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’ll just copy a bit from the link I posted above:

We have a responsibility to make our surveys easy to understand and use. We do the hard work to make our surveys simple, which removes that burden from our staff and respondents.
We prioritise the respondent experience because we know that without doing so, we risk us not achieving our goals. We develop surveys that meet the needs of respondents and data users by investing time and resources into the early research, design, and testing phases of a project. We monitor respondent burden and use the insights to inform decision making.
We develop surveys that do not rely upon staff intervention and lengthy help and guidance to get the data we need. Instead, they are clear and highly usable on their own, without the need for much additional support or advice. Through good design we empower our respondents to take part in our surveys and provide us the data we need. We only add additional help where research shows that further support is needed.

Yeah, right.

To be fair in the ONS I think the whole definition of what "trans" actually is is so woolly and ill-definable that no questions they could have asked would have made sense to everyone. They were trying to ask whether people were or weren't something that some other people don't have a linguistic or psychological concept of, as beautifully illustrated by the Google translate efforts. I defy anyone to write a question that counts how many trans people there are which works in other languages!

This makes me worry for young Muslims experiencing emergent same sex attraction who are often negotiating quite a complex emotional push-pull between what is taught via faith & family and what is taught via school & secular society.

The last thing they need is Stonewall, Mermaids et al shoving their nosy, self interested beaks in the middle of it!

I can’t imagine the hoo-ha that went on in Birmingham over No Outsiders ‘Queering the Classroom’ will have had a positive impact on the Muslim kids from that school who do grow up to be gay, was probably really frightening witnessing the protests.

That is not good enough though. If the question is too woolly to mean anything then it should not be asked.

“Gender Identity” should have gone under beliefs with a subquestion asking about how you identify yourself.

This is a scandalous waste of public money, will result in misdirected public money and underserved communities including trans people. Trying to inflate numbers of people who identify as transgender by obfuscating language is shameful and is literally taking services away from those who need them both. Absolute bastards. This should be the subject of an urgent enquiry by a commons select committee of MPs with the topic investigating whether the ONS data isreliable and whether it needs to stop trying to be an advocacy organisation and be just a mirror to society. The government must commit to funding additional user testing in ALL future UK population wide communications to ensure that genuinely vulnerable and minoritised groups can access them clearly. We predicted all of this on FWR and it’s absolutely exasperating.

I agree with that assessment.

What a diabolical waste of money. The census is an important data source for civic planning.
Turns out it's got a big pile of shit data in it.

I think the fact it’s so woolly, so poorly defined, so lacking in consensus (especially from within the movement’s activists), so lacking in widespread social meaning, so inherently political and ideological means that it was not an appropriate thing for the census to be asking about in the first place.

Just because an ideology or an identity matters a great deal to a small number of people in niche areas, or is currently fashionable among young people, doesn’t make it reasonable for inclusion in a national census. You may as well start asking people what football team they support (which may structure their lives in all sorts of ways) or what musical instruments, if any, they play, or whether they identify as whatever categories and tribes of youth culture currently dominate how young people see themselves in the world.

Any of them might be reasonable research topics. But the census should be asking about the big stuff about which there’s broad societal understanding and which significantly affects national planning and policy (like age distributions or sex distributions or disability). How people feel or how they’d like to be perceived isn’t really suitable for this kind of exercise.

The amazing thing is how effectively special interest groups persuaded the government that gender identity should be treated like the standard big demographic categories. Not even just asking about what’s in the equalities act (gender reassignment) but how people want to understand themselves with gender identity ideology.

Or is the football team that you support the same as the football team you supported as a child?

Is the musical instrument that you play the same as the musical instrument that you'd like people to think you play?

🤣😩

This stuff is so bloody depressing.

I agree it's a very difficult question to try to ask and quite arguable that they shouldn't have tried. One of the reasons for asking was to ensure that the sex question could remain firmly about biological sex without pressure to change it to (self chosen) genders or fear that people would answer incorrectly as a protest against being able to have their perceived gender recorded. Though the numbers are so small I really don't think they need have worried.

I repeat though that it is so useful to have some reasonable data on the numbers who are trans (by using the numbers who wrote in "trans man" or "trans woman" as answers, rather than the overstated 0.5% who initially answered no). I'm dealing with one group at work who set a "representative target" of 16% to be LGBT+ based on some really dodgy figures from I don't know where (possibly Stonewall). I'm in the process of getting this target figure revised to 3-4%, which is the actual proportion of people who are LGBT according to the census. This is a big improvement and saves them trying to proactively find more LGBT+ people to address this "under-representation". So I think the data does really help to push back against cries of under representation when necessary.

Does your gender identity match your birth sex?

I am a woman and would never deny it. But I haven’t got a ‘gender identity’ any more than I have a spirit guide or a totem animal. I don’t share those particular belief systems. I don’t identify as a woman, I just am one.

So it’s impossible to answer that question honestly without giving incorrect information. As pointed out by feminists and other rational people, and ignored by the Stonewalled bureaucrats.

I can see that would be v.handy.

Whenever I read about companies aiming to up their employee diversity statistics I always think - ‘at this rate the lesbians are going to have to do three full-time jobs apiece!’

@Ofcourseshecan Very well articulated.

The statical bollocks of lumping the LGBT together, is another of those problematic figures.

It's used to say 'lgbt groups are under represented'. But there's something very interesting within that data too.

I can't be arsed to go hunting for the BBC's data on its employees, but it was striking to see how OVER represented gay men were at the corporation. Technically to hit their diversity targets the BBC should be looking to reduce the number of gay men it employs. Especially gay men in higher ranked positions. Lesbians were surprising under represented. It begs a few questions.

After talking about it on MN I remember seeing a conversation on MN amongst lesbians who don't like to tell their workplace their sexuality because of the harassment it has led to in the past or because they feel it somehow restricts them in their career due to stereotypes.

Then there is the representation in political parties which has been noticed on FWR. The LGBT Lib Dems are the best example. Last time I looked at the staff on their executive it was pretty revealing. Their lesbian representation was male. In fact the entire exec was male bar one female who identified as non-binary. Then there's Stonewall itself. I remember seeing a photo not too long ago, which made another thread on MN. It was of Stonewall's key personnel. You've got the token Nancy Kelley and then another massive representation of males. This pattern repeats through politics. Gay men are the most over represented group in parliament. Lesbians are under represented. (Actually young women between 20 and 50 are one of the most under represented group - no prizes for guessing why. Women in politics overwhelming tend to be over 50, particularly in local politics.)

You have this amazing disappearing lesbian phenomena hidden by the bullshit stats. By lumping lesbians in with gay men and transwomen, it's possible to both marginalise them whilst taking up their part of the LGBT quota and STILL claim to be under represented.

All of these ways of collecting data are actively working against women and other minority groups because of who is setting the questions and the way they are setting the questions.

In an era of big data this matters more and more.

At this point this thread really deserves Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez to be plugged and recommended for anyone who hasn't read it yet. It's essential reading.

FWR is definitely picking up on some many of these type of issues when institutions are turning a blind eye to the problem either by blindness or deliberate design.

👏 👏 👏

Isn't it funny how self proclaimed stat nerd Nancy Kelley, hasn't picked up on the amazing disappearing lesbian stats yet...

Please can you say more about the disappearance of lesbians with lgbtq+ statistics? I get it absolutely within lgbtq+ policy.

Do you mean that lesbians are more likely to tick a different sexual orientation or to tick ‘don’t want to say’ than people with other sexual orientations, including on a census, out of mistrust of how stats would be used against them? Sounds like another underserved group where extensive user testing of the census questions and accompanying explainer info should have been focused in advance, in that case?

That's all true @RedToothBrush . The same issues arise with ethnicity and lumping all non-white British groups in together for analysis. However, if the size of your group is small, it'll never be possible to have representative numbers of these very small groups. You'd have to have an organisation of at least 1000 for even one trans man and one trans woman to be expected to be included, if the group was representative (alongside about 10 gay men, 12 gay women, 4 bisexual men, 9 bisexual women and 2 people of other sexualities). So being gay is much, much more common than being trans, according to the census, which could be surprising to many people given the degree of media coverage trans issues get.

The group I'm working with at work has a size of 13 so that "correct" proportion of all LGBT groups combined is still less than one whole person!

Fantastic post @RedToothBrush.

@Slo
I think what RTB means about disappearing lesbians is that if combined LGBTQ totals are used a company can technically meet it's diversity quota if say 10% of its employees are gay men. Fantastic, amazing and there is an LGBTQ person on the board of directors as well (another gay man). But if none of those LGBTQ people are lesbians (and certainly not on the board of directors), then lesbians are still totally under represented across the company and in senior positions, whilst the company has met its diversity targets by ... Employing men.

Previous post was meant to be @Slothtoes !

At company X, 20 employees identify as LGBT according to their figures. This is our of 1000 employees. So 2% of the workforce. There's a slight under representation of LGBT employees compared to the general population.

However because there's no breakdown in the data between lesbians, gay men and transwomen you don't see that there's no lesbians and 17 gay men and 3 transwomen. This means there is actually an over representation of both male groups and an under representation of lesbians. In fact it looks possible that the company looks actively a hostile workplace for lesbians. They either don't work there or they don't feel comfortable to be out of the closet. Company X is actually a deeply sexist environment to work in.

But the all male LGBT representative panel can argue that they need to employ more gay men or transwomen because LGBT people are under represented in the company. This is the premise of Invisible Women mentioned above - when you go gender neutral and talk about people rather than males and females, this tends to disadvantage women because they become invisible and in becoming invisible any way of being able to see bias or disadvantage disappears with it. Far from increasing diversity, it actually works to decrease it.

Company X on seeing the data could then invite Stonewall to do the whole diversity programme thus making it more hostile to lesbians (with the whole TWAW and can be lesbians bullshit) because of the premise of under representation of the LGBT community. Except gay men and transwomen are actually already over represented and the problem is actually lesbian visibility and lesbian employment. Which Stonewall is institutional and politically tone deaf to.

The inward systematic looking in on the perceived problem rather than actually correctly identifying the actual problem in the first place due to missing important data, leads to the situation becoming worse rather than improving for the under represented group in something of a vicious circle.

This is why sex matters in the details on representation. A sex blind data set has the danger of misrepresenting what's actually happening.

The company has no way of seeing the invisible lesbian issue, much less addressing it without it.

I hope this illustrates the point in a way that's understandable.

The ONS's flawed data on gender in areas of high levels of low literacy will inevitably cause a similar problem to the one at Company X as money is invested in a none existent trans community. Money given to this folly is taken away from the vulnerable groups that are most in need of that cash for actual real world problems instead. There is likely to be a heavier pushing for unisex facilities in the area, when this is culturally highly inappropriate. It's more likely to result in the disappearance of Muslim women from the public sphere back into homes, and this in turn reduces their opportunities to improve their independence and literacy levels. It makes them more vulnerable to things like domestic abuse. All because some jumped up privileged pricks can't comprehend why simple English and simple concept that are universally understood should only be on the census.

It highlights well why the argument that transwomen are the most marginalised in society, simply can't be true. Their need to be identified and recognised is institutionalised into the ONS and political parties whilst the needs and visibility of people who don't speak or read English are completely forgotten about.

I have little faith that this finding will be taken on board by councils or anyone in planning unfortunately, so there will be ramifications for years and other surveys / institutions will continue to overlook the importance of simple English (hello NHS) particularly to the detriment of women.

I think the very best example of bullshit stats is to say that if you were describing a human to an alien who had never seen a human it would be accurate to say the average person has less than two legs.

We know that this 'average' person is not the majority of people walking around. It is not an accurate representation. You have to look a bit beyond that to understand why is actually being said when you say the average human has 1.8 legs. The reality is that most people have 2 legs. A small number have 1 and a bit legs, some have 1 leg and a very small number have no legs. And that's what society looks like and that's what society should cater for.

We need to understand that most people have 2 legs but some are disadvantaged and have less so should be catered for rather than be invisible to society. This is a more sophisticated level of understanding which better reflects reality and social disadvantages.

Understanding the concept of why accurate data collection matters is hugely important.

Any self proclaimed data geek should know that, when you look at data for important decision making you really should be also having a good look at the quality and reliability of that dataset and looking for possible data bias and flaws in methodology. Nancy Kelley really is scoring a big fat fail on this.

Ben Goldacre and Margaret McCartney are two of the best authors on this subject on a wider level - I'd recommend them together with Perez's Invisible Women. All three are widely acclaimed and respected as being essential reading in terms of understanding data. They are NOT niche.

For Nancy Kelley to be so blithely ignorant and willfully blind as to spot the anomaly as being inconsistent with other known data and her own knowledge of her own community is a catastrophic admission of being unsuitable for the roll she has at the head of a diversity charity where this stuff is the basic bread and butter of enabling change for the better. It really really matters.

Her failure to ask questions is deeply deeply problematic. The male lesbian problem at Stonewall who are trying to influence others isn't a mere blip it's institutionalised sexism and homophobia. It's a feature of Stonewall to lack a professional level of understanding data and other disadvantaged groups. It's built on the ideology and belief that transwomen are the most vulnerable rather than having a good understanding of information and data to present as evidence to create a compelling argument that this is actually the case. (It's clearly not as I say above).

Thank you for your posts very helpful. I can absolutely see that eliding different groups results in the dominant group consolidating their existing power. That’s really depressing. Sex absolutely matters.

InvisibleDragon and RedtoothBrush