Times article: Question about sex to be voluntary for next census

[theendisnotnigh]

For our next national census (compulsory to complete for everyone) it is proposed to make the question about your sex voluntary - in case it offends those who are. So we won't know how many men / women there are in the country. Apparently it's "irrelevant, unacceptable and intrusive" to have to state your sex !!

Article below:

The UK is to become one of the first countries in the world not to require its citizens to let officialdom know what sex they are.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is proposing to make the sex question in the next census voluntary, after protests that it discriminates against transgender and other non-binary people.
The change will leave Britain without an accurate figure for the number of men and women living in the country.
Four million people declined to answer the only voluntary question in the last census: “What is your religion?”
The proposal was greeted with horror last night by some feminists, who see it as part of a growing trend to remove all mention of the biological female sex.
Germaine Greer, the writer and academic, said biological women were “losing out everywhere”.
She added: “I’m sick and tired of this. We keep arguing that women have won everything they need to win. They haven’t even won the right to exist.”
The survey takes place every 10 years, with the next due in 2021.
Stephanie Davies-Arai, a feminist activist, said: “Women’s biological sex is being erased and that terrifies me. Once you stop gathering information, that skews everything for women.”
In a report slipped out last month, the ONS said the existing census question, which requires respondents to choose whether they are male or female, was “considered to be irrelevant, unacceptable and intrusive, particularly to trans participants, due to asking about sex rather than gender”.
Another option — to add a third choice of “other” — was rejected as “irrelevant and intrusive”, with the “other” category “thought to homogenise trans people and differentiate them from the rest of society”.
The final option, a two-step design with separate sex and gender identity questions, was again rejected.
The report instead recommended that the existing census question “should not be mandatory, for the benefit of particularly intersex and non-binary people who cannot choose male or female as a reflection of their current sex or gender”.
It also said that any other questions on sex or gender should be voluntary.
It is a criminal offence not to complete the census, or to give false information, with more than 100 people convicted in 2011

How about classifying people like this:

1. Noun: Woman or Man (i.e. what biological sex are you)
2. Adjective: Female or Male (i.e. your gender - how you identify or describe yourself)

So while the majority might describe themselves as a female woman or a male man, a man who identifies as a woman would be a female man. A woman who identifies as a man would be a male woman. This would correctly identify the sex, but would also indicate those feel their identity does not match their sex. A non-binary person, or anyone who thinks gender is a tool of the patriarchy :) would be man or woman and then "neither".

The first layer of identification cannot be changed but is kept on the record and relevant only for the situations where biology/physiology matters : medical, recording of crime, women only spaces, sport?, and for the aristocracy inheriting titles (cough). For all other purposes gender is used, and frankly there should be very few situations where one would need to differentiate on the basis of gender, so should be largely irrelevant.

I do realise that this would be totally unacceptable to TRA's. But this is kind of how my kids see it (with a trans sibling), and it makes sense to me.

I think also valid to add "intersex person" as a third choice of noun.

Attendees at that workshop did include Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES), Stonewall, Mermaids

Oh yes I bet they did. FFS.

I was doing a heart health survey this morning on Menopause Matters. Women are still more likely to die from a first heart attack than men [sigh].

YY and there are conditions which primarily affect women that are underresearched.

I think also valid to add "intersex person" as a third choice of noun.

They should find out if intersex people would want that adding and do it. Not 'other'.

That noun/adjective distinction is good.

They are going to be even more under researched when ovarian cancer affects 1 in 150 peoples rather than 1 in 75 women.

Yes, precisely.

This is very scary indeed. As someone says above, Donkeythingy I think, the activists are setting out to erase gender and sex differences totally. The no offense culture means that no-one can stand up and say no without being hounded. The world is nuts and the West has sown the seeds of its own destruction through corruption of the nuclear family and desire to make everyone's choice equal even though clearly outcomes are not equal.

Read this article [http://quillette.com/2017/10/06/misunderstanding-new-kind-gender-dysphoria/ Gender dysphoria] and contemplate what disaterous outcomes are being pushed on young vulnerable people by activists with an agenda.

Got the link thing wrong...

Gender dysphoria

I believe that the 'research' by the ONS was with - wait for it... fewer than 50 people!
Four focus groups were conducted with the "cisgender [those who retain the sex and gender with which they were born]" population (total 29 participants) and 18 one-to-one in-depth interviews were conducted with the trans population. And this is another reason why we are getting such skewed results when the views of 18 transgender people can bring about such wholesale changes!!

Feck is 36% of the population transgender now?

Or was their sampling biased?

Jane Fae's in the Mail (thanks @Mumsnut for sharing on the board).

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-4964536/JANE-FAE-proposal-make-stating-sex-optional.html

So Jane believes the proposal to remove mandatory sex question is "poppycock". Jane proposes instead a three question approach:

Sex M/F ( or gender as Jane would choose to answer this)
Is this the gender assigned at birth Y/N
Do you not identify as a man or woman? Y/N

This is even more complicated than the two question option ONS tested, which when tested "there arose some confusion"

It also confuses sex and gender AGAIN and ignores intersex people who allegedly are a core group who will benefit from the census change

Indeed MrsPestilence.

There is no question that an aim of this and other projects (passports, GRA) is to obliterate sex as a class, or a "protected characteristic" as the Equality Act has it

It won't be an aim for all - I am sure most in the ONS are trying to be as inclusive as possible and make sure that nobody feels bad - but it's embedded for sure

Just in regards to intersex:

The 2015 report on intersex human rights by Organisation Intersex International Europe and the European Region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association stated that intersex should not be listed as a 'third sex'.

A third sex positions intersex people as having bodies that are unclear or unknown which is deemed to cause social isolation and pathologise their bodies - leading to cosmetic 'normalising' surgeries and other intervention on infant bodies. Instead of being unclear, intersex individuals who are male or female variants. In this regard there's a lot of overlap in the disability rights movements - particularly as OLL are peer-led.

From their stats, most intersex people identify as a man or a woman and do not have an incongruent gender identity to their sex variant bodies. Of course some intersex people do identify as trans, but gender identity is separate from the material reality of a sexed body.

That's v interesting hinged

I would be keen to hear if any uk groups representing intersex people have commented on the census change, or if the sex question has caused them issue/concern in the past