Cancer referrals have been missed and previous convictions overlooked because biological sex has been erased from official data on health, crime and education, a review has found. The Times has more.
The review, commissioned by the last Conservative government and released on Wednesday, found that the word “gender” started to replace “sex” in the collection of data in the 1990s and that for the past ten years “robust and accurate data on biological sex” has been lost.
The study, led by Professor Alice Sullivan from University College London, investigated all public bodies and found “the meaning of sex is no longer stable in administrative or major survey data”.
Sullivan’s review found inconsistencies in the way sex and gender were recorded and conflated. Some official surveys were found to remove sex altogether and only collected information on gender identity.
This included a Royal Navy sexual harassment survey, which asked how respondents identified rather than asking for their sex “despite its obvious relevance to the subject matter”.
In another case, a children’s camping programme raised safeguarding concerns through collecting data on gender identity, with male, female and “other” response options.
Some of those interviewed for the study said there was a “hostile environment” in raising the issues within their organisations and Sullivan said that ministers should “consider the vulnerability of government and public bodies to internal activism that seeks to influence outward-facing policy”.
Sullivan said the Office for National Statistics had “radically changed” how it viewed sex in terms of data collection and recommended that the UK Statistics Authority — which oversees the ONS — should consider launching a review of activism and impartiality within the civil service in relation to the production of official statistics.
It is understood that the review has been circulated to all government departments by Peter Kyle, the technology secretary, with an acknowledgment that accurate data collection is essential.
Sullivan said: “This should not be seen as a zero-sum game between characteristics. We can and should collect data on both [sex and gender identity]. Acknowledging sex does not erase gender identity or vice versa.”
The review found that across the NHS “gender identity is consistently prioritised over or replaces sex”. She said that records that traditionally represented biological sex were “unreliable and can be altered on request by the patient” and that there had been a “gradual shift away from recording and analysing sex in NHS datasets”.
This meant there were “clear clinical risks”, such as patients not being called up for cervical smear tests or prostate exams, or the misinterpretation of lab results. Sullivan said: “This has potentially fatal consequences for trans people.”
In one case a paediatrician said that a child had been brought up in the preferred gender of the mother, which was different to their birth-assigned gender. “She [the mother] had gone to the GP and requested a change of gender/NHS number when the baby was a few weeks old and the GP had complied. Children’s social care did not perceive this as a child protection issue,” the doctor reported.
Sullivan’s review said the patient’s ability to change their records “puts transgender individuals at a particular disadvantage and as such is potentially discriminatory”. She said that in some cases samples such as blood tests could be rejected by laboratories or sex-specific cancer referrals could be missed.
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