Mick Hartley

Academics – as academics do – have come with a wonderful new idea:

The census could ask “do you menstruate?” instead of “are you female?” to be inclusive of transgender people, a taxpayer-funded study has suggested.

The Future of Legal Gender Project, led by King’s College London, has assessed how legal sex would be abolished in England and Wales and replaced with a single gender category, with the aim of contributing to policy discussions.

Well yes, it would certainly contribute to policy discussions: "What does this mean?" "What's the point of this?" Or simply, "What the fuck??"

The underlying assumption, clearly, is that the abolition of a sex category in the census would be A Good Thing. It's just a question of how we get there. Luckily some great minds have been hard at work on this very subject….

After four years of interviews with 200 charity workers, civil servants, lawyers, government officials and the public, it suggested that a “soft decertification” of small changes in organisations could replace any lurch to “gender-neutral law”.

A "soft decertification" rather than a lurch? Yep, that should do it.

The study, which received £579,717 of taxpayer funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, acknowledged the concerns of campaigners who argue that biological sex provides vital binary data and that trans women are not women.

But the research said that in surveys such as the census, respondents understand the question on their sex in different ways – some “assume the question is about their genitals, about their legal status or about the sex they were registered as having at birth”. Others will say their sex is “based on the social category they live in”, it noted.

As a result, the researchers said: “In some contexts, more precise questions may help to avoid distortions or inaccuracies, for example, ‘do you menstruate?’ or ‘are you perceived or treated as a man at work?’ rather than, or in addition to, ‘are you male or female?’.”

It explained that “acts of sexism may also be far more dependent on how someone is perceived by others than how they self-identify”.

So people don't understand the question "are you male or female?", and would find it easier if they were asked if they menstruate, or if they're treated as a man or a woman at work? Amazing.

As it happens many women – if I can use that term without causing too much confusion – do not in fact menstruate. They may, for instance, be post-menopausal. And is it seriously being suggested that people decide what gender they are by noting whether the conversations they have with work colleagues tend to centre on cars and engineering, or on knitting and cookery? Perhaps they also observe which toilet they find themselves heading to, and draw the appropriate conclusion.

In their final report last month, the seven academics who carried out the study from KCL, Kent and Loughborough universities added: “For medical purposes, good practice means asking questions at a higher level of specificity. ‘Are you menstruating?’ rather than: ‘what is your sex?’”

In written law, they suggested that “building on existing practice, where it is necessary to use pronouns in legislation, gender-neutral pronouns (e.g. they, them, their) should be used”, except where inequality or lack of clarity is the consequence.

Where law mentions gendered physical processes, the researchers suggested it could say “gestational or birth parent rather than mother or woman – this recognises that people other than women also become pregnant”.

I think the Orwell quote might be applicable here. “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”