Michael Biggs, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Oxford, has written an illuminating piece in the Spectator criticising the effort in the recent census to determine how many transgender people there are in England and Wales. As he points out, the way some questions were posed renders the findings unreliable – such as the bizarre stat that there are more trans people in the London boroughs of Brent and Newham than there are in Brighton.
Here is an extract:
The problem began with the question itself. The ONS did not ask a plain question like: “Are you transgender?” Instead, it chose a convoluted formulation: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”
Those who answered “no” could then write in their gender identity. This question assumes that everyone has a gender identity. It also assumes that everyone was registered at birth. As the human rights campaigner Maya Forstater has emphasised, some immigrants were not registered at birth. The question could have puzzled many respondents outside the professional and managerial classes. How many of them mistakenly answered in the negative?
Anomalies appear when we look at the distribution of the transgender population by local authority. Newham and Brent top the list, with 1.5% and 1.3% respectively. Brighton and Hove, with 1%, ranks only 20th. Yet Brighton is the LGBTQ capital of Britain, home to the country’s longest-running Trans Pride celebration. It is also the site of two universities, including the University of Sussex where some transgender activists and their allies effectively ousted philosopher Kathleen Stock for writing about sex. Could Brighton really have a less salubrious climate for trans people than Newham? It seems unlikely.
This data is also hard to tally with that gathered from a petition to reform the Gender Recognition Act, launched by trans activists in 2021, which attracted 118,000 signatories from England and Wales. By comparing the distribution of signatures to the distribution of the transgender population according to the census, we see that the correlation between the two distributions across all 331 local authorities is close to zero. Brighton and Hove, for example, had more signatories, relative to adult population, than anywhere else except the City of London. Newham and Brent, by contrast, had relatively few signatories, ranking 303rd and 304th respectively.
If places like Newham and Brent had so few inhabitants willing to sign a pro-transgender petition, what accounts for their prominence in the census transgender figures? What these boroughs have are many immigrants for whom English is a second language, and who are therefore liable to be confused by a convoluted question on gender identity. The strongest predictor of the transgender population across 331 local authorities, as measured by the census, is the proportion of people whose main language is not English.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Noah Carl has done his own analysis of the recent census Much of what he unearths corroborates Biggs’s findings. Carl focusses on the unusually high proportion of non-responses to the gender questions and explains how that tarnishes the results.
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