In 2021 the Office for National Statistics hugely overestimated the trans population. They asked “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”, and found that places with high immigrant communities whose first language was not English, like the London boroughs of Newham and Brent, had surprisingly high levels of trans identification – a result much celebrated by trans activists. It took Michael Biggs, sociology professor at Oxford, to point out the problem: they didn't understand the question.
The statistical confusion continues:
Trans women have been allowed to self-identify as women in a survey about social attitudes.
Polling published by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) included biological men who were allowed to give their answers as women.
Gender-critical academics claimed that the report, which is part of the British Social Attitudes series, could be “misleading” because it “conflates sex and gender”.
NatCen insisted that the sample size of men identifying as women, non-binary, or vice versa was too small to affect the results significantly.
If they know it's a problem, why do it?
The NatCen report concluded that “gender identity matters most to women”. It cited polling showing that 66 per cent of women say that being a woman is extremely or very important to how they think of themselves, compared with 52 per cent of men who feel the same about male identity.
That makes no sense. These women are saying that being women – their sex – is very important to them. It has nothing to do with "gender identity" as the term's now used by activists. These NatCen people are hopelessly confused.
Prof Alice Sullivan, of UCL, an expert on gender identity, told The Telegraph: “They are overriding the sex where that doesn’t agree. Thirteen of the men identified as women. That’s muddling sex and gender identity.
“And they are using gender identity when it doesn’t agree with sex and the way they report that does not make it obvious.
“It’s unfortunate given that they have data on sex, so they can look at sex separately, but they have chosen to effectively muddle the two and that could be quite misleading.”…
Prof Selina Todd, a modern history academic at the University of Oxford, claimed: “This report seems very confused, because the authors conflate sex and gender.
“They also misunderstand sex as ‘assigned at birth’ – it isn’t, it’s a biological fact, determined at conception.
“Gender is not an innate identity, as they claim, but a set of roles and behaviours that people are expected to conform to, depending on which sex they are.”
Back to the drawing board.
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