Census 2021

[Tootsweets23]

Anyone else done their census 2021 rehearsal survey online yet? I just completed it and thought the way they'd laid out the questions on sex and gender was helpful and thankfully not a muddle between sex and gender. Sex question first, with a notification on that page that a question on gender would come later, and the gender question was voluntary. I then filled in the details for my two children, and no gender question was asked, only sex (they are vert young, so I don't know what age would trigger the gender question to be asked, whether 16 or 18).

That seems like a pretty good way of putting it - presumably they are testing other questions as well though?

But it's gender and not gender identity and by not being specific it makes gender mean something it doesn't.

The question should be: ‘Is the gender role you customarily perform in your life the role that is stereotypically attributed by society to your biological sex?’

Then they’d discover that ..... very few people actually conform totally to stereotypical gender roles, so we all must be trans or non-binary or special in some way.

This isn't perfect but it is progress.

I'm not in a rehearsal area but as I don't understand either question I don't know how I'll truthfully answer them in 2021

For the first question "What is your sex?" I would have assumed (without reading the notes) that they were asking about the sex entered on my birth certificate that I was observed as being at birth.

But no, reading the guidance it states "If you are one or more of non-binary, transgender, have variations of sex characteristics, sometimes also known as intersex, the answer you give can be different from what is on your birth certificate"

Surely that means the question must be asking "What sex do you feel yourself to be inside" (your gender identity) rather than "What sex were you born" (also I fit the definition of being non-binary as many of us do) Well I don't have an internal 'feeling' of being one sex or the other so which box should I tick?

Then the second question, "Is your gender the same as the sex you were registered at birth?" Google tells me 'gender' means the socially constructed characteristics of women and men, such as norms, roles, and relationships of and between groups of women and men. As I do not conform to the stereotypes of my birth sex and tick more of the stereotypes of the opposite sex does that mean I should tick yes?