If we no longer dare to record how many of us are male and female, Britain’s lost the plot

WITH a £ 5 million programme of public events and major commemorations at Westminster, it should be quite a centenary party next year as Britain marks the 100th anniversary of votes for women.

So what on earth would the leaders of the suffragette movement have to say, a century on, about a proposal to reclassify gender as optional and – in the words of one leading feminist – to deny a woman’s ‘right to exist’?

British men may be equally concerned to learn that being ‘male’ will also lose its official status if the Office of National Statistics proceeds with a barmy new proposal for the next census in 2021.

In a report marinaded with politically correct jargon, a panel of statisticians argue that the time has come to stop asking people to state whether they are male or female. In future, the ONS suggests, people should not have to answer such a question because it is ‘irrelevant, unacceptable and intrusive’ to certain members of the trans-gender community.

Even the common-sense addition of a third option – ‘other’ – is ruled out on the basis that this ‘was thought to homogenise trans people and differentiate them from the rest of society’.

The answer, according to the ONS experts, is to make the question of sex a voluntary one. At the last census, in 2011, the only voluntary question on the form concerned religious beliefs. Four million people chose not to answer it, while a further third of a million claimed to support ‘alternative’ religions such as ‘Jedi’.

If this mad ONS idea is adopted, it will mean Britain will no longer have any firm data on the number of men and women in the country – a fundamental cornerstone of any study of any society.

GOVERNMENT thing from life planning expectancyon every- and pensions to the provision of education and healthcare would start to become informed guesswork.

Above all, any future attempts to ensure equality between the sexes is going to irreparably compromised if the sexes cease to be identified. Little wonder that so many feminists and equal rights campaigners are up arms.

And it is all being done to avoid upsetting some (though by no means all) members of a tiny sub-section of society for whom a properly conducted census should actually be a good thing anyway. The whole point of the exercise is to identify gaps in society, not to gloss over them.

The last census, in 2011, included the time-honoured question: ‘What is your sex? 1. Male, 2. Female.’

However, the unnamed authors of the ONS report conclude that this simply will not do in future. They cite the following reason: ‘The 2011 “Sex” question was considered to be irrelevant, unacceptable and intrusive, particularly to trans participants, due to asking about sex rather than gender.’

Whereas ‘ sex’ is regarded as a physical phenomenon, ‘ gender’ has come to mean one’s internal identity. The report goes on: ‘The lack of response options for intersex [ people with physical attributesbinaryas make cause forceditem response,neither feelingsnon-it choice,people difficultof male non-responseresponseboth leading[thoseof nor having sexes]to female]who answerto or to potentialand identifyinvalidmake to couldnon-and thea census complaintsthe In othersex as of a words, wholeto more ONS.’we and than shouldn’tcould60 millioncause ask peoplemight find becauseit uncomfortablea handful of them or make Statisticiansa complaint. are not meant to concern themselves with people’s feelings. They are supposed to be dispassionate, number-crunching boffins who give us honest data and leave it to the rest of us to draw our own conclusions and the state to adjust its priorities. Anyone wading through this report – buried on the ONS website under the gloriously unappealing headline: ‘Qualitative research on gender identity: phase 1 summary report’ – will see that mathematical rigour comes a poor second to pandering to the politically correct agenda. We need only apply a little statistical rigour ourselves to see that.

For, deep within, the authors admit their argument is based on conversations with fewer than 50 people. ‘Four focus groups were conducted with the cisgender [those who retain the sex and gender with which they were born] population (total 29 participants) and 18 one-to-one in-depth interviews were conducted with the trans population,’ it says. The language may be turgid but it is also a revealing insight in to the Orwellian thought processes which now govern the highest echelons of the public sector. For example, at one point the authors explore the idea of putting two questions on the census form – first, asking people their sex and, second, asking the gender by which they identify themselves.

This would, surely, cover 99.999 per cent of the population. But the ONS says this would also be a bad idea: ‘ Trans participants [transgender people whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth] had mixed feelings that their two answers, in combination, might or might not result in their trans identity being visible in the census data. Some were positive that they could be represented in statistics about trans people, which they felt was important. However, others expressed negativity, either because if they gave the same answers to the two questions their trans identity would not be visible in data when they wanted it to be; or, conversely, if their answers differed they would be visible in the trans statistics, when they did not want to be visible.’

In other words, none of this microscopic sample of people could actually agree on anything and they weren’t sure what they wanted anyway.

This is a 3,143-word report by (presumably) highly intelligent people at the most important data-gathering unit in the land – the one which will shape government policies towards every facet of our lives for a whole decade.

These great minds have sought to overlook a primordial question asked of every one of us the moment we arrive in this world: boy or girl?

AND yet you will not find the words ‘man’ or ‘ woman’ anywhere in this report. There are 44 references to the ‘ trans’ population compared against 11 to the ‘cis-gender’ community. ‘ Male’ and ‘ female’ get just half a dozen mentions each.

However much ministers may object to the proposal, there is little they can do as the ONS has no ministerial paymaster. Though it used to be an arm of the Treasury, Gordon Brown transferred it to the UK Statistics Authority which enjoys the same independent status as the Bank of England’s monetary committee. It answers to a board of 14 academics and economists (nine men and five women – for the moment, at least).

We already have the absurd situation where a distinguished feminist such as Germaine Greer is banned from universities for saying that a man who changes sex is not the same as a woman born a woman. We have seen public buildings and even schools do away with ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gents’ in favour of unisex facilities, while ‘ trans’ activists attack feminists at public rallies. We even have the headmistress of a top independent London girls’ school (one with the word ‘girls’ in its title) saying that she avoids the word ‘girls’ in case it offends anyone querying their gender identity.

Until now, most people have rolled their eyes and turned away from a debate which grows more toxic and esoteric by the week.

But when we have reached the point that Britain no longer dares to find out how much of its population is male and female, we have crossed a line.

Since our politicians can do nothing about the ONS, we must pin our hopes on a chap called Sir David Norgrove, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority.

So come on, Sir David. It’s time to man up.