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as the NHS, the police, schools and the Civil Service the review showed that factual information on biological sex has been replaced by subjective and highly contested feedback on gender identity since 2015.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.

The number of these patients each year is in single digits over all such cancers combined. This means for patients treated using the same approaches, there are too few to publish reliable statistical analyses. The alternative would be to widen the period of diagnoses to get sufficient numbers but that would be like analysing, say, breast cancer care as a single entity over the time before and after tamoxifen was introduced. This is why there are no publications. The size of the US population is much larger but they do not feel able to publish either, presumably for similar reasons.

For anyone who didn't see it the first time round, this is Alice Sullivan talking about the important of questionnaires and reliable data in Swansea in 2023. It's really interesting and she was very funny about the people organising the census:

I'm aware of a woman with urinary/bladder issues who, back in the 80s, self-diagnosed herself as having prostate cancer because her symptoms were similar to those experienced by her husband who had been formally diagnosed. So if people were self-reporting, I can see how these anomalies could occur.

Thanks for the article. It’s a nice day so I didn’t mind the extraneous detail about the wallpaper and recipe book.

I think the point of the Sullivan report is not so much inaccurate self-reporting (so, people who are biologically male selecting “female” as their sex marker) as it is what questions institutions are actually asking. The report shows that the question has gradually shifted away from “sex” through “gender” towards “gender identity.” I agree, you can’t completely control how individuals respond to questions, but you can - and should, for good, accurate, quantitative research - be very, very careful about the questions that are asked.

With regard to male / female cancer data is it possible that, as well as patient error (deliberate or otherwise), we might have clinician error? Being tired and ticking the wrong box is not unlikely here and there, surely.

Every time I've been pregnant, healthcare professionals have inaccurately recorded my ethnicity. I would never tick the box I've been given. This is on several occasions, all predating modern notions of self-identifying. Now, in my case, it doesn't matter hugely - the chance of particular illnesses is fairly minor. But there are different odds of various illnesses, and I am keen that this is judged correctly.

Thanks for the link to the article, OP. I'm not a data scientist, but striving for clear accurate data seems a no brainer to me!

I too forgive them the wallpaper/kitchen/cookery guff in my sheer joy at a data scientist talking sense on this issue. Well done Prof AS, excellent job.

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?

Agreed, it's incredibly tiresome!

But I feel like it's unfortunately still needed because as Sullivan notes in her comments in the Telegraph piece, so many lefties see it as a tribal left/right issue, and as we can see from the ONS debacle, even though the left/centre left was out of power for many years it still has a considerable amount of cultural power in public institutions and academia. So speaking to the left and making it permissible to say heretical things about gender has a purpose.

It's bloody slow going though and I'm longing for the day when all the brandishing of leftie credentials is unnecessary.

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?

Who is doing that?

As the article is in the Telegraph in their world would be a mark against her.

Or maybe they were surprised as by and large in terms of MSM it is the right wing / Tories that recognise and support a pro sex matters position.

Which reminds me, that it is odd that the article in getting a quote from Sex Matters (glad that they know who they are), didn't add the "disclosure" (which is on their web site) that "Professor Sullivan is a member of the Sex Matters advisory group."

It would seem that the TRAs in NHS England have been pushing back against reality again

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/01/trans-activists-urge-doctors-fight-nhs-data-overhaul/

Human error of this type does tend to be quite consistent over decades.