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How the trans census fooled Britain

Stock, Kathleen
http://unherd.com/2023/04/how-the-trans-census-fooled-britain/

Publisher:  Unherd
Date Written:  14/04/2023
Year Published:  2023  
Resource Type:  Article

Tribal speech codes breed linguistic compliance.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

An investigation by academic Michael Biggs has revealed, the strongest predictor of trans identification within a local authority is the proportion of people whose main language is not English. Once this was pointed out, the Office for National Statistics acknowledged it was "possible" that respondents misinterpreted the question, and confirmed it would investigate the findings.

On reflection, such confusion was easily predictable -- and not just for non-native speakers. The Census asked: "Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?" Even assuming you successfully parsed its off-putting syntax, a number of serious ambiguities remain.

Is a 'gender' a grammatical category, a synonym for maleness or femaleness, a set of sociocultural meanings, or a psychological identity? According to the Oxford Learner's Dictionary, it could be any of these. So, whether or not you 'identify with' a gender (or, even more clumsily, have a 'gender you identify with') will partly depend on what you think 'gender' is. It also partly depends upon what you think 'to identify with' means, since this is hardly an everyday term. And then there's the awkward fact that, if you are an immigrant without a birth certificate, you may not take yourself to have a 'sex registered at birth' at all.

One might ask why the statisticians at the ONS got this so wrong, given that one of their main jobs is to design survey questions that don't invite false positives. By the ONS's own admission, the trans question was trialled by means of "community testing at LGBT History Month events", which is a bit like gauging atheists' understanding of the Catholic Mass by means of community testing at the Vatican. Why didn't those in charge anticipate that a question couched in obscure genderese might stump noninitiates.

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