Mick Hartley

The rot goes deep. From the Times:

Cancer referrals have been missed and previous convictions overlooked because biological sex has been erased from official data on health, crime and education, a review has found.

The review, commissioned by the last Conservative government and released on Wednesday, found that the word “gender” started to replace “sex” in the collection of data in the 1990s and that for the past ten years “robust and accurate data on biological sex” has been lost.

The study, led by Professor Alice Sullivan from University College London, investigated all public bodies and found “the meaning of sex is no longer stable in administrative or major survey data”.

Sullivan’s review found inconsistencies in the way sex and gender were recorded and conflated. Some official surveys were found to remove sex altogether and only collected information on gender identity.

This included a Royal Navy sexual harassment survey, which asked how respondents identified rather than asking for their sex “despite its obvious relevance to the subject matter”.

In another case, a children’s camping programme raised safeguarding concerns through collecting data on gender identity, with male, female and “other” response options.

Jesus. 

Some of those interviewed for the study said there was a “hostile environment” in raising the issues within their organisations and Sullivan said that ministers should “consider the vulnerability of government and public bodies to internal activism that seeks to influence outward-facing policy”.

Sullivan said the Office for National Statistics had “radically changed” how it viewed sex in terms of data collection and recommended that the UK Statistics Authority — which oversees the ONS — should consider launching a review of activism and impartiality within the civil service in relation to the production of official statistics….

Sullivan said: “This should not be seen as a zero-sum game between characteristics. We can and should collect data on both [sex and gender identity]. Acknowledging sex does not erase gender identity or vice versa.”

*Sigh*. There is no such thing as gender identity. It's nonsense. It's cult-speak. 

Sex can be recorded differently across the prison service, while many police forces record sex as the gender given in a gender recognition certificate.

The review said it meant that data across police forces was not reliable, particularly in patterns of female offending and “the classification of a small number of males within the female category may result in artificial significant increase in female offending rates”.

Yes, we had noticed. See under "not our crimes", ad nauseam. Isla Bryson, Karen White….the list goes on and on. 

Maya Forstater, chief executive of the charity Sex Matters, said the review was “devastatingly clear about the harms caused by carelessness with sex data and a decade-long failure of the civil service to maintain impartiality and uphold data standards”.