Current Draft Guidance from the Office of Statistics Regulation(OSR) says:
“Statistics should meet their intended uses and should inform public debate. To achieve this, producers must seek to understand their whole user base and the questions that users want to be able to answer with their statistics.”
Note the whole user base.
The Draft Guidance also states
”Producers should be clear about definitions or terminology they use, and these should be harmonised to be consistent and coherent with related statistics and data where possible. The terms ‘sex’ and ’gender’ should not be used interchangeably in official statistics.”
It seems to me that the Scottish Chief Statistician is advising exactly the blurring of that distinction. He pretty well acknowledges this when he says:
”Given that for the vast majority of people sex and gender identity questions will provide the same result, for most issues one may want to measure, whether there is a question about sex or about gender identity, it will not skew the statistics when disaggregated by either concept.”
He is presuming that this is true for the vast majority - how can we tell? He’s also assuming that they can get realistic responses to trans identity questions. Given the confusion of the trans umbrella confusion, how many people will indicate they are trans just because they fall somewhere in the LGBTQ… alphabet? If they even answer at all - a major concern.
The Scottish Chief Statistician does include good definitions of gender, gender identity and transgender. In particular he says “Organisations such as the World Health Organisation, and the Royal Statistical Society define gender identity as a personal, internal perception of oneself, and so the gender category someone identifies with may not match their sex registered at birth what an individual experiences as their innate sense of themselves as a man, a woman, as having no gender identity, or as having a non-binary gender – where people identify as somewhere on a spectrum between man and woman”. It’s odd that gender identity seems to include the notion of not having a gender identity. Perhaps he means agender, which is different, it means believing there is a gender essence but not believing it applies to you.
Sorry, long ramble. I get very cross when I look deeper into this and see how many stats are already distorted into what doesn’t upset particular groups and what is easy to collect. The Criminal Justice stats are a dreadful hodgepodge of self-identified, officer-assessed or institutionally defined - obviously anyone in a woman’s prison is a woman, right?
I’m not sure I’m helping anyone here.