1 in 67 English/Welsh Muslims are transgender

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

According to the ONS.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-does-the-census-say-there-are-more-trans-people-in-newham-than-brighton/

"Did you realise that one in every 67 Muslims is transgender? That adults with no educational qualifications are almost twice as likely to identify as transgender as university graduates? That the London boroughs of Brent and Newham are home to higher proportions of transgender people than Brighton and Oxford? These are some of the astonishing results from the 2021 census of England and Wales, which was the first in the world to ask about gender identity."

They could have got round the problem with the question for those who don't feel they have a gender identity better by asking "Do you have a gender identity that differs from your sex registered at birth?" (Rather than "Is your gender identity different...") which would have allowed those of us who feel we don't have one to answer no quite happily. But I suspect that wasn't something that came up with the groups they tested on (no mention of this issue in the methodology doc I shared)

They discussed whether to use "sex assigned at birth" which would have been much worse (I accept that my sex was registered at birth, but after having first been observed not assigned!) Their stated reasons for not using "assigned" are to do with comprehension though (which is speculated on, not tested) suggesting the controversial nature of the question for people who believe that gender is a social construct rather than an inner identity wasn't considered at all.

James Kirkup's article for the Spectator highlighted the strategy dictated in the Denton's report.
There's no doubt that the presence of so many powerful older white males in institutions / professions has led the way - along with the mile high streak of intimidation and bullying to silence all challenge:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-document-that-reveals-the-remarkable-tactics-of-trans-lobbyists/

Yes it’s definitely the Denton’s strategy at play. Outwardly it looks as if it’s a sudden mass movement but that’s not true - they’ve been positioning their chess pieces for years

Tbh, if I were designing a survey, I think I’d actually go for something like ‘are you transgender?’ and follow that with a free response ‘if yes, what does the term transgender mean to you?’ type of response.

The definitions would give you a reasonable indication of whether the respondents had understood the question at all.

It’s obvious that these questions are pretty niche and hard for many people to understand. That, in itself, is important data. Part of the reason that these questions are so difficult to write is that the basic concepts being asked about (the core components of gender ideology) simply aren’t universally relevant - regardless of whether the proponents of the ideology think they should or must be.

People hugely passionate about technical aspects of, for example, energy generation or fishing methods, might want to survey the whole population on stuff about the mix of renewables in their energy tariff or the correct hole size in fishing nets to achieve particular outcomes for endangered species. But trying to write questions about those things for the population as a whole is likely to improve impossible. They might think that energy applies to everyone, but that doesn’t make the concepts and categories used by the industry or by keen environmental
activists are in any way meaningful to most of the population. Even something that guardian readers might feel is really straightforward (like ‘green energy’) may well be quite confusing for large parts of the population

Quite simply, it’s hard to write a question because the characteristic or concept being asked about isn’t relevant to large numbers of the population.

That is an important insight, an evidence-based one, that is too easily swept under the carpet because it’s extremely inconvenient to gender ideologues. They’d much rather present people not caught up in their pet debates as bigots or regressive conservatives or stupid than actually consider that the stuff they think is so important (gender identification) might just not matter to most people.

They could have got round the problem with the question for those who don't feel they have a gender identity better by asking "Do you have a gender identity that differs from your sex registered at birth?" (Rather than "Is your gender identity different...") which would have allowed those of us who feel we don't have one to answer no quite happily.*

But the question is still meaningless to those groups who speak English as a second language and those with low literacy rates. And actually the rest of the population who had no idea about identifying as transgender - we were just beginning to come out of the no debate era.

This must mean that this census was a pointless exercise. Who would have guessed that? 😣

In decades to come British social historians will use this as an excellent example of the extent to which UK government departments were captured by Stonewall.

My parents thought transgender was just the ‘modern word’ for gay/lesbian.

Exactly. Despite all the focus on this in some circles, for most of the population is is just meaningless jargon.

I think that is actually the bit of this that really caused the problems for the Scottish government following pink leggings gate. It’s was all just some niche stuff that only affected a tiny number of people (so what is all the fuss about?), until it became abundantly obvious in a way accessible to everyone that there was a big problem with putting a male rapist in a women’s prison.

At that point it stopped being ‘poor people suffering (with a condition we don’t really understand)’ and became a ‘WTF. that’s a man in pink leggings’.

Of course, nothing is going to upset TRAs like the statement that, actually, their issue is simply too niche to be asked about in something like the census.

thats not ‘erasure’ or whatever they’ll claim. Lots of things don’t get asked about in the census because they’re just not relevant to or meaningful to a broad enough swathe of society.

@SnailKite thats kind of my point. For someone completely outside of the entire gender identity debate, the census question basically asked "does this situation that you don't understand apply?". People don't understand so tick "no" - and hence are counted as trans.

By inverting the question, someone who is trans is far more likely to understand what the question is asking and hence be able to tick "yes" - but someone with no knowledge or lived experience is again more likely to tick "no" which is then correct for them.

(I'm coming at this from my research perspective, hence no comment from me on the validity or otherwise of the gender identity debate. I have to enable people to self-identity for all demographic questions but I'm passionate about making sure that their answers are what they mean them to be)

This is very interesting and has ramifications for a lot.of communities, including trans people.

Interestingly a few years ago I worked somewhere where we would do a very large survey every two years about consumer experiences of our industry. We used the data on location, sex, sexuality ethnic background, location, age etc.. to understand if there were different needs or experiences across those groups.

The last survey I was involved with had a similar question to the 2021 census. The data that came back on that question was pretty much unusable.

It had comparably low levels of completion and wbere it had been responded to, the answers often showed many people simply did not understand the question.

To be honest I think for many organisations the questions end up being bad as they don't really care. They have feeling there ought to be a question on this but really do not care or understand enough to interrogate whether the question is understandable or useful. They find some wording supplied by Stonewall or similar, use that and think no more about it.

Which does women and trans people a disservice. Trans people deserve to have accurate and decent data about their needs collected not just a token question bunged in that is so badly thought out many people do not understand how to answer it.

"Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?"

The thing with this is that I don't actually know how I would translate this in the second/third languages in my family. There's not really commonly-used separate words for sex and gender in this way.

The only way to really ask it would be to say something like "do you disguise your birth type for social reasons?" But even then, social has overtones of tribe and community, and you bring other cultural phenomenon into play where very definite females have historically done male activities (like riding into battle) and this has been seen as disguising from the enemy her birth type, but not that she's actually male in any way.

The problem is the words used. Gender is obvious, as is sex, but "identify" is very easily translated as "recognise a person, place or thing" whereas in English now, identify means something more like adopt or 'believe oneself to be".

"registered" is also difficult. It can have very distinct document overtones, particularly in terms of property and ownership.

So I can see how this question could be mangled to say something like: "are the words you use to recognise things different to having sex to make babies?"

That’s really interesting!

You’d think the ONS would be well aware that for a question that is irrelevant to most people, you need to pose the question in a way that minimises false positives.

That this didn’t happen, and that the question was more or less written by pro trans lobby groups, suggests that false positives were considered a positive outcome in the eyes of Stonewall et al.

Kinda funny that they didn’t foresee how batshit those false positives could look (made less funny by the seriousness of public funds wasted).

I'm coming at this from my research perspective, hence no comment from me on the validity or otherwise of the gender identity debate. I have to enable people to self-identity for all demographic questions but I'm passionate about making sure that their answers are what they mean them to be

The thing is, there are questions about whether this particular demographic category is useful in this way.

In order to be a useful category that people can self identify as, there needs to be sufficient consensus on what the term(s) mean and sufficient clarity that people -in general - can select the appropriate response.

Transgender has neither of those things. It’s an idea that does not have a broad base of societal understanding and, even within the communities to which it’s meaningful, there is a great deal of debate and dissensus about what the terminology means or should mean.

Add to this the highly politicised nature of it all, such that significant numbers of those who should be recording themselves as transgender are not willing to because they want to be viewed as the opposite sex etc, and it’s just not a useful demographic category.

Then there the fact that including it causes problems with the quality of the data collected on the sex category.

The privileged educated TRSOHers who drive all this don't care about boring-type marginalised communities. Heck, they don't even care about the special group of most oppressed that they claim to most greatly care for - if they did, they would be clamouring for accurate data collection.

What TRSOHers care about it performative virtue signalling to polish their own knobs haloes and congratulate themselves on how InclusiveBeKind they are.

The many posts here - especially those outlining how hard it is to translate an activists' term into other languages - rather support the need to clarify "sex" in the EQA.

I'm now even less convinced than I was, that "transsexual" is an "outdated term". While I don't think you can actually change sex, at least we all knew what that meant in English!

"Gender" and "gender identity" just don't translate well. And that reminds me...whatever happened to the public sector being pushed to write in plain English? That was a big deal a few years ago. Seems to have evaporated.

I’d be interested to hear from The Muslim Council re these issues. Maybe I’m not on the right mailing lists but I can’t find any comments in the MSM. Or from the Beth Din.

What I'm taking away from this is trans advocacy groups and data collection around sex/gender is poorly understood and badly taken.

First we have the infamous Stonewall survey which showed an abnormally high level of self identifying as disabled. Which no one in the organisation questions.

Then we have the massive correlation with poor mental health, with the assumption that it's down to be poorly treated as trans, rather than proper investigation into whether trauma is a factor in being exploited / being vulnerable to cult like behaviour.

Then we have the none follow up on outcomes at the Tavi.

Then we have the deliberate trying to bury data on transwomen in prisons and their pattern of criminal behaviour.

Then we have a census question which anyone with literary and cultural diversity may well struggle to even understand leading to confusion and poor data reliability/ integrity. And activists spotted the strange anomaly and just excepted it because it supported their narrative rather than doing the correct thing and investigating why the data was coming back with something so wildly different to other data sets.

And that's before you consider responses from the belligerent actively wanting to corrupt the data because they don't believe in gender identity and think it's gender stereotyped nonsense.

Then you have all these bollocks surveys done by supposed reputable companies that investigate whether people support trans rights, which after scrutiny and more information given don't hold up to be quite the blanket support first thought when broken down to the respondent to 'minor' details like 'retaining a penis' or fairness in women's sport. Again clearly showing the limited knowledge about the subject by the general population which clearly wants to be nice and do the right thing but also retains the knowledge that sex exists and gender is made up bullshit in practice.

And the politicians have just lapped it up for years. And are shocked when the public are slowly educated about this and go 'what - the - actual - fuck?'

The level of unthinking idiocy and unintelligent responses to understanding data is quite remarkable. It really is like brains fell out on confirmation bias. Given the high level of support from university students, it's really rather damning on the education system over the last few decades that no one looks at the data and thinks hmmm .... That Ben Goldacre fella and that Margaret McCartney woman would have a bit of a field day over this cluster fuck of nonsense.

There is no accountability, no scrutiny and no basic standards over data quality being used with trans activism.

Remembering at the same time there were certain trans advocacy groups who had a deliberate policy which was recorded on paper to get things through under the radar before the general population noticed.

Some bloody great big questions in a number of areas should be being asked on this, because it doesn't just affect trans rights. This is a monumental level of failure and political blindness driven by data in an era where big data is the driver of social issues and responses.

This is why there is a lack of trust between 'educated types' and none educated types because the data simply isn't reflecting reality.

I don’t know about ONS, but in other government departments these decisions tend to get made by young shiny-eyed digital teams who view trans people as the ultimate excluded/marginalised group (and themselves as noble liberators). As said upstream it doesn’t seem to occur to them to test outside the interest group - the focus is usually on whether the wording upsets members of that group. It’s unbelievably deeply rooted, too.

I’m wondering why the census wording wasn’t tested out on a group of British people from as diverse a range of social and language backgrounds as possible, including those who are illiterate or semi literate in English or who have no words for “gender” in their first languages.

That would have been real inclusivity.

On the basis of the census data, why haven't Stonewall been shit hot about proactively engaging with the Muslim council about the size of the trans identifying Muslim community and how can they engage with them better because they are massively underrepresented at their very white pride events?

Shouldn't Stonewall have been asking whether they were institutionally racist / intolerance to Muslims or doing more research/ work to find out about cultural taboos?

The fact there doesn't appear to be any work in this area, nor any recorded intentions to progress work in this area is fascinating.

It seems to simply be easier to shout bigot a lot and try and cancel things rather than attempt to engage that the original grass roots Stonewall did.

This is where we can see the shift from liberalism to authoritarianism easily. Liberalism realised on good quality data and engagement based on understanding and respecting the public at grassroots, and providing evidence which is robust and stands up to scrutiny.

Instead we find ourselves stuck in a mire of scandal after scandal following trans activism around like a bad smell being greeting with howls of 'this is just because you hate us' not because they are being generated because of how frankly, out of touch and thick as mince these activists are.

(Side note it was interesting yesterday to see a political analyst put various demographics on a political compass map and to see just how much of outliers students were on social issues - I posted this on another thread)

We know that trans activism is totally blind to economic, racial and cultural issues. It's hardly a surprise.

The whole black women are a subset of women too bullshit sums it up well. Or the lack of interest in recognising the need for single sex provision for Jews and Muslims. Never mind the outrageous fgm related abuse.

watch them try to bring Drag Queen Story Hour into schools with high Muslim populations now.

@RedToothBrush Yes, I can see all of this. My question was tongue in cheek. My friends from Muslim communities are aghast at the idea of men coming into women’s singles-sex spaces.

The user testing may well have been done by ONS user researchers who have pretty superficial methodological understanding and mostly follow processes.

Except, that this illustrates that methodology really matters: how you collect data makes a big difference to the quality of the data and what you can do with it. Technical issues about question construction in surveys are important.