Census ‘hugely overstated’ trans population - Telegraph article

Now why didn't I think of listing my 3 cats as occupants? FFS. If a man can register himself as a woman, why don't my cats count?? I now feel I missed an opportunity to expand the census to make it way more meaningful. I will do that next time, assuming we're still floating around in cloud cuckoo land and the census is as crap then as this one.

My initial proposal for my masters dissertation was on the 1911 census and how it reflected social attitudes (it was the first one in which the actual census papers filled out by the households themselves were retained and not just the summaries the officials compiled). There was lots of stuff like suffragettes/gists using it as an opportunity to protest, people complaining about their living conditions and politicians (and their wives/family members!), the questions asked (because some people felt they were invasive, as it was the first census to ask about nationality, the duration of their marriage, children born, living, dcd, etc.), and also just some funny stuff like people listing their pets, including their occupations (my favourite was an enumerator who crossed one of these out in big red ink and wrote 'THIS IS A CAT.')

I eventually had to change it quite a bit so it was more general but still have all the research and am thinking of doing something with it some day.

It fascinates me to think hopefully all the modern returns with amendments/notations will be considered by social historians in 100 years and what conclusions they will draw!

Me.

I wrote SEX and BIOLOGY so many times on the census that my pen ran out.

Fukkem, they wanted answers, I gave them answers.

And another thing. I'm really pissed off with this corrupt, partial, politicised, negligent Civil Service that we are now stuck with for the forseeable.

I had to search for the answer to, 'which politician is responsible for the operation of the Civil Service?'

Since 1968, the Prime Minister of the UK has had this job. So the corruption and degradation of the Civil Service since 2010 has been down to Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak. The stupid fuckers couldn't see what was right in front their faces every day.

Or is it worse than that? I mean, five Prime Ministers in a row, oblivious to the ideological pollution of their own Civil Service? WTAF.

My young(ish) adult DC was staying with me during the census (England). We had a full-blown rant at the bloody thing, notably over the stupidity of the questions around 'gender' and religion.

Put it this way: the DC and I know each other pretty bloody well. Yet there we were disagreeing with each other about how each of us should answer certain questions and what the questions 'really' meant.

These are not the signs of a successful census.

This is the bit I harp on about endlessly. I know it's annoying but someone really needs to answer the question "which genders are "the same as" which sexes"?

Once trans ideologists explicitly acknowledge that "woman gender" is the same as "female" we might start to unpick the logic underlying the whole thing.

Or, if woman and female aren't the same, name the genders that are the same as each sex.

It's impossible to answer otherwise. As we now see.

It baffles me as to why the definition of trans changed from "somebody who wishes to be, and/or to be seen as, the opposite sex". No-one needs a special inner essence to do that.

I would question whether this was mistake or deliberate exercise to inflate the numbers.

Surely it is obvious that questions need to be simple and easily understood? It beggars belief that any unbiased person would think that this one was. There is only one explanation.

ONS stands by dataThe ONS stood by its data, insisting: “The census estimates on gender identity remain the best available. They are broadly consistent with NHS data collected in the same year and other countries’ comparable data".

“The new, voluntary question went through rigorous development and testing involving trans and non-trans people and, through the census rehearsal, people who did not have English as their main language, before being finalised through legislation. "

hmmm. I'm having difficulty believing the above!

“is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”

does this make any sense as a question?

We hear from all sides in this debate that sex is different from gender.

I know what sex I was registered at birth. I know what sex I am now but if gender is different to sex does it have the same categories?

I'm looking forward to finding out exactly how many people wrote 'believer in biology' in the religion section. One researcher has done one small scale poll which indicated a few hundred but I suspect it's much, much more.

I ordered a paper copy of the scottish census and I wrote ALL over that bloody thing, making it perfectly clear what I thought of their shitty gender identity questions and what SEX myself and my family members were.

I also gave them a bit of a lecture about how sodding useless gender identities were when it came to deciding what services the population would need in the future, considering that many of those are SEX dependent.

It was one giant useless virtue signal from beginning to end and whilst I returned it, I doubt they'd have enjoyed my answers. Lowest rate of return ever in Scotland, I believe, under 80%.

Exactly this. It served the agenda's purpose to fudge things up.

Likewise, the possibility of a self identified TW at a high level should be completely irrelevant - save for pattern recognition and bitter experience of conflict of interest, and people from this political agenda intentionally inserting them into positions of power to abuse their position to benefit themselves and their political movement. Corruption in other words. It's very sad that this has to be thought of, but it's happened too many times now, and it is not a definition of diversity, it is a definition of extreme political bias that sees its aims as above morals, ethics, other people's rights and law.

It served the purpose of justifying a lot more funding on LGBT projects to the detriment of other communities, by how much we will never know.
Someone at ONS should be fired, someone should be accountable, they had one job.

There isn’t a clear definition of ‘gender’ so how could people know what they are being asked?

I said no to this question as I see gender as sex role stereotypes and no, I don’t identify with those. I don’t identify as being transgender but that’s not what they asked.

If they wanted to know how many transgender people there are they should ask ‘Do you identify as transgender?’

Every time I read these government funded investigations I wonder why they don't just all read Mumsnet FWR where the investigation has already been done, for free.

Also no way of knowing who thought -

• I didn't HAVE a gender identity at birth and am not agreeing to the first one because it states me as holding a belief that I don't.
• I have no idea what those phrases mean or what information is wanted because I'm not reddit-soaked, I'm of a generation with any idea what this is supposed to mean, and/or my first language is not English
• I have an exciting identity that is not one of those listed

All this was extensively pointed out at the time. The answer was that it didn't matter. Well if accurate data doesn't matter, stop wasting millions on it and just get David Walliams to write the fiction for you.

Recently there was a thread about Bristol and their consultation on trans inclusion. These were the figures they used from the census. What is interesting is that over 1000 people said that their sex was was different from their GI but didn’t identify as TW, TM, NB or give other GI’s. It makes you wonder if they struggled to understand what they were being asked. Them made up nearly a third of the trans population in the census in Bristol.

"The source said it was now clear the 2021 figures on gender, released in January, “hugely overestimated” the number of transgender people – a view they said was shared by multiple ministers.

The inquiry into the findings was sparked after academics warned the wording of the census question, “is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?” may have skewed the answers for respondents whose first language is not English, or who are less familiar with the language of gender identity.
Earlier this year, academics found those who speak English poorly were five times more likely to be transgender.

Michael Biggs, a professor of sociology at the University of Oxford, claimed that confusion over the question may explain why the London boroughs of Newham and Brent, which have a significant percentage of residents who speak English as a second language, recorded the highest proportion of transgender people in the UK.
Ed Humpherson, the head of the OSR, has written to the ONS setting out its initial observations.
His letter said the ONS team that carried out the “quality assurance” of the data “agreed that, with more time to look at all combinations of variables, for example looking at gender identity and ethnicity, it may have identified areas for additional probing and analysis.”"

There were threads on here discussing this both before and after the data were released.

The Scottish census even more so. Absolutely useless data, low rates of return and an extraordinary amount of tax payers money spent on it.

news.stv.tv/scotland/census-lessons-must-be-learned-after-significantly-low-return-rate-says-auditor-general-of-scotland

What a waste of time.

I did a quick Google and found this pdf, it's by Michael Biggs at Oxford. I've only had a chance to glance at it, it seems fairly scathing.

1 Gender Identity in the 2021 Census of England and Wales: What Went Wrong? Michael Biggs, Department of Sociology and St Cross - OSF https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/yw45p/download

Hope the link works, it will download a document.

I think iirc there is, or was, a tw working quite high up in the ONS.

Particularly when the errors are quite politically useful, and you're more interested in creating nice impressions that boost your personal agendas than you are in objective reality and planning services with actual integrity.

The census estimates on gender identity remain the best available. They are broadly consistent with NHS data collected in the same year and other countries’ comparable data.

Have they considered that’s because everyone’s making an utter hames of it, I wonder 🤔

Here

Census ‘hugely overstated’ trans population

digitaleditions.telegraph.co.uk/data/1435/reader/reader.html?social#!preferred/0/package/1435/pub/1435/page/31/article/NaN

And some background on Diamond

www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/education/higher-education/2752462/sir-ian-diamond-aberdeen/

Does anyone else have archive.ph blocked by their device? I can't access it on any browser from my laptop but can if I browse via a VPN. It's not a service provider block because my phone can access the website when connected via my home WiFi. Odd and annoying.

I just love this. The ONS, yet another government service that doesn't service the government or the public. Unfortunately the original errors stand because the big splash made at the time has been absorbed by many people.

I get the impression that many of these organisations really don't care when they make major errors