Prof Alice Sullivan on the data disaster that is gender identity

[flyingbuttress43]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/30/alice-sullivan-transgender-donald-trump-wes-streeting/

Today's Sunday Telegraph "The Sunday Interview". Prof Alice Stewart - a left winger for info - and a data scientist, on her recently published Sullivan Review.
The review shows "that when it comes to liberating public bodies from institutional capture by trans activists and highlighting the dangerous lunacy of conflating sex with gender, our doughtiest defence is data."

She said many people in a great many organisations don't understand data collection as a discipline and have been taking advice from other people who don't understand it either; the result is a mess. We need - have a responsibility -to record both sex and gender identity.

After interviews, collated evidence and hearing from whistleblowers too fearful of reprisals to speak out across key organisation such as the NHS, the police, schools and the Civil Service the review showed that factual information on biological sex has been replaced by subjective and highly contested feedback on gender identity since 2015.

The Sunday Telegraph has devoted a whole page to the interview and Mumsnet regulars will be interested to know that it was, as a keen runner on Hampstead Heath, that she came across the plans to allow individuals to access areas such as the Ladies' Pond based on self-identification. She said it gave her pause for thought when she saw the consultation document - "a really badly written questionnaire - and I care alot about questionnaires."

She went public after this and took a stand after learning the ONS was rolling out a new "inclusive" version of the sex question on the 2021 national consensus. Cue the usual hate mail when she criticised this bias in an open letter in 2019 signed by 80 eminent academics from Oxbridge and Russell Group universities. The ONS refused to back down and, as we know, Fair Play for Women took them to court and won.

Prof Stewart is now focusing on the second part of the review, which looks at barriers to research on sex and gender, primarily in universities.

The article is an interesting read.

Gift token:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/d7d1ac9264ea4eaf

Maya Forstater, CEO of pressure group Sex Matters welcomed its findings: “This review is devastatingly clear about the harms caused by carelessness with sex data and a decade-long failure of the Civil Service to maintain impartiality and uphold data standards. The destruction of data about sex has caused real harm to individuals and research, and undermined the integrity of policy-making. Conflating sex and gender identity is not a harmless act of kindness but a damaging dereliction of duty.”

Yes.

This would be what happens when tax payer funded bodies in positions of responsibility just download their thinking and policies from representatives of a political lobby untrained in what they are advising on, (just as with safeguarding, women's policies etc), with no knowledge of or interest in any other groups or people outside of themselves, and which openly describes the equality of others or even the equality of consideration for others, as an aggressive attack on their 'rights'. As evidenced by the response shared in the article:

Or, as transgender lobbyists TransActual put it on their website; “This review is providing an academic gloss on what is a political call to strip trans people of our hard-won rights to privacy, dignity, and respect in public spaces.”

The culture that has allowed this capture to happen will eventually have to be faced up to and addressed. It comes of naivety, laziness and complacency taking the place of responsibility, accountability and integrity. That has permitted too much 'training' without anyone asking basic questions or even checking the credentials of the person in front of them. It comes of too many people being sucked in through new shiny and exciting ideas, and the social status games of signalling to others and jockeying for superiority about their open mindedness and niceness and righteousness, and their more progressive than you thinking. And it comes of the last 30 plus years of focus on action plans and mission creep where action plans always have to show expansion of brief and more and social targets, while the core brief gets steadily diluted down, abandoned and looked down on in favour of the current Next Thing.

as transgender lobbyists TransActual put it on their website; “This review is providing an academic gloss on what is a political call to strip trans people of our hard-won rights to privacy, dignity, and respect in public spaces.”

Oh FFS. Surely even trans ideologues need these data for accurate research. How would they track anti-trans discrimination, for instance?

Great article and it's fantastic to see someone talking sense and being respected for doing so.

However, is anyone else starting to get irritated by this need to establish impeccable left wing credentials before anyone can be taken seriously on this topic?

My source of irritation was the description of Prof Sullivan’s beautifully appointed house and cookbook open at a complicated recipe - but the author decided not to hate her for these things because Prof Sullivan doesn’t have children and so of course has time to keep an immaculate home.

🤮

So unnecessary. It’s like the reports on the female astronaut commenting on her hair having gone grey while she was in space for flipping months longer than expected.

Many thanks for the link and the gift token to it. Professor Sullivan is admirably clear and has shown enormous strength of character to plough on with what has (incredibly) become a controversial message: we need to record biological sex in all sorts of contexts to understand what's going in the world around us and make sensible plans to deal with problems, manage risk and try to predict and sometimes try to change behaviour.

Couldn't agree more with what she says here:
“As a life-long Leftie, it feels uncomfortable to be put in the position of agreeing with Donald Trump. But the fact is that he is simply saying that there are two sexes and that this matters, for example in prisons and sports. If Donald Trump says that the earth is round, should Leftists claim it is flat just to avoid being on the same side as him? This kind of tribal thinking has been horribly damaging to the Left. The idiotic positions that the Democrats took on these issues helped to gift the election to Trump. Mainstream politicians of all stripes need to learn from this that denying observable facts about the world is dangerous.”

I've dug an old favourite out of my saved pictures as it seems apposite.

Thank you

Gotta make use of my subscription somehow 🤣

The English cancer registry has records of gynae cancers in males and cancers of male genitalia in females from the early 1970s onwards, so the claim that recording gender instead of sex in health data is a recent phenomenon is simply wrong.

Bloody hell! Now read to the end of the article. This little nugget had passed me by till now.

During research for her eponymous review a paediatrician cited a mother who “changed” the sex of her child when it was still a baby. Within weeks of the birth she decided she wanted to bring up her newborn as the opposite sex and went to her GP to request a new NHS number and have it officially recognised in the sex she had chosen. The GP complied. When children’s social care was alerted, they denied there was any safeguarding issue.

WTAF? No safeguarding issue? A vulnerable newborn is being brought up by a certifiably insane parent and social services are just nodding along? What if she'd announced that she identified as having a child with a serious health condition and wanted the NHS records amended accordingly? What's the difference?

This should be interesting. For now, her focus is on the forthcoming second part of her review which looks at barriers to research on sex and gender, primarily in universities. No lack of material to consider, I suspect.

I would have hypothesised that most of those are down to coding errors, though. Am I wrong?

This review is providing an academic gloss on what is a political call to strip trans people of our hard-won rights to privacy, dignity, and respect in public spaces.”

TRA have managed to destroy their own dignity & respect by their utterly appalling bullying behaviour

This is absolutely shocking

If they are mistakes, they’re at a remarkably consistent level over more than half a century. And one has to remember that most health data is self reported which is why “sex” has pretty much always been (at best) “augmented sex”. An example where this isn’t the case is genetic testing data but this is relatively recent and most patients don’t have these.

Archive: https://archive.fo/SmdF2

You sound as if you may have professional expertise here, which I haven't, but firstly breast cancer can occur in males. Secondly, if it's mostly self-report we know that people's knowledge of what's going on in their bodies, which body parts they have, and so on, is abysmal, not to mention high rates of illiteracy and very poor literacy in the past. So many women (my own grandmother included) believe they urinate out of their vagina, for example. So I could believe they pick the wrong thing to tick on the box, if that's how it works.

Very interesting @PollyNomial could you link to some more info about this?

DSD's can create an increased risk of cancer, which might account for some of the confusion in those figures.

For now, her focus is on the forthcoming second part of her review which looks at barriers to research on sex and gender, primarily in universities.

Any research that correctly sexes its subjects is transphobic (see: Phoenix v OU). Presumably 'pure' medical research gets a free pass, or things are getting really dangerous.

Yes, thank you, this is very interesting. I found their website, https://digital.nhs.uk/ndrs. They automatically record cancer diagnoses, treatment and outcomes, as well as rare diseases.
You can opt out, but I've had cancer and had no idea this record was being made.

I think this letter, explaining how the Great 2021 Census Gender Cock Up happened should be compulsory reading for every single doctor, teacher, health professional, MP and anyone else who thinks the much vaunted 0.5% of the adult population identifying as trans is a given and verifiable fact.

It simply isn’t true, it is abundantly clear that in areas where many of the population have poor written English skills as English is an additional language the question was misinterpreted and the data received is compromised beyond redemption, and while this isn’t mentioned I would venture to suggest that for many of the population who do have English as a first language but whose reading skills are limited the same problem of misunderstanding almost certainly arose since the question was so poorly worded.

Link not loaded.

Sorry, it did load, but slowly.

we need to record biological sex in all sorts of contexts to understand what's going in the world around us and make sensible plans

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

Hear hear. I would go further and say all data is potentially good data, and birth sex could be good data even 'out of context'. It might not be obviously relevant, it might be a total surprise that it turns out to correlate with some other, apparently unrelated, measurable, but that's all the more reason to collect it.

I do and I am not talking about male breast cancer in the above. The registration record is a mixture of medically reported and patient reported data. The pathology reports from which the type of cancer is recorded is not self reported. Afaik, things like “sex”, ethnicity are taken from forms patients complete when they commence treatment. People can change their responses to (at least) these questions and researchers have had to develop rules to deal with different responses at different times by the same person. Changes to self reported “sex” are much less common than changes to self reported ethnicity (which are most commonly between the “prefer not to say” and an ethnicity label)