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."

When is our day of awareness of adult English illiteracy? Name an organisation who advocates this and gets huge amounts of media coverage on the subject?

Here is the national literacy trust (nope I'd never heard of them before either)
https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/

They say here that
16.4% of adults in England, or 7.1 million people, can be described as having 'very poor literacy skills.' They can understand short straightforward texts on familiar topics accurately and independently, and obtain information from everyday sources, but reading information from unfamiliar sources, or on unfamiliar topics, could cause problems. This is also known as being functionally illiterate.

I think this is actually now outdated information as ironically the latest census should be the most recent data set with information along these lines.

That's a lot more people than there are trans identifying...

...yet the highly literate and educated ONS census bods overlooked this gem in favour of the importance of trans visibility.

Like Nancy Kelley that's fucked up and a dereliction of duty. It highlights their unsuitability to do the job and the fact they have been way over promoted in not understanding THE most basic part of the brief for the premise of the census. Be simple enough so everyone can understand enough to give data that's useable and has any value.

Instead it looks like they've produced shit that's worse than useless. It's effectively potentially harmful.

I think part of the stonewall problem is that they’re not interested in representativeness or participation. They’re really too focused on the exceptional outliers (the most vulnerable, the most marginalised, etc).

It means that all those pretty mainstream and ordinary gay and lesbian people get forgotten. They’re not interesting enough to merit attention. Who cares about the ways in which homophobia continues to create barriers in their lives, especially for lesbians when there’s a more special
group to shout loudly around?

The carnivalesque-as-default presentation of LGB-and-the-list-of-many-letters is not really that helpful to the majority of people the category claims to include. Life is not a pride parade and, frankly, most LGB people are not reasonably represented by sparkly rainbows, fetish gear or whatever - that’s true even if every so often they might dress up and join a pride parade or whatever.

The boring, non-sparkly, issues that affect people’s everyday lives do matter. Pushing those boring, ordinary lesbians aside to focus on drag queens is simply not helpful. Sure, it’s easier from a marketing perspective to show images of trans women in sparkly dresses than to try to present lesbians who often just look pretty much like many straight women (especially given the wide variety of ways in which any group of women might choose to style themselves) doing ordinary things. It’s all more eye catching and distinctive. But it’s not representative.

Stonewall should actually give a shit about representing the significant proportion of the population who just are LGB without needing to be spectacular or exceptional in doing so. Instead they’re off trying to ‘save’ the ‘most vulnerable’, redesigning flags to include ever more colours and just missing the whole point.

The literacy trust do some useful work in relation to early years education.

But that also, kind of, illustrates the same
point. That’s the photogenic end of literacy issues.

The ridiculous rates of illiteracy in the prison population, for example, is a very big issue for society. But not one you can make a nice glossy poster about.

It’s as we’ve always said: a men’s rights and men’s sexual access movement. Just dressed up in 21 century clothes

I don't think young women help matters.

Yesterday we watched Loose women (first time in a year or so) and Hearsay/Coronation Street Kim Marsh was on, her make-up was pretty standard, where as her daughter wore clothes and make-up you would see on a drag Queen.

I think it simply gets harder and harder to take Stonewall seriously when they are led by someone so unprofessional and incompetent and they are pushing quasi-religious bullshit which isn't backed by robust quality data.

This second tweet of one about cordial discussion but bringing in "gendered digital misinformation" doesn't appear to be ironic:

https://twitter.com/nancymmk/status/1645747259525545984?s=46&t=WHoOZ3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

"To forestall the obvious. I KNOW that all women in the public eye get abused on social media. Gendered digital misinformation and gendered online abuse is everywhere. I experience it daily."

Watchdog to examine ‘implausible’ UK census trans figures

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cffadd74-d889-11ed-80bc-e358583c5d62?shareToken=f6bf85eeac659d8e129c40853824bb31

Brilliant! Didn’t know there was a stats watchdog. Hope this wakes them up to the scale of these data problems

EXCELLENT!

Biggs said the authors “never thought about how a Bangladeshi grandmother or a Hungarian plumber will think about this question”, adding: “I’d be disappointed if a master’s student at Oxford made that error.”

We know this is the heart of the problem.

Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology from University College London who has also expressed concerns about the question, said: “It’s such a shame because it’s such a missed opportunity. This should have been the gold standard. It’s so hard to understand how the ONS could fail ‘questionnaire design 101’ in this way. It is particularly important when asking about a small minority group. It’s mind-blowing to me.”

Nice to see TWO university professors on the case from different universities expressing such horror at how much of a basic error this is.

The ONS maintained that the 2021 census results on its gender identity question were “broadly consistent with NHS data collected in the same year”. “However,” a spokesman added, “while the question on gender identity was tested thoroughly, it is possible that individual responses were affected by different interpretations of the question and we will do more work to understand whether that was an issue.

And here we have the ONS doubling down, insisting the data is actually ok and the question was tested thoroughly and then blaming individual members of the public rather than the fact its disappeared up its own arse. Whilst saying they probably should look at it because they have to.

I think the key point from that article is when they highlight that it's arisen because the group of interest (trans people) is such a small group. People with poor English skills may make errors in other questions too (they did at least have the option of skipping the gender identity over which I'm sure many did) But it doesn't make a huge difference to the overall figures reported because the actual numbers are much larger. So it's partly a difficulty with wording a question on such a woolly topic and partly a problem of trying to count a group that's only 0.2% of the population.

I do repeat though that the 0.2% figure (who wrote in the words "trans man" or "trans woman") rather than the 0.5% figure who ticked a box is probably reasonably robust. Having actual data on the number of people who are trans is useful

Agree data on the number of trans people is a useful thing to have.

Interested by this from ONS:
We developed and tested various different formulations of the gender identity question, ultimately using the version that was shown to give the most accurate results.

Is this because they only tested it in the relevant population and didn't consider the risk of false positives from the much larger non-trans population overwhelming the number of true positives? Or is it an admission that lots of trans people in the test groups would have selected "no" if asked a question with a simpler formulation like "Are you transgender?" ?

Either one is not great.

It's also worth considering what is the smallest population size that can be accurately measured in the census, given that there will be a base rate of errors?

I don't know if someone else has raised this question because I can't read 8 pages right now...

Does this not mean that the data for sexual violence convictions, and the very large numbers, is even worse than we thought?

Because it was extrapolated from the census how many people said they were trans and combined with crime statistics. So if 1 in 67 muslims accidently said they were trans, does it not mean the % of convicted trans sex offenders is way higher than thought?

Can someone do some maths with this?

In a word. No.

You are conflating issues.

I don't think so, because the number of trans people that was highlighted by ONS and being used for those calculations was the (more correct) figure of those who said they were a trans man or trans woman (0.2%). The dodgy figure that's been highlighted this week is the 0.5% who answered no to "is your gender identity the same as the sex you were registered at birth" which looks as if it includes about half trans people and half people who didn't understand the question.

Yes I think that's absolutely the problem. And the issue of "false positives" is a much bigger problem when the number of genuine positives is so small. This should have been predictable though and led to greater than usual testing on the groups most likely to get questions wrong.

I'm still baffled that the ONS consider trans identity both less sensitive and than asking about how much people earn, which would be so, so useful to so many researchers and policy makers, but has always been omitted on the grounds that it's too sensitive and would reduce response rates.

Iirc the census made no ducking sense!

I just gave up in the end!

More or Less did a segment on the census fairly recently, looking at a big shift of people identifying as British rather than English. Turns out it was mainly due to a reordering of the available options, people tend to tick the top of the list.

This is known about in elections.

The earlier in the alphabet your surname is, the more likely you are to get elected.

Especially on ballot papers where you need to vote for multiple candidate such as local elections.

Cue candidates changing their names to Aardvark by deed poll.

Yes that was an interesting thing about the question order (and showing that most English people don't care a great deal about whether they're English or British)

I don't think it's the problem with the gender identity question though as they put Yes first, which 99.5% of people ticked.

99.5% of those who answered the question that is. 6% didn't answer.

It is thought the question posed, "Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”, may have confused non-native English speakers.

No shit. Many people who answered “no” will have been trying to indicate that they are heterosexual. They “identify with” (are attracted to) a different sex from their own.

Not just second language English speakers but anyone not familiar with the recent nonsense of “identifying with”.

Isn’t the language of “identification” old hat now anyway? I thought trans activists had already discarded it because people were going around identifying as attack helicopters 🚁

It looks as though the ONS gave the census questions to the latest trainee to develop.