Guardian article on the Census

[jellyfrizz]

Seems a bit confused to me. If the issue is that the ONS wants to find out how many people identify as trans why don't they put the question 'Do you identify as trans?'

And the last paragraph seems to be conflating sexual orientation with gender identity.

Anyhow comments open.....

Link:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/09/the-guardian-view-on-the-uks-next-census-counting-what-counts

I agree. It's confused and clunky and nothing to do with sexual orientation. I don't buy that the ONS were trying to count the number of trans. It would make no sense to make the question option.

Is it just the Guardian covering it in a dreadful way, or is the ONS actually being so barmy?

It's a load of crap, the census has nothing to do with sexual orientation and nor has trans people. Epic fail, Guardian.

Fuck sake, and it's an editorial - understand your subject ffs

The comments are overwhelmingly gender critical, which is heartening.

This is most likely going to bite me on the arse in some way but the ignorance of the BTL comments on the Guardian website never fails to amaze me. I imagine many of them are reasonably intelligent. But the ignorance often seems to have a deliberate "quality" about it.

It is bizarre. I happened to catch a Radio 4 item while I was driving today and, although I missed the beginning, they had a number of people on commenting race disparity audit published by the Government today.

These experts emphasised how important it was to break down data by race, age, gender etc. to get a clear picture.

So what are ONS now proposing? To not break down data by gender....

You couldn't make it up.

I imagine many of them are reasonably intelligent. But the ignorance often seems to have a deliberate "quality" about it.

The conflation of sex and gender is not an accident in many comments. There is someone trying to argue that gender is the biological position, not sex.

There's a petition about this now petition.parliament.uk/petitions/202435

The petition has a pathetically small number of signatures right now, probably because too many of us don't dare share it in non-anonymous forums :-( Do go and sign it, and share it if you dare.

Re the petition - there seems to be a problem with no emails being received to confirm your identity once you've signed it??

Got mine no problem, and induced someone else to sign a few minutes ago who had no problem either. Check your spam maybe?

It only went live this evening. I think it's a totally shareable petition. It only talks about the importance of collecting disaggregated data on sex - which is an unassailable position. I would encourage everyone to share it. The text is very measured:

Keep the category of sex a mandatory question in the 2021 Census.

We oppose the published tentative recommendation by the Office of National Statistics to make sex a non-mandatory field in the 2021 Census. We demand that sex remains a mandatory question in the Census and is included in all government demographic data collection in accordance with SDG5 commitments.

More details
Data collection disaggregated by sex gives us vital information for policy making and distribution of resources. If implemented, the ONS recommendation will make widely acceptable that sex becomes a voluntary question. This will render useless equal opportunities monitoring designed to combat sex discrimination. It will influence governments worldwide making difficult the monitoring of imbalances resulting from sex-selective abortion, female infanticide and unequal treatment of girls and women.

Maybe it should have a thread under the Petitions topic?

I find the fact that the ONS are even considering this proposal very alarming. Just how much power does the trans lobby have?

It seems to have a huge amount of power, massive, and I can't work out why or where it's coming from, but it's undoubtedly there.