“The proportion of people who had a different main language than English and who said they were trans was four times higher than the 0.4% of the population with English as their main language (or English or Welsh in Wales).

“Overall, 13% of people identifying as trans did not speak English well and the London boroughs of Newham and Brent recorded more than double the average proportion of respondents identifying as trans, higher than in Brighton or Cambridge.

“The ONS [Office for National Statistics] admitted ‘the overall impact on the data of any misinterpretation of the question cannot be determined’.”

The UK Statistics regulator has said that it is still considering whether to accredit the gender identity dataset as having ‘accredited official statistics’ status. We wrote to the statistics regulator in November to say that the investigation by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has been inadequate and its conclusions are not supported.

Our conclusion was that data on gender identity (including the sex of the people identified as transgender) is not fit for purpose. It was driven by the adoption of concepts and questions promoted by lobby groups that seek to replace sex with gender identity.

Last week The Telegraph reported on leaked documents which show how much influence gender ideology has within the ONS.

Why did the ONS get it wrong?

The ONS spent years planning how to collect data on the transgender population. It conducted focus groups and consulted trans lobby groups, but ignored scientists who actually needed to use the data. Instead, it focused on how to avoid upsetting people with a transgender identity. 

When you see what’s been going on inside the ONS, this is not at all surprising. ONS staff policies, internal communications and posts on its intranet and staff chat sites show an organisation that has put transgender identities and feelings before everything – including accuracy. 

Gender identity rules the roost at the ONS 

The ONS’s Gender identity and transitioning at work policy shows how transactivist demands have been prioritised, seemingly with no consideration of the consequences.

“All trans people should be treated according to the gender in which they identify, irrespective of their legal gender status under the Gender Recognition Act 2004.”

“Although not covered by the Gender Recognition Act (2004), ONS accepts that it is good practice to treat a transgender person who does not hold a Gender Recognition Certificate in the same way as a person who does.”

Both these go far beyond the law, disregarding the impact on other employees.

“Any action deemed to constitute bullying and/or harassment on the grounds of transgender, non-binary or intersex status will result in consideration of action under the ONS Disciplinary Policy and Procedure.”

The term “non-binary” is not recognised in UK law or mentioned in the Equality Act, and “intersex” is an outdated term for a range of congenital disorders of sex development. These words are indications that activists wrote the policy. It also refers to “birth gender”: this must mean birth sex. 

Complete disregard for all other employees

Employee policies actively encourage men who identify as women to use the women’s facilities, and vice versa.

“ONS recognises that it is up to the employee to decide when they feel comfortable using these facilities.”

There is nothing about the comfort or wishes of anyone who enters a facility expecting it to be single-sex.

The manager’s checklist for supporting a transitioning employee contains a section headed “Use of single sex facilities”. This says:

“Have you agreed when the employee will start to use single sex facilities, such as toilets and changing rooms, appropriate to their acquired gender? This will usually be on the first day of transition.

“If colleagues object to sharing facilities with employees going through transition, the situation should be dealt with through communication, discussion and education. If colleagues persist with unreasonable objections you may need to manage the situation via grievance or disciplinary procedures.”

In other words, anyone who objects to a man in the women’s facilities or a woman in the men’s facilities needs to be educated. If they persist in their objections, they may need to be disciplined. 

“All employees have a responsibility to… use correct names and pronouns.”

This is compelled speech.

Concealment is mandated

Extreme secrecy is at the heart of the policy. Someone who transitioned before joining ONS need not reveal or acknowledge this within the organisation. This means that a male can access all female facilities, regardless of the impact on women, and everyone else must – with compelled pronouns – pretend not to see.

Where an employee transitions after joining ONS, all records of their previous “gender” are to be destroyed. Sickness notes do not have to be uploaded to the central system because they would show the reason for absence. Managers must put “any paper documents that cannot be destroyed in a sealed envelope and attach it to a new employee file, clearly marked as confidential, to be opened only if required, by a member of the Employment Relations Team”. This is extreme, meaning that a new line manager might not be aware of an employee’s past performance, absence, sickness or disciplinary records. 

An annex to the policy uses activist terminology such as “dead naming” and “cis gender”. The definition of trans is taken from Stonewall (the list of identities that ends with the mysterious “neutrois”). Transphobia is defined as “the fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans, including the denial/refusal to accept their gender identity”. This is a denial of the rights of those employees who do not believe in gender identity. Disagreement is not discrimination or a phobia. It is simply not sharing a belief, and has been shown to be perfectly legal.

Promotion of transactivism on staff noticeboards

The official staff intranet and the less formal, but still regulated, staff Yammer channels carry frequent content promoting transgender matters. It’s not just the infamous post concerned about the wellbeing of transgender colleagues when the census results were queried. Here it is:

November 2023, ONS blog post to all staff

A message of support for colleagues

Three directors, including the Director of Population, worry that the official reviews into ONS’s handling of sex and gender statistics are a threat to the safety of ONS staff.

The census failure must have come as a shock, given that the national statistician and head of the ONS, Sir Ian Diamond, in a post for LGBTQ+ history month, celebrated how the census questions on sexual orientation and gender identity had received an “overwhelmingly positive response from LGBTQ+ charities”. This ignored the great concern about the framing of the questions expressed by data users, both before and after the census was conducted. 

The LGBTQ+ agenda isn’t just for the census

Here are some examples of posts to all 4,000+ staff on the front page of the ONS intranet. They will have been edited and approved by the central ONS comms team (50+ staff).

February 2024, ONS blog post to all staff

Healthcare, experience and history

The LGBTQ+ Staff Network writes a long post on LGBTQ+ history and healthcare, advocates for a ban on conversion therapy, tells us that the female 18th-century surgeon James Barry was a transgender man, and claims that problems with conversion practices “persist to this day”.

May 2023, ONS blog post to all staff

Keeping LGBTQ+ history in mind

A long post about the Nazis and gender-affirming medical care.

November 2022, ONS blog post to all staff

Faith and Gender

A civil servant in Crime Statistics discusses the various genders in India and the “missing voices” of young Indian transgender Sikhs. The post describes Hijra people, but fails to mention that they are gender non-conforming males, some of whom are forcibly castrated. It is hard to see what this has to do with data collection in the UK.

Why it matters

This is a model of how transgender ideology can harm an organisation – not just staff policies and the people who work there, but also the work that it does. The ONS has an authority greater than almost any other institution to decide which concepts are valid and important, and which categories scientists are able to talk about. It is respected around the world. It even has its own international development team that supports developing countries to collect official statistics and helps run their census programs. When the core work of the ONS is distorted by ideology, the ripples spread far and wide.

Government departments, NHS trusts, universities and other organisations that have participated in Stonewall workplace schemes usually claim that these schemes solely concern their behaviour as employers, not their work or their output. But when a BBC radio podcast, Nolan Investigates, looked at Ofcom, the independent media regulator, it found evidence suggesting that Ofcom’s adjudication of broadcast material was shaped by its wish for Stonewall approval. 

This evidence from the ONS shows how transactivism has distorted the focus of the ONS and derailed its purpose. 

The post How gender ideology broke the census appeared first on Sex Matters.

Until yesterday, the guidance for the 2021 census said: 

If you are considering how to answer, use the sex recorded on one of your legal documents such as a birth certificate, Gender Recognition Certificate, or passport.” 

Most people will have no difficulty answering that question, and won’t need to go looking for online guidance to help them. But for people who identify as trans or non-binary, it’s not quite so straightforward. Should they give their biological sex, or should they answer according to their gender identity? If their gender identity is something other than male or female, how should they deal with the fact that the question only offers those two options? 

What did the old guidance mean? 

The guidance told people that they could answer the question by reference to “one of your legal documents, such as a birth certificate, Gender Recognition Certificate, or passport.”  It takes a GRC to get your sex changed on your birth certificate, but it’s surprisingly easy to change the sex recorded on other official documents: in many cases, you just ask. 

With this guidance anyone who had changed the sex written on any official documents would have a completely free choice which sex to give: they could either pick what was written on their birth certificate, or what was written on their passport, or driving licence, or NHS record, or whatever they had changed. 

Why did Fair Play For Women  say the guidance was unlawful, and did the judge agree? 

The Census process is tightly controlled by legislation. ONS is given power to conduct censuses collecting certain kinds of information by the Census Act 1920. The Census (England and Wales) Order 2020 tells it exactly what information it must collect in the 2021 census. Schedule 2 to the order, headed “Particulars to be stated in returns,” sets out what should be asked. 

Paragraph 8 is “Date of birth and sex.”  The precise form of the questions that must be asked is prescribed Schedule 2 to the Census England (Regulations) 2020. The question that must be asked about sex is “What is your sex?” and the offered answers are “female” and “male.” 

FPFW said the guidance was unlawful because the ONS was going to tell people that they could give an answer to the “sex” question that was untrue. Answering the census truthfully is compulsory: giving false answers or (with a few exceptions – the sex question is not one of them) failing to answer is a criminal offence, so in legal terms that was a big deal. The guidance was inviting people to break the law. 

FPFW argued that it was obvious that the sex question was asking about biological sex (almost invariably the same as the sex recorded on your birth certificate), apart for people who had a GRC. If you have a GRC, your sex is deemed by law to have changed for all purposes – unless a specific statutory exception applies. There’s no legislation that says a GRC doesn’t change your sex for the purposes of a census, so people with a GRC must give their legally deemed sex, not their biological sex, in answer to the question. But everyone else must give the answer that is literally true. 

The ONS said that “sex” was an “umbrella term” that could mean self-identified sex, sex recorded on a birth certificate, sex as recognised by law or sex as recognised by any document – and they were entitled to pick whichever meaning they thought best. The judge disagreed. Although this was only a preliminary hearing of FPFW’s application for permission to seek judicial review, he stated his conclusion in unequivocal terms: the ONS guidance was wrong. He ordered the ONS to change the guidance on its website pending a full hearing, and it complied within a couple of hours:

What happens next? 

The judge ordered a full hearing of the claim on Thursday 18 March, three days before the Census. Most of the same arguments seem likely to be repeated at slightly greater length, and then a judge will decide finally whether the ONS guidance was lawful or not. That will be the end of the case, unless one side or the other gets permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal. 

Why is this important?

As the ONS guidance itself says, “This question is vital for understanding population growth and equality monitoring.” Answers to the question will only provide reliable information for those vital purposes if they are accurate. Sex matters. 

It’s unfortunate that there isn’t a specific exclusion of the effect of a GRC for the sex question in the questionnaire: it would be better if the Census collected information about biological sex (and then seperately whether people identify as transgender, whether they have a GRC or not). 

But given that records are kept of how many GRCs are issued, the damage to the data involved in letting people answer according to their GRC is known and limited. 

So it matters for the data that the Census collects. But it matters much more widely than that. The ONS is the public body entrusted with collecting reliable data; the statistics it publishes command respect, and are used by researchers for all kinds of purposes. Where the ONS leads, other bodies are likely to follow. Many public bodies, regulators and large and small employers have already ceased collecting diversity monitoring information about sex, and are collecting self-identified gender instead. This judgment – assuming it is upheld at the full merits hearing – will make it much harder for them to defend that practice.

The post Census guidance on the sex question ruled unlawful appeared first on Sex Matters.

The first in a series, this report ‘Sex and the Census’ focuses on planned changes to the way that data on sex is collected in the UK census and outlines why collecting census data on males and females matters.

The post The political erasure of sex appeared first on Sex Matters.