluable data source. I use it a lot in my work and despite all its shortcomings it's a hell of a lot better than most other sources especially for trans numbers for which the only other sources are much worse.

It's worth being careful with the data that's used though - The first census question asked whether people's gender identity was the same as their sex. 0.5% of people said yes. It's this figure that the article linked in the OP is rightly pointing out is dodgy. But we do have more than that - Those 0.5% of people were then asked to state their gender identity - 0.1% of people said "trans man" and 0.1% said "trans women" with 0.2% not answering. (Two thirds of the remaining 0.1% said non-binary and a third wrote in another answer). I don't think that people who didn't understand the question or didn't agree with the premise would have written in "trans women" or "trans man" would they? So these estimates of 0.1% each seem pretty good to me - and when government have reported the trans data from the census it's these figures they've focused on. So the total of 0.2% of over 16s saying they are trans is I think the figure that should be used if population estimates are needed (eg if you want to see if trans people are over represented among prisoners or mental health patients, etc) The 0.5% figure should be ignored.