UK Census Change May Impact Transgender Inclusion

The U.K. census, conducted on a single day every ten years, will ask Brits to declare their sex and not their gender identity, The Daily Mail reports.

Previously, the 2011 survey allowed respondents to declare their gender identity, "whichever you believe is correct, irrespective of the details recorded on your birth certificate."

While the 2021 census includes a new voluntary question for adults on their gender identity, which will help the Office for National Statistics determine the size of Britain's transgender population, transgender rights advocates see these changes as a setback. Strikingly, the voluntary question will not appear on the census in religiously conservative Northern Ireland.

For the 2021 census, respondents are required to identify as the sex listed on either their birth certificate or on the gender recognition certificate. The latter is obtained by those who have gone through formally changing the legal designation of their sex.

Sir Ian Diamond, the head of the government statistics body, said on Radio 4, "the question on sex is very simply your legal sex."

While anti-trans sentiment in the U.S. is typically driven by religious conservatives, in the U.K., journalists, radical feminists, and academics are among the loudest voices against transgender rights.

In July, 150 public figures – including J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky, and Gloria Steinem, among others – signed a public letter bemoaning the threat of political correctness to free speech. In response, a letter signed by 200 authors and publishers defended transgender and non-binary people, suggesting the signatories of the July letter were defending Rowling from the backlash to her continued anti-trans statements.

Transgender lobbyists believe the community is more prominent than what conservative lobbyists think and growing still. Three years ago, the Government Equalities Office said they believed there were between 200,000 and 500,000 transgender people in the U.K. – just under 1 percent of the population. Problematically, since gender recognition certificates were introduced in 2004 by way of the Gender Recognition Act only about 5,000 have since been issued. The figure doesn't come close to fully representing the U.K.'s transgender community.

Alice Sullivan, a sociology professor at University College London, said, "sex is an important predictor of outcomes across all areas of life, including education, wages, crime, and physical and mental health.

"If we do not monitor sex differences, we cannot tackle sex discrimination."

But, Sullivan adds, "Gender identity is not the same thing as sex. Understanding people's identities is important, especially at a time when increasing numbers of girls are identifying as trans or non-binary. But we cannot simply assume that the lives of these girls are not also affected by the fact that they are female."

The Office for National Status said the census would not be postponed by the virus and available both digitally and in its traditional paper version. Furthermore, census field workers will still follow up with ensuring every census form is filled out and collected while taking appropriate pandemic precautions.