Prof Alice Sullivan on the data disaster that is gender identity

I would have hypothesised that most of those are down to coding errors, though. Am I wrong?

Bloody hell! Now read to the end of the article. This little nugget had passed me by till now.

During research for her eponymous review a paediatrician cited a mother who “changed” the sex of her child when it was still a baby. Within weeks of the birth she decided she wanted to bring up her newborn as the opposite sex and went to her GP to request a new NHS number and have it officially recognised in the sex she had chosen. The GP complied. When children’s social care was alerted, they denied there was any safeguarding issue.

WTAF? No safeguarding issue? A vulnerable newborn is being brought up by a certifiably insane parent and social services are just nodding along? What if she'd announced that she identified as having a child with a serious health condition and wanted the NHS records amended accordingly? What's the difference?

This should be interesting. For now, her focus is on the forthcoming second part of her review which looks at barriers to research on sex and gender, primarily in universities. No lack of material to consider, I suspect.

The English cancer registry has records of gynae cancers in males and cancers of male genitalia in females from the early 1970s onwards, so the claim that recording gender instead of sex in health data is a recent phenomenon is simply wrong.

Gotta make use of my subscription somehow 🤣

Thank you

Many thanks for the link and the gift token to it. Professor Sullivan is admirably clear and has shown enormous strength of character to plough on with what has (incredibly) become a controversial message: we need to record biological sex in all sorts of contexts to understand what's going in the world around us and make sensible plans to deal with problems, manage risk and try to predict and sometimes try to change behaviour.

Couldn't agree more with what she says here:
“As a life-long Leftie, it feels uncomfortable to be put in the position of agreeing with Donald Trump. But the fact is that he is simply saying that there are two sexes and that this matters, for example in prisons and sports. If Donald Trump says that the earth is round, should Leftists claim it is flat just to avoid being on the same side as him? This kind of tribal thinking has been horribly damaging to the Left. The idiotic positions that the Democrats took on these issues helped to gift the election to Trump. Mainstream politicians of all stripes need to learn from this that denying observable facts about the world is dangerous.”

I've dug an old favourite out of my saved pictures as it seems apposite.

My source of irritation was the description of Prof Sullivan’s beautifully appointed house and cookbook open at a complicated recipe - but the author decided not to hate her for these things because Prof Sullivan doesn’t have children and so of course has time to keep an immaculate home.

🤮

So unnecessary. It’s like the reports on the female astronaut commenting on her hair having gone grey while she was in space for flipping months longer than expected.

Great article and it's fantastic to see someone talking sense and being respected for doing so.

However, is anyone else starting to get irritated by this need to establish impeccable left wing credentials before anyone can be taken seriously on this topic?

as transgender lobbyists TransActual put it on their website; “This review is providing an academic gloss on what is a political call to strip trans people of our hard-won rights to privacy, dignity, and respect in public spaces.”

Oh FFS. Surely even trans ideologues need these data for accurate research. How would they track anti-trans discrimination, for instance?

Maya Forstater, CEO of pressure group Sex Matters welcomed its findings: “This review is devastatingly clear about the harms caused by carelessness with sex data and a decade-long failure of the Civil Service to maintain impartiality and uphold data standards. The destruction of data about sex has caused real harm to individuals and research, and undermined the integrity of policy-making. Conflating sex and gender identity is not a harmless act of kindness but a damaging dereliction of duty.”

Yes.

This would be what happens when tax payer funded bodies in positions of responsibility just download their thinking and policies from representatives of a political lobby untrained in what they are advising on, (just as with safeguarding, women's policies etc), with no knowledge of or interest in any other groups or people outside of themselves, and which openly describes the equality of others or even the equality of consideration for others, as an aggressive attack on their 'rights'. As evidenced by the response shared in the article:

Or, as transgender lobbyists TransActual put it on their website; “This review is providing an academic gloss on what is a political call to strip trans people of our hard-won rights to privacy, dignity, and respect in public spaces.”

The culture that has allowed this capture to happen will eventually have to be faced up to and addressed. It comes of naivety, laziness and complacency taking the place of responsibility, accountability and integrity. That has permitted too much 'training' without anyone asking basic questions or even checking the credentials of the person in front of them. It comes of too many people being sucked in through new shiny and exciting ideas, and the social status games of signalling to others and jockeying for superiority about their open mindedness and niceness and righteousness, and their more progressive than you thinking. And it comes of the last 30 plus years of focus on action plans and mission creep where action plans always have to show expansion of brief and more and social targets, while the core brief gets steadily diluted down, abandoned and looked down on in favour of the current Next Thing.

Gift token:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/d7d1ac9264ea4eaf