1 in 67 English/Welsh Muslims are transgender

The Scottish census, taken a year later asked:

• Sex male or female
• are you or have you been trans, with open box to describe

It will be interesting to compare with E&W when that is published.

ColdMeg this is such a good point thank you.

And the person doing the translating might be a primary school age child translating for non-English speaking parents.

Someone upthread said the question as asked was an example of "privileged fuckwittery" and I agree.

Pendant point - a Beth Din is a Jewish religious court, not Muslim. Think you got your terminology muddled ;)

I can't really remember (thanks menopause!) but in general where there's a write in box I'll answer the question to the best of my ability and then write in that I found it difficult to answer the question because I believe in the reality of two biological sexes in mammals. So I probably did that. Or simply that I don't believe in gender identity.

Also there will have been many honest people who answered 'no' because they don't have a gender identity and they don't think sex is assigned at birth.

But if that's your position, why choose to answer the question? This question was voluntary, so you could just leave it blank.

Not answering could mean 'I don't want to say' or 'I don't have a gender identity' or 'My birth wasn't registered' or 'I don't understand the question'. But at least it doesn't give inaccurate information.

The most surprising thing to me is how few people chose not to answer.

You'd hope but I've seen nothing so far. I hope More or Less do something on this.

Yes - multiple women on here have said that this sort of wording excludes and confuses non-English speaking or people with SEN. We warned about this.

Also there will have been many honest people who answered 'no' because they don't have a gender identity and they don't think sex is assigned at birth. How are you honestly supposed to answer that question if you don't believe in gender (or that it's basically just personality) and you believe sex is observed, not assigned?

I'm pretty sure I answered no. Assuming I'm transgender from answering that question 'no' is stupidity and dishonesty of the highest order.

Hopefully the press will pick this up and some awkward questions will be asked about political capture of the ONS leading to delusional discriminatory data.

This exactly.
Either it's important to get right or it's not. Incredibly badly worded questions that you are at a loss on how to answer if you don't have a gender identity or if you haven't got a clue what these terms mean so have to guess.

Yes. Bring it on, I say! That will really get the pants/knickers of those who consider themselves as “right-thinking liberals” in a twist.

Or, even more simply: “do you lie about your sex?”

Quite. Capturing the ONS, fondly imagining you can use the census to promote your stupid ideology, resulting in Muslims being more likely to be trans than anyone else.

Idiots.

The capture of the ONS by the trans lobby is a fucking embarrassment.

We've had a census every decade for the best part of 200 years and Stonewall have fucked it right up in five minutes.

People not steeped in trans ideology will have no idea what 'gender' or 'identify as' even refers to. Hell, even rabid transactivists are reduced to nonsensical gibberish if asked to explain. The entire ideology is incoherent.

A more accurate question would be 'do you like to tell everyone that you're the opposite sex?'

But that doesn't uphold the bullshit.

They'd rather fuck the entire thing up, waste all the money and time, and look like raging zealots just so they get to write 'woman' in the box on sex. On an anonymous census, not publicly accessible for 100 years..

There's not really commonly-used separate words for sex and gender in this way.

When I did my silly exercise running the question through google translate (and remembering this is google) that was the main outcome - replacing ‘sex’ with ‘gender’. Yet ‘gender’ is such a vague term.

Flev · Today 09:00
@SnailKite thats kind of my point. For someone completely outside of the entire gender identity debate, the census question basically asked "does this situation that you don't understand apply?". People don't understand so tick "no" - and hence are counted as trans.

It only came up because they wondered why I was concerned about my brother’s (step)child being transgender. Mum actually said’I never thought you’d be like your Aunty Sarah about it!’ (Aunty notoriously rejected and cut off my gay cousin, who was also fired for being gay, several decades ago.)

When I said it was the testosterone and mastectomy and health effects that bothered me, they were astonished and appalled. They had just thought (correctly, I’d say) that she needed to be accepted as lesbian.

Too late now.

I hope they do.

Good luck with it.

Remind me again, who is prattling on about 'manufactured culture war'?

The user testing may well have been done by ONS user researchers who have pretty superficial methodological understanding and mostly follow processes.

Except, that this illustrates that methodology really matters: how you collect data makes a big difference to the quality of the data and what you can do with it. Technical issues about question construction in surveys are important.

@RedToothBrush Yes, I can see all of this. My question was tongue in cheek. My friends from Muslim communities are aghast at the idea of men coming into women’s singles-sex spaces.

watch them try to bring Drag Queen Story Hour into schools with high Muslim populations now.

We know that trans activism is totally blind to economic, racial and cultural issues. It's hardly a surprise.

The whole black women are a subset of women too bullshit sums it up well. Or the lack of interest in recognising the need for single sex provision for Jews and Muslims. Never mind the outrageous fgm related abuse.

On the basis of the census data, why haven't Stonewall been shit hot about proactively engaging with the Muslim council about the size of the trans identifying Muslim community and how can they engage with them better because they are massively underrepresented at their very white pride events?

Shouldn't Stonewall have been asking whether they were institutionally racist / intolerance to Muslims or doing more research/ work to find out about cultural taboos?

The fact there doesn't appear to be any work in this area, nor any recorded intentions to progress work in this area is fascinating.

It seems to simply be easier to shout bigot a lot and try and cancel things rather than attempt to engage that the original grass roots Stonewall did.

This is where we can see the shift from liberalism to authoritarianism easily. Liberalism realised on good quality data and engagement based on understanding and respecting the public at grassroots, and providing evidence which is robust and stands up to scrutiny.

Instead we find ourselves stuck in a mire of scandal after scandal following trans activism around like a bad smell being greeting with howls of 'this is just because you hate us' not because they are being generated because of how frankly, out of touch and thick as mince these activists are.

(Side note it was interesting yesterday to see a political analyst put various demographics on a political compass map and to see just how much of outliers students were on social issues - I posted this on another thread)

I’m wondering why the census wording wasn’t tested out on a group of British people from as diverse a range of social and language backgrounds as possible, including those who are illiterate or semi literate in English or who have no words for “gender” in their first languages.

That would have been real inclusivity.

I don’t know about ONS, but in other government departments these decisions tend to get made by young shiny-eyed digital teams who view trans people as the ultimate excluded/marginalised group (and themselves as noble liberators). As said upstream it doesn’t seem to occur to them to test outside the interest group - the focus is usually on whether the wording upsets members of that group. It’s unbelievably deeply rooted, too.

What I'm taking away from this is trans advocacy groups and data collection around sex/gender is poorly understood and badly taken.

First we have the infamous Stonewall survey which showed an abnormally high level of self identifying as disabled. Which no one in the organisation questions.

Then we have the massive correlation with poor mental health, with the assumption that it's down to be poorly treated as trans, rather than proper investigation into whether trauma is a factor in being exploited / being vulnerable to cult like behaviour.

Then we have the none follow up on outcomes at the Tavi.

Then we have the deliberate trying to bury data on transwomen in prisons and their pattern of criminal behaviour.

Then we have a census question which anyone with literary and cultural diversity may well struggle to even understand leading to confusion and poor data reliability/ integrity. And activists spotted the strange anomaly and just excepted it because it supported their narrative rather than doing the correct thing and investigating why the data was coming back with something so wildly different to other data sets.

And that's before you consider responses from the belligerent actively wanting to corrupt the data because they don't believe in gender identity and think it's gender stereotyped nonsense.

Then you have all these bollocks surveys done by supposed reputable companies that investigate whether people support trans rights, which after scrutiny and more information given don't hold up to be quite the blanket support first thought when broken down to the respondent to 'minor' details like 'retaining a penis' or fairness in women's sport. Again clearly showing the limited knowledge about the subject by the general population which clearly wants to be nice and do the right thing but also retains the knowledge that sex exists and gender is made up bullshit in practice.

And the politicians have just lapped it up for years. And are shocked when the public are slowly educated about this and go 'what - the - actual - fuck?'

The level of unthinking idiocy and unintelligent responses to understanding data is quite remarkable. It really is like brains fell out on confirmation bias. Given the high level of support from university students, it's really rather damning on the education system over the last few decades that no one looks at the data and thinks hmmm .... That Ben Goldacre fella and that Margaret McCartney woman would have a bit of a field day over this cluster fuck of nonsense.

There is no accountability, no scrutiny and no basic standards over data quality being used with trans activism.

Remembering at the same time there were certain trans advocacy groups who had a deliberate policy which was recorded on paper to get things through under the radar before the general population noticed.

Some bloody great big questions in a number of areas should be being asked on this, because it doesn't just affect trans rights. This is a monumental level of failure and political blindness driven by data in an era where big data is the driver of social issues and responses.

This is why there is a lack of trust between 'educated types' and none educated types because the data simply isn't reflecting reality.

I’d be interested to hear from The Muslim Council re these issues. Maybe I’m not on the right mailing lists but I can’t find any comments in the MSM. Or from the Beth Din.

The many posts here - especially those outlining how hard it is to translate an activists' term into other languages - rather support the need to clarify "sex" in the EQA.

I'm now even less convinced than I was, that "transsexual" is an "outdated term". While I don't think you can actually change sex, at least we all knew what that meant in English!

"Gender" and "gender identity" just don't translate well. And that reminds me...whatever happened to the public sector being pushed to write in plain English? That was a big deal a few years ago. Seems to have evaporated.

The privileged educated TRSOHers who drive all this don't care about boring-type marginalised communities. Heck, they don't even care about the special group of most oppressed that they claim to most greatly care for - if they did, they would be clamouring for accurate data collection.

What TRSOHers care about it performative virtue signalling to polish their own knobs haloes and congratulate themselves on how InclusiveBeKind they are.