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.
Read more: Is Newham ‘More Trans’ Than Brighton? Only If You Trust the Wonky Census Data
