1 in 67 English/Welsh Muslims are transgender

I'm coming at this from my research perspective, hence no comment from me on the validity or otherwise of the gender identity debate. I have to enable people to self-identity for all demographic questions but I'm passionate about making sure that their answers are what they mean them to be

The thing is, there are questions about whether this particular demographic category is useful in this way.

In order to be a useful category that people can self identify as, there needs to be sufficient consensus on what the term(s) mean and sufficient clarity that people -in general - can select the appropriate response.

Transgender has neither of those things. It’s an idea that does not have a broad base of societal understanding and, even within the communities to which it’s meaningful, there is a great deal of debate and dissensus about what the terminology means or should mean.

Add to this the highly politicised nature of it all, such that significant numbers of those who should be recording themselves as transgender are not willing to because they want to be viewed as the opposite sex etc, and it’s just not a useful demographic category.

Then there the fact that including it causes problems with the quality of the data collected on the sex category.

That’s really interesting!

You’d think the ONS would be well aware that for a question that is irrelevant to most people, you need to pose the question in a way that minimises false positives.

That this didn’t happen, and that the question was more or less written by pro trans lobby groups, suggests that false positives were considered a positive outcome in the eyes of Stonewall et al.

Kinda funny that they didn’t foresee how batshit those false positives could look (made less funny by the seriousness of public funds wasted).

"Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?"

The thing with this is that I don't actually know how I would translate this in the second/third languages in my family. There's not really commonly-used separate words for sex and gender in this way.

The only way to really ask it would be to say something like "do you disguise your birth type for social reasons?" But even then, social has overtones of tribe and community, and you bring other cultural phenomenon into play where very definite females have historically done male activities (like riding into battle) and this has been seen as disguising from the enemy her birth type, but not that she's actually male in any way.

The problem is the words used. Gender is obvious, as is sex, but "identify" is very easily translated as "recognise a person, place or thing" whereas in English now, identify means something more like adopt or 'believe oneself to be".

"registered" is also difficult. It can have very distinct document overtones, particularly in terms of property and ownership.

So I can see how this question could be mangled to say something like: "are the words you use to recognise things different to having sex to make babies?"

This is very interesting and has ramifications for a lot.of communities, including trans people.

Interestingly a few years ago I worked somewhere where we would do a very large survey every two years about consumer experiences of our industry. We used the data on location, sex, sexuality ethnic background, location, age etc.. to understand if there were different needs or experiences across those groups.

The last survey I was involved with had a similar question to the 2021 census. The data that came back on that question was pretty much unusable.

It had comparably low levels of completion and wbere it had been responded to, the answers often showed many people simply did not understand the question.

To be honest I think for many organisations the questions end up being bad as they don't really care. They have feeling there ought to be a question on this but really do not care or understand enough to interrogate whether the question is understandable or useful. They find some wording supplied by Stonewall or similar, use that and think no more about it.

Which does women and trans people a disservice. Trans people deserve to have accurate and decent data about their needs collected not just a token question bunged in that is so badly thought out many people do not understand how to answer it.

@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.

By inverting the question, someone who is trans is far more likely to understand what the question is asking and hence be able to tick "yes" - but someone with no knowledge or lived experience is again more likely to tick "no" which is then correct for them.

(I'm coming at this from my research perspective, hence no comment from me on the validity or otherwise of the gender identity debate. I have to enable people to self-identity for all demographic questions but I'm passionate about making sure that their answers are what they mean them to be)

Of course, nothing is going to upset TRAs like the statement that, actually, their issue is simply too niche to be asked about in something like the census.

thats not ‘erasure’ or whatever they’ll claim. Lots of things don’t get asked about in the census because they’re just not relevant to or meaningful to a broad enough swathe of society.

Exactly. Despite all the focus on this in some circles, for most of the population is is just meaningless jargon.

I think that is actually the bit of this that really caused the problems for the Scottish government following pink leggings gate. It’s was all just some niche stuff that only affected a tiny number of people (so what is all the fuss about?), until it became abundantly obvious in a way accessible to everyone that there was a big problem with putting a male rapist in a women’s prison.

At that point it stopped being ‘poor people suffering (with a condition we don’t really understand)’ and became a ‘WTF. that’s a man in pink leggings’.

My parents thought transgender was just the ‘modern word’ for gay/lesbian.

This must mean that this census was a pointless exercise. Who would have guessed that? 😣

In decades to come British social historians will use this as an excellent example of the extent to which UK government departments were captured by Stonewall.

They could have got round the problem with the question for those who don't feel they have a gender identity better by asking "Do you have a gender identity that differs from your sex registered at birth?" (Rather than "Is your gender identity different...") which would have allowed those of us who feel we don't have one to answer no quite happily.*

But the question is still meaningless to those groups who speak English as a second language and those with low literacy rates. And actually the rest of the population who had no idea about identifying as transgender - we were just beginning to come out of the no debate era.

Tbh, if I were designing a survey, I think I’d actually go for something like ‘are you transgender?’ and follow that with a free response ‘if yes, what does the term transgender mean to you?’ type of response.

The definitions would give you a reasonable indication of whether the respondents had understood the question at all.

It’s obvious that these questions are pretty niche and hard for many people to understand. That, in itself, is important data. Part of the reason that these questions are so difficult to write is that the basic concepts being asked about (the core components of gender ideology) simply aren’t universally relevant - regardless of whether the proponents of the ideology think they should or must be.

People hugely passionate about technical aspects of, for example, energy generation or fishing methods, might want to survey the whole population on stuff about the mix of renewables in their energy tariff or the correct hole size in fishing nets to achieve particular outcomes for endangered species. But trying to write questions about those things for the population as a whole is likely to improve impossible. They might think that energy applies to everyone, but that doesn’t make the concepts and categories used by the industry or by keen environmental
activists are in any way meaningful to most of the population. Even something that guardian readers might feel is really straightforward (like ‘green energy’) may well be quite confusing for large parts of the population

Quite simply, it’s hard to write a question because the characteristic or concept being asked about isn’t relevant to large numbers of the population.

That is an important insight, an evidence-based one, that is too easily swept under the carpet because it’s extremely inconvenient to gender ideologues. They’d much rather present people not caught up in their pet debates as bigots or regressive conservatives or stupid than actually consider that the stuff they think is so important (gender identification) might just not matter to most people.

Yes it’s definitely the Denton’s strategy at play. Outwardly it looks as if it’s a sudden mass movement but that’s not true - they’ve been positioning their chess pieces for years

James Kirkup's article for the Spectator highlighted the strategy dictated in the Denton's report.
There's no doubt that the presence of so many powerful older white males in institutions / professions has led the way - along with the mile high streak of intimidation and bullying to silence all challenge:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-document-that-reveals-the-remarkable-tactics-of-trans-lobbyists/

They could have got round the problem with the question for those who don't feel they have a gender identity better by asking "Do you have a gender identity that differs from your sex registered at birth?" (Rather than "Is your gender identity different...") which would have allowed those of us who feel we don't have one to answer no quite happily. But I suspect that wasn't something that came up with the groups they tested on (no mention of this issue in the methodology doc I shared)

They discussed whether to use "sex assigned at birth" which would have been much worse (I accept that my sex was registered at birth, but after having first been observed not assigned!) Their stated reasons for not using "assigned" are to do with comprehension though (which is speculated on, not tested) suggesting the controversial nature of the question for people who believe that gender is a social construct rather than an inner identity wasn't considered at all.

Thank you for that explanation @Flev - accurate data is critical and knowing that trans zealots have been allowed to infiltrate so many organisations and are diverting energy, resources and actual direction of travel is dangerous - even more so at a time of limited resources.

Slightly off topic but I'm always enraged when I see the amount of ££ and resources diverted in the NHS to gender woowoo / eradicating sex based language / wedging sex offenders onto women's wards etc. The NHS currently presides over so much dangerous maternity care that harms women and babies. Just imagine how those financial & staff time resources could help if redirected into improving the countless unsafe maternity units.

Fucking hell @MrsOvertonsWindow isnt extraordinary how the most marginalised and vulnerable evah/“there so few of us what difference does it make you bigots???” manage to hold so many influential positions in the civil service, the NHS, & the law

I ran a survey over 10yrs ago in a previous job among mainly older people which I was asked to include the exact same gender identity question as was used in the 2021 census. The results suggested over 25% of respondents were trans. This was so blatantly ridiculous that I was able to make a strong case for people simply not understanding the question, and hence for ignoring the findings.

Since then, when I've been pushed to include this question I've explained that experience and instead proposed "Do you consider yourself to be trans?". It's much simpler, and if you have no idea what trans means then you probably aren't, so would then correctly tick "no". It's better, but I still get pockets of "yes" responses where I suspect confusion has occurred.

The challenge for people like me is we're expected to check our participant demographics against the census to look for areas of under-representation and then ask services to consider ways of reaching out to under-represented communities. If census data is this clearly wrong I'm now going to have to make that argument internally within my organisation, to avoid prioritising the wrong things.

I attended an ONS focus group on this question before the last census. It was a complete shit show. I got the distinct impression that they had already decided the question and they thought this was a process.

They used Cis throughout. Even after I explained that I didn’t use it. I pointed out that many people wouldn’t understand the question. I pointed out that I didn’t have a gender identity so where was the option to opt out. I emailed them feedback after the event and I never even received an acknowledgment

TRSOHers don't identify as being privileged word salad pricks who get off on performative virtue signalling, but rather as InclusivelyBeingKind to the really most vulnerable delicate oppressed actual people. And that makes it so.

Nasty things like good data quality and factual reality are both bigoted and beneath them.

So many people are employed in positions they are incapable of carrying out. The fabrications from some are inducing illness in vulnerable groups.

As someone else pointed out, money will be redirected to trans now within Brent rather than where it's required, the gaslighting will destroy trust in public servants who will quite rightly untrustworthy liars.

The Muslim community will be telling each other all sorts and will then be called conspiracy theorists and bigots by professionals for not believing in gender identity and the Muslim community will not access services.

What an evil thing to have done, it reminds me of Andrew Moffat targeting Muslims in Birmingham. I remember they were going to home school and move away to save their children from no outsiders indoctrination.

Some of those who completed the census in Wales would have used the Welsh language forms. I think an even smaller percentage of those people would be familiar with the terminology. I was thinking of younger relatives helping a person with limited English complete it. The question used is probably tough to translate. Maybe it would get summarised to 'they want to know whether you're transgender' or similar.

Can't believe they did so little proper testing. Anyone with only a little experience of surveys and questionnaires knows to pilot properly and also to think about all the possible misunderstandings or confusion your draft wording might cause.

A barrister recently suggested to me that the questions they ask in the census are good quality. I will be emailing them the article tomorrow morning!

Even if it’s just for over 16s, the question is what’s the likelihood there’s more social contagion in Newham compared to Brighton? It’s incredibly unlikely surely, so can’t be the reason.

Me too. I'm not going to pretend I have a gender identity.

That has been a problem in gov for some time. There has been a big push for inclusion in research recruiting, but only to make sure there are minorities involved with testing "universal" services. Getting a cross section to test services designed with minorities in mind even if everyone will need to access them, not so much. I think that only started to change with Covid, when it became clear that men were having worse cases than women were so there was no point in being fluffy about sex/gender.