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."

I hope they do.

Good luck with it.

Remind me again, who is prattling on about 'manufactured culture war'?

Flev · Today 09:00
@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.

It only came up because they wondered why I was concerned about my brother’s (step)child being transgender. Mum actually said’I never thought you’d be like your Aunty Sarah about it!’ (Aunty notoriously rejected and cut off my gay cousin, who was also fired for being gay, several decades ago.)

When I said it was the testosterone and mastectomy and health effects that bothered me, they were astonished and appalled. They had just thought (correctly, I’d say) that she needed to be accepted as lesbian.

Too late now.

There's not really commonly-used separate words for sex and gender in this way.

When I did my silly exercise running the question through google translate (and remembering this is google) that was the main outcome - replacing ‘sex’ with ‘gender’. Yet ‘gender’ is such a vague term.

Quite. Capturing the ONS, fondly imagining you can use the census to promote your stupid ideology, resulting in Muslims being more likely to be trans than anyone else.

Idiots.

The capture of the ONS by the trans lobby is a fucking embarrassment.

We've had a census every decade for the best part of 200 years and Stonewall have fucked it right up in five minutes.

People not steeped in trans ideology will have no idea what 'gender' or 'identify as' even refers to. Hell, even rabid transactivists are reduced to nonsensical gibberish if asked to explain. The entire ideology is incoherent.

A more accurate question would be 'do you like to tell everyone that you're the opposite sex?'

But that doesn't uphold the bullshit.

They'd rather fuck the entire thing up, waste all the money and time, and look like raging zealots just so they get to write 'woman' in the box on sex. On an anonymous census, not publicly accessible for 100 years..

Or, even more simply: “do you lie about your sex?”

Yes. Bring it on, I say! That will really get the pants/knickers of those who consider themselves as “right-thinking liberals” in a twist.

This exactly.
Either it's important to get right or it's not. Incredibly badly worded questions that you are at a loss on how to answer if you don't have a gender identity or if you haven't got a clue what these terms mean so have to guess.

Hopefully the press will pick this up and some awkward questions will be asked about political capture of the ONS leading to delusional discriminatory data.

You'd hope but I've seen nothing so far. I hope More or Less do something on this.

Yes - multiple women on here have said that this sort of wording excludes and confuses non-English speaking or people with SEN. We warned about this.

Also there will have been many honest people who answered 'no' because they don't have a gender identity and they don't think sex is assigned at birth. How are you honestly supposed to answer that question if you don't believe in gender (or that it's basically just personality) and you believe sex is observed, not assigned?

I'm pretty sure I answered no. Assuming I'm transgender from answering that question 'no' is stupidity and dishonesty of the highest order.

Also there will have been many honest people who answered 'no' because they don't have a gender identity and they don't think sex is assigned at birth.

But if that's your position, why choose to answer the question? This question was voluntary, so you could just leave it blank.

Not answering could mean 'I don't want to say' or 'I don't have a gender identity' or 'My birth wasn't registered' or 'I don't understand the question'. But at least it doesn't give inaccurate information.

The most surprising thing to me is how few people chose not to answer.

I can't really remember (thanks menopause!) but in general where there's a write in box I'll answer the question to the best of my ability and then write in that I found it difficult to answer the question because I believe in the reality of two biological sexes in mammals. So I probably did that. Or simply that I don't believe in gender identity.

Pendant point - a Beth Din is a Jewish religious court, not Muslim. Think you got your terminology muddled ;)

ColdMeg this is such a good point thank you.

And the person doing the translating might be a primary school age child translating for non-English speaking parents.

Someone upthread said the question as asked was an example of "privileged fuckwittery" and I agree.

The Scottish census, taken a year later asked:

• Sex male or female
• are you or have you been trans, with open box to describe

It will be interesting to compare with E&W when that is published.

The census is - despite all this - a completely invaluable data source. I use it a lot in my work and despite all its shortcomings it's a hell of a lot better than most other sources especially for trans numbers for which the only other sources are much worse.

It's worth being careful with the data that's used though - The first census question asked whether people's gender identity was the same as their sex. 0.5% of people said yes. It's this figure that the article linked in the OP is rightly pointing out is dodgy. But we do have more than that - Those 0.5% of people were then asked to state their gender identity - 0.1% of people said "trans man" and 0.1% said "trans women" with 0.2% not answering. (Two thirds of the remaining 0.1% said non-binary and a third wrote in another answer). I don't think that people who didn't understand the question or didn't agree with the premise would have written in "trans women" or "trans man" would they? So these estimates of 0.1% each seem pretty good to me - and when government have reported the trans data from the census it's these figures they've focused on. So the total of 0.2% of over 16s saying they are trans is I think the figure that should be used if population estimates are needed (eg if you want to see if trans people are over represented among prisoners or mental health patients, etc) The 0.5% figure should be ignored.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/censustransformationprogramme/questiondevelopment/sexandgenderidentityquestiondevelopmentforcensus2021#research-that-led-to-the-recommended-census-2021-question-designs

The questions were "developed and evaluated via community testing at LGBT History Month events"

FFS did they not think that they needed to test a little wider??

Surely it's not OK that such an expensive data gathering exercise ends up as such a useless shambles?

This government publication sets it out pretty well and, as discussed, focussed just on those who named their gender identity or said they were trans men or trans women https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/2021-census-what-do-we-know-about-the-lgbt-population/

The fact that they've chosen to focus on this way suggests to me that they're aware there's a problem with the first question, though they should in my view have been more explicit about this rather than waiting for other people to spot it and point it out (With the resultant confusion as sone people don't read the detail and start asking "is there really a hidden trans Muslim population we never knew about?!!)

Thanks for that link Fireyflies; that's useful.

Sorry that first post from me at 15.03 should have read "0.5% of people said no"

@Fireyflies it makes a difference whether the trans sub-categories include checkboxes for trans woman and trans man. Or if it was free text entry.

People who’ve misunderstood may also wrongly select trans man or trans woman because the only bit they understand is man or woman.

There’s also the fact that people often want to complete things. So they’ll try to answer further questions if it’s an option. Even if they don’t understand.

This is so frustrating. Sensitivity and specificity are basic concepts in statistics. A question/ test is useless at a population survey level if the number of false positives (people who accidentally marked themselves as transgender) is comparable to or higher than the true positives (people who correctly identified themselves as transgender).

Given that activists make a lot of noise about how small the trans population is, you would think someone could have anticipated this issue and found a different wording!

Not testing the question for false positives is such an idiotic fail.

It was a free text question with people writing in their own answer. So the figures for "trans men" are just those who ticked the box and then wrote in "trans man". I don't think people who didn't understand the question or dispute the existence of gender identity would have done that.

It fits the agenda for the “majority” of Trans people to be POC and poor people. Then, when people point out this is a movement of middle and upper class white people they can scream “actually, Muslim and black people are most likely to be Trans so you’re racist!” And “trans justice means racial justice and trans need to be centred in campaigns for Muslims.” And piggy back onto real campaigns for marginalized people like inserting trans literature into literacy and ESL programs. They will love and use this data and pretend they don’t know it’s a mistake.

The ONS has some Survey Research and Development principles now (published 30/03/23)

https://analysisfunction.civilservice.gov.uk/policy-store/office-for-national-statistics-ons-survey-strategy-research-and-development-principles-ssrdp/#it-s-our-responsibility-to-make-things-simpler

This is a scary, but plausible, possibility. We've already seen how eager TRSOH are to misuse other (boringly marginalised in old-fashioned ways) people to polish their rainbow-glittering haloes.