Today the census published data on sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time. Census participants were asked “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”
94.0% of the population aged 16 years and over answered the question, 93.5% answered yes, 0.5% answered no (equivalent to 262,000 people in England and Wales). This is one in every 200 adults, fairly close to the previous unofficial estimate I had of one in 300.
Those who indicated that their gender identity was different from their sex registered at birth were asked a follow-up write-in question which only half of them answered:
- 0.1% identified as a trans man (approximately 48,000 people)
- 0.1% identified as a trans woman (48,000)
- 0.06% identified as non-binary (30,000)
- 0.04% wrote in a different gender identity (18,000).
Whilst we are now a little bit clearer about the size of the trans population, as the question was optional, and non-response was significant, we still don’t have a precise answer. Perhaps we need to recognise that some people don’t want their identity to be pinned down.
Full results are available on the Census website, which provides regional data as well.
Eight out of the 10 local authorities with the largest proportion of the population whose gender identity was different from their sex at birth were in London. Newham and Brent topped the list. The top two non-London local authorities were Oxford and Norwich. Brighton and Hove, Norwich and Cambridge had the highest proportions writing in non-binary.
For many of us these results will come as no surprise, given that we will have one or two trans people in our wider circle of friends and acquaintances. Generally their gender identity is immaterial in most circumstances. In my own case this includes someone I buy diesel from at the local garage and someone else who has been part of the local anti-lockdown campaign. We have never discussed their gender identity and have no reason to do so.
In the past year I have, however, encountered a larger number of people angrily accusing others of being fascists whilst proclaiming ‘trans rights are human rights’. At a Women’s Rights rally in Brighton last September the people who had come to listen to speakers talking about the importance of single sex spaces and other topics were separated from a group of protestors by a police cordon. The protestors were standing up for ‘trans rights’ and tried to drown out the speakers. Many were masked; some were dressed ‘antifa -like’ entirely in black.
Having attended two such events, I am as yet unclear as to what ‘rights’ the trans campaigners were shouting about. One had a placard saying they (singular) had the right to be gorgeous. I do not remember this being in the UN Convention on Human Rights. Some seemed to be very angry. When the women who wanted single sex spaces tried to talk to the protestors many found that dialogue was impossible.
I am pleased that the Census has provided some data on this. Minority rights are important. Whilst the size of the minority should not have any bearing on the importance of their rights, it does have some bearing on the nature of the public dialogue, especially when two rights conflict. This is the case with single sex spaces or sports and gender identity. Sex and gender (definition-wise) are not the same.
The census will hopefully provide some ‘official clarity’ on the subject. It first ‘came across my desk’ around five years ago when I was part of a technical group overseeing changes to the National Readership Survey. We were asked by the Chair “how would trans people express their gender”. The answer should have been simple: “We observe and record sex (we don’t ask gender) such that we are consistent with the census” (which at that time reported sex not gender). Much time was spent figuring out what to do. Sometimes discussions got a bit heated. When we did introduce a question about gender identity, in my mind it caused more problems than it solved. There was no constructive help from the person who asked the question. At the time they (singular) were also Chair of Stonewall (involved in moving the equality organisation from campaigning solely for lesbian, gay and bisexual people to include trans people). I am aware this move is not very popular with some lesbian and gay men and women and can understand why.
The Census also provides numbers on sexual orientation for the first time:
- 92.5% of participants answered the question
- 43.4 million people (89.4%) identified as straight or heterosexual
- 1.5 million people (3.2%) identified with an LGB+ orientation (“Gay or Lesbian”, “Bisexual” or “Other sexual orientation”).
The figures support the view that gender identity and sexual orientation are different matters, even if they overlap for some people. Hopefully this will help underpin future discussions about gender identity and these will be able to take place in a civilised manner. Dialogue is a natural partner of free speech without which the world becomes divided and dogmatic. That is something most of us do not want.
Nigel Jacklin is a statistician and market researcher who founded The Democratic Network, which helps people get involved in democratic decision-making. Find him on Twitter.
Stop Press: Stonewall has egg on its face, having claimed in a document entitled ‘The Truth About Trans’, that the trans population of the U.K. is 600,000. Steerpike in the Spectator has more.
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That’s a bad sign.
Extending furlough means extending restrictions is on the cards.
And one more step towards the adoption of UBI.
yes – you couldn’t do it all in one go
All those “conspiracy theorists” who were on about UBI at the start look righter and righter all the time.
Most of the conspiracy theories from the start have either come to pass or are looking very likely to – compulsory vaccines, vaccine passports, the end of paper money, inflation and rising prices, ongoing lockdowns, UBI to name just a few
Good old Ickey!
Communism in all but use of the word.
Credit communism. It’s inevitable when so called central banks are really committees that set the price of debt and thus prices for the economy, a hallmark of marxist lunacy.
“On the cards” Lol. Only a loony would ever have expected all restrictions to be lifted on 21st June, never to return, and the government have already been pretty clear that Track and Trace and travel restrictions will continue for the foreseeable future, and of course the vaccine program with boosters and new vaccines for variants will grind on for decades. Some restrictions may be lifted in June but to think that the coronamadness will be over then is simply fanciful. It’s the new normal.
No. Its not “normal”.
“New normal” isnt a thing. Its abnormal.
Stop accepting it.
I will never accept it as long as I live, and will never give up trying to convince people of the truth, but we need to recognise where we are which is that the insane narrative continues to dominate
Good man. Stay strong with integrity. Totally with you on that one.
the “new normal” TM
USA completely open, internal flights busier than ever. Mental illness will take over in little Britain. It looks like it already has in the gov’t and it’s advisors.
The picture at the beginning of this item makes me want to vomit….please, not again!
He looks like he’s still in school
FURLOUGH = LOCKDOWN
Furlough= bribing idiots not to think to hard about all the bad stuff that’s coming their way.
Paying people to do nothing; all part of training the sheep to abdicate responsibility for their own lives to the state.
Which is the opposite of what we should be doing; open up, get people working again to regain a sense of normality, (traditional, not “new”), and let the anxious see that there is nothing to fear and everything to gain from having close contact with their fellow man.
We all know UBI was the plan from the start, why not just admit it?
unearned money will not be spent wisely and will quickly work it’s way to those title holders.
This is appalling news. It’s their usual, predictable strategy of “leak it to the press” to see how the public responds. Get angry. Lockdown must STOP, and never happen again.
Gove is a snake, utterly appalling creature.
When this rot is allowed to continue, you know that good can no longer prevail…
I suggest if Sturgeon wants furlough extended the the scottish ministration can pay for it. Sucking at the English teat is becoming very tiresome.
She certainly has a brass neck, covered with a tartan scarf. I thought her idea is for a Caledonian Utopia, pap-fed as an EU subordinate state, wholly free of the nasty English and their money. Hypocrisy.
Inevitable. They couldn’t work the scam without bribery.
But don’t blame the punters – it’s the simple profit motive : a reward/effort equation.
I know people who liked furlough and others that hated it
Yes, so do I. And to be fair, most people I know have work itself as part of the reward side of the equation. Only sad misanthropes with their own problems tend to attribute furlough generally as being driven from bottom up.
Put Fear+Reward for submission together, tho’, and you have a powerful self-reinforcing psychological combination.
Build Back Better. Oddly I’ve a sense I heard that before.
How come I am not a penny better off from their Build Back Better scheme and we are thousands of pounds worse off ? Gove’s clearly been snorting the white coco powder in Islington again.
Most people will be tens of thousands of pounds worse off with “build back better” once his green nonsense kicks in fully.
Build Back Better for the few, not the many.
Michael Gove snorted coke and the fizzy bubbles went right up his nose.
Long Cocaine.
They should just call it what it is, UBI and have done with lying.
‘Build back better’, ah there was me thinking this was ‘the green deal’; you know all those heat pumps to replace gas boilers etc. Well unfortunately for the UK government ( and most others) the German government has just put a rather large spoke in that wheel.
Their report ( linked below in English) on dangers to health from water supplies contaminated by the acid coming from heat pumps , and their call to stop installing them, may lead to more life yet from the old gas boiler.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/press/pressinformation/trifluoroacetic-acid-from-fluorinated-refrigerants
Every penny these lunatics throw down the toilet serves only to reduce the value of money for everyone. Don’t any of these people realise what they are doing? With what has been spent already we will be lucky to avoid prices doubling within a matter of months and unlike with progressive inflation the level of wages will not even remotely keep pace with the price rises. Hyper inflation is particularly nasty for those at the lower end of the food chain who will undoubtedly find themselves on or below the bread line.
Undoubtedly there will be calls for so called “green taxes” to try and make up some of the balance which will of course hurt those at the lower end of the spectrum the most.
Printing money works until suddenly it doesn’t, and the proverbial hits the fan and everyone’s pockets.
“On the cards”? It was ALWAYS the bloody plan! UBI anyone?
Gove’s only hope of advancement lies in technocracy, not democracy. Little wonder that he’s trying to hurry it along.
I am at present wearing a t – shirt proclaiming ‘ Resist Technocracy’
After a long gap, I have been re-reading the memoirs of the German WW2 general Guderian. After he and other generals were dismissed by Hitler, he wrote:-
“The result of the ill-feeling thus engendered was the law passed by the Reichstag on April 26th, 1942, which removed the last checks to totalitarian authority in the legislative, executive and judicial spheres. This law (which granted Hitler the right to change law by decree without discussion by the Reichstag) marked the culmination of a long process which had begun with the unfortunate Authorisation Act of March 23rd, 1933; the German dictator was now given complete despotic power. Germany had thus ceased to be a modern state whose structure was based on the rule of law.”
That was happening in Germany 79 years ago, and I never thought, when I first read that passage almost forty years ago, that I would, in 2021, be living in a country which now so closely resembles the Third Reich.
Indeed. By 1942, many Germans had already experienced living in a dictatorship under the Kaiser, so it wasn’t too difficult for Hitler to assume the role. In contrast, the supine attitude of the British people to what has been coming their way over the past 30 or so years has been quite nauseating. Bread and circuses, anyone?
And the unvaccinated become the new Jews, a target to blame for government policy of continued restrictions.
We can point to Florida as an example of no restrictions, no masks, no coerced vaccinations, but it won’t make any difference. People become illogical and fanatical.
We mustn’t weaken on ensuring that our freedoms are returned in full, we must not become complacent simply because we are closer to the day when our glorious leader Alexander Johnson has promised to grant us (some) of our freedoms back on the 21st June – if he took our freedoms away once he can just as easily take them away again … and he will – so we must send a powerful message to this government that its penchant for totalitarianism will not be tolerated again.
I’m going to be there – hope you can make it too …
They will wait until he end of the summer rioting season before they sack 5m+
Mengele Gove should be fired, he is totalitarian scum,
He will fund this but not a decent catch-up programme for schoolchildren.
Priorities -pah!
The only thing they need to catch up with is normality.
More FUD…
Has any real journalist asked the minister what build back better means
They could ask, but I doubt they’d get a sensible answer.
It means a teacher in every classroom.
The establishment took a financial hit with Brexit raising wages for the average worker and their rents falling so this is more taxpayers money for them.
Gove is another in a long line of annoying, bent finger pointing fucktards I would never tire of kicking.
Time for violence.
What the F does build back better even mean? Whose version of better? better for whom? how will this better look? what does that mean for the average joe in the street?
Why do the MSM allow these people to come out with these little slogans without asking them to define what that means.
Plus Gove has clearly been briefed by psyops to keep the alarm level up in the Public by the indication that Furlough extension means Lockdown coming back thus the sadistic game of continuing the terror on the British Public.
It’s the new way of doing politics, creeping towards things that people would never accept but for the fact that they were gradually and relentlessly nudged there.
Zero-covid + closed borders. Started months ago, almost there.
UBI, slowly making a sizeable chunk of the population unemployable and addicted to state support.
Vaccine passports, government still having to play hot and cold with it, but will definitely be introduced for travel and when people get used to that, they’ll extend it to everyday life.
Of course it would be Mengele Gove spouting this rubbish, he would tell you, with a straight face, that Manchester United play their home games in Eindhoven, wearing black and white stripes.
Eff off Gove. You want to control us into the foreseeable.
“Build Back Better”
Whoo hoo – we’re with you.
There is a MASSIVE problem with “Build Back Better” – it makes the assumption that what we had before, in this case pre March 2020 was fundamentally bad. The obvious question:
In what way was it bad? Examples please.
Now could you explain in which ways you are going to rebuild in ways that are eminently better than what we had before.
Or is this a case of destruction for destruction’s sake?
Build back better! How exactly does one build back better when they destroyed their own country. Oh people you have been warned this is only the beginning of the hell coming. Only the beginning. Especially when idiots like Gove repeat the mantra WEF “build back better” you know they are determined to get the job done. How much were they paid? What were they promised? Are their children part of the protected. It is their future.
“broad shoulders of the U.K. Treasury”. Well that puts paid to Sturgeon’s belief that Scotland can be financially independent.
Of course furlough will be extended! Only way to keep this pantomime going. Pay us all (?) off! We ,as a nation, won’t continue to obey our masters of they ain’t paying us! We now live in a country where the frightened, the gullible and the stupid follow the bast*rds!
Remember that “magic money tree” that they don’t have? Keep on shaking it, don’t they!
Nicola Sturgeon would have the begging bowl out, wouldn’t she?
I’m beginning to think some of us are work-shy.
“Build back better” is a maxim of the New World Order control freaks. Destroy people’s lives with a hyped pandemic or tax the hell out of the energy they need, and people will bend to their masters.
Dangerous clowns. Drunk on the power the scamdemic has given them and the endless fake money pouring from the BOE. Much of that prnted money is for furlough – essentially, a from of dole. The Government issuing you income and in return you be a good boy and girl.
Reject all the garbage. like the hundreds of thousands marching in London last week-end (not that the MSM would acknowledge it).
I see a picture of Gove and I now understand what prompts random acts of violence like punching a stranger on the nose!
That idiot Gove says thanks to the broad shoulders of the treasury he can pay for more people to be paid for doing nothing. It’s nothing of the sort, it’s the taxes of people working and companies keeping going in the difficult restricted circumstances that his hopeless government are retaining without reason that will be paying for this now and for years to come.
No one in the “revolving door sector” (politics-industry-financial, in other words the Cabal) gives a damn about the money printing or debts being racked up, no one ever expects it to be repaid. Hyperinflation is coming soon as Michael Burry of sub-prime big short fame noted recently. The only difference with the Weimar Republic will be that we have now moved to digital (not paper) currency, but you still won’t be able to buy anything with the digital currency.