The Sunday Telegraph has interviewed Professor Alice Sullivan, the lead author of the recently published Sullivan Review, which urged public bodies to go back to collecting data on biological sex. In a revelation that may surprise some, the Left-wing academic says she thinks Donald Trump is right when it comes to trans issues, eg, that biological men should not be allowed to compete against biological women in women’s sports.
Sullivan, a professor of sociology and a quantitative data scientist at University College London, was commissioned by the previous Conservative government to investigate how data on biological sex is collected by public bodies after deep concerns were raised about the stranglehold of gender ideology in our key organisations. She was chosen to do the review because of her specialist work on the topic and well-publicised views on the need to record accurate data on sex.
“Sex and gender identity are distinct characteristics and are not interchangeable,” has always been her message. “But unfortunately people in a great many organisations don’t understand data collection as a discipline and have been taking advice from other people who don’t understand it either; the result is a mess. We need – we have a responsibility – to record both sex and gender identity”.
She and her team carried out interviews, collated evidence and heard from whistleblowers too fearful of reprisals to speak out. What they uncovered was shocking; across key organisations like the NHS, schools, the police and civil service, factual information on biological sex has been replaced by subjective (and highly contested) feedback on gender identity since 2015.
As a consequence “robust accurate data” has been lost, the review concluded. Criminals – including sex offenders – are being permitted to choose a self-identified ‘gender’ rather than be identified by their biological sex, and the police and courts are complying. Then there are the schools that immediately change children’s ‘gender’ on IT systems if they self-identify as the opposite sex – often without consulting the parents – and civil servants hounded out for perfectly ordinary opinions on biological sex. It’s absurd. Enter the Sullivan Review. For those longing to turn the tide on aggressive gender politics, this detailed 226-page document has drawn a long-overdue line in the sand.
Maya Forstater, CEO of pressure group Sex Matters welcomed its findings: “This review is devastatingly clear about the harms caused by carelessness with sex data and a decade-long failure of the Civil Service to maintain impartiality and uphold data standards. The destruction of data about sex has caused real harm to individuals and research, and undermined the integrity of policy-making. Conflating sex and gender identity is not a harmless act of kindness but a damaging dereliction of duty.”
Or, as transgender lobbyists TransActual put it on their website; “This review is providing an academic gloss on what is a political call to strip trans people of our hard-won rights to privacy, dignity, and respect in public spaces.”
It’s the sort of binary response that has landed Britain in such a nonsensical quagmire in the first place. Sullivan has, in fact, called on organisations to record gender preference as well as sex when gathering data – but nuance has gone the same way as common sense.
Thankfully cometh the hour cometh the quantitative data scientist in the shape of Prof Alice Sullivan, who is as far from a Gradgrindian number-cruncher as you can imagine. To my mind it all feels terribly bleak. But when we meet, in her corner of north London, where the magnolia trees are in full creamy bloom and the local coffee shop is so vegan I almost cause a riot when I unwittingly ask for “real milk”, Sullivan is in surprisingly high spirits.
“I’m optimistic. I think this review marks a watershed. It has taken a long time but I really do believe we are beyond the point where we can be silenced. It’s the beginning of the end for no debate.”
Wouldn’t that be nice? I can’t help suggesting that Donald Trump of all people may have had a part to play in changing the proverbial mood music surrounding gender issues.
“As a life-long Leftie, it feels uncomfortable to be put in the position of agreeing with Donald Trump. But the fact is that he is simply saying that there are two sexes and that this matters, for example in prisons and sports. If Donald Trump says that the earth is round, should Leftists claim it is flat just to avoid being on the same side as him? This kind of tribal thinking has been horribly damaging to the Left. The idiotic positions that the Democrats took on these issues helped to gift the election to Trump. Mainstream politicians of all stripes need to learn from this that denying observable facts about the world is dangerous.”
Worth reading in full.
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