This new 232-page government-commissioned study, called “the Sullivan Report” after its leader, opens this way (click on the screenshot below to see the whole thing).

This independent review was commissioned in February 2024 by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology.

The aims of the review are as follows:

i. Identifying obstacles to accurate data collection and research on sex and on gender identity in public bodies and in the research system

ii. Setting out good practice guidance for how to collect data on sex and gender identity

All public bodies, as defined by the Cabinet Office, are in scope of the review. The review also considers research institutions and organisations from outside the public sector, where relevant to the aims of the review.

The review is UK wide, respecting the devolved nature of areas of responsibility within the research and development landscape and the collection of relevant areas of data and statistics. This report concerns data and statistics. A further report will examine barriers to research.

The review is led by Professor Alice Sullivan, University College London, assisted by policy analysts Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, and Dr Kathryn Webb, University of Oxford.

I’ll confess that I’ve only skimmed it, and am relying on the summary given by the Times of London. (If you subscribe click the headline below, or find the piece archived here.) It does, however, appear to draw on many studies: over 500 of them.

The upshot is that biological sex (male or female, with a very, very tiny proportion of true intersexes) is not consistently identified in government documents, even though some of them mandate “gender identification”.  While having both is usually okay by me, the absence of biological sex has, so the report (and the Times article) argue, caused the loss of useful data as well as harm to people.  On pp. 5-6 the report makes ten recommendations, and here are just three:

2. Data on sex should be collected by default in all research and data collection commissioned by government and quasi-governmental organisations. By default, both sexes should be included in all research, including clinical trials, and sex should be considered as a factor in analysis and reporting. As a general rule (with some obvious exceptions), a 50/50 sex ratio is desirable in studies

3. The default target of any sex question should be sex (in other words, biological sex, natal sex, sex at birth). Questions which combine sex with gender identity, including gender identity as recognised by a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) have a mixed target. Sex as a biological category is constant across time and across jurisdictions, whereas the concept of ’legal sex’ subject to a GRC may be subject to change in the future and varies across jurisdictions. Using natal sex future-proofs data collection against any such change, ensuring consistency.

6. The word ‘gender’ should be avoided in question wording, as it has multiple distinct meanings, including: a synonym for sex; social structures and stereotypes associated with sex; and gender identity. If a question targeting gender identity is worded as a question on gender, this is likely to mislead many respondents. Questions on sex have also often been labelled as ‘gender’. Change in the use of the term ‘gender’ means that it is important that questions on sex are labelled explicitly as such.

Plus given that there are over a hundred genders on lists I’ve seen, what does it add to a survey to add “gender identity”? I don’t really object to it, but really, what does gender add for official forms if biological sex is already specified?

Here are some ways the data are erratic (I’m not sure that any study asked for “natal sex” or “biological sex” sex rather than just “sex,” which these days is ambiguous.  (That information might be in the long report.) Quotes from the Times:

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.

. . .The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also previously caused confusion by proposing respondents to the 2021 England and Wales census could answer the sex question in terms of their subjective gender identity, rather than their sex. It was later forced to change this through judicial review.

This ambiguity also occurs in the National Health Service (NHS):

The review found that across the NHS “gender identity is consistently prioritised over or replaces sex”. She said that records that traditionally represented biological sex were “unreliable and can be altered on request by the patient” and that there had been a “gradual shift away from recording and analysing sex in NHS datasets”.

And the report describes some of the palpable harms deriving from this inconsistency. Bold headings are mine:

Medical Harm:

This meant there were “clear clinical risks”, such as patients not being called up for cervical smear tests or prostate exams, or the misinterpretation of lab results. Sullivan said: “This has potentially fatal consequences for trans people.”

In one case a paediatrician said that a child had been brought up in the preferred gender of the mother, which was different to their birth-assigned gender. “She [the mother] had gone to the GP and requested a change of gender/NHS number when the baby was a few weeks old and the GP had complied. Children’s social care did not perceive this as a child protection issue,” the doctor reported.

It’s even worse because in the UK (and many states in the U.S.) people can change their official records to a non-natal sex, which can also be harmful:

Sullivan’s review said the patient’s ability to change their records “puts transgender individuals at a particular disadvantage and as such is potentially discriminatory”. She said that in some cases samples such as blood tests could be rejected by laboratories or sex-specific cancer referrals could be missed.

Legal Harm:

In the justice system Sullivan found that definitions of sex and gender were “highly inconsistent”.

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”.

She said: “Many police forces record crimes by male suspects as though they were committed by women at the request of the perpetrator or based on how a person ‘presents’.”

Guidance notes for officers on the Police National Computer (PNC) state that it is “quite possible” that an arrested person who has acquired a gender recognition certificate and not informed the police “could be released or otherwise dealt with before any link to their previous offending history is known (through confirmation by fingerprints)”. The review found that this was also likely to be true of those who self-declared a different sex and name.

Distortion of educational data:

In schools and universities, the review found that children and young adults were more likely to report being transgender but that without biological sex being recorded data that showed the different life outcomes, including earnings, could not be relied upon.

The review said: “Significant sex-based effects could either be missed, because they are wrongly assumed to be due to changing practices in self-identification, or conversely wrongly inferred, as the data has become impossible to read reliably for sex-based effects.”

Pay differentials:

The lack of reliable data was also found to have an impact on pay gap reporting.

UK public authorities and private sector employers with headcounts of 250 or more have been required by law to report annually on their gender pay gap — which records how much less women earn than men.

However, those who identify as non-binary are excluded from the data and gender identity is recorded rather than sex.

Sullivan’s recommendations.  These are given in extenso following p. 6 in the report, but Sullivan is opposed to reporting gender identity (and I think this means non-natal sex for transsexuals):

It has been argued that recording biological sex alongside gender identity could interfere with a person’s human rights.

However, Sullivan found — and presented legal advice to back it up — that recording sex as gender identity was in itself likely to breach UK data laws and potentially human rights laws.

She said: “There are things that statistics cannot do. Statistics are not a means of personal self-expression. They can neither validate nor invalidate individual identities, and they cannot see into people’s souls.”

Remember that this is a report commissioned by the UK government, so take it up with them if you don’t like what it says. However, I do agree that on birth certificates and official documents, like driver’s licenses, what should appear is not gender identity but biological sex. If you want to add “gender self-assignment” to things like medical records, I don’t have a huge objection to that so long as biological sex is the primary thing identified, because I see no medical advantage, and palpable disadvantage, to recording only gender identity.

I’m still waiting to see how advocates of the “multidimensional, multivariate” concept of sex tell us how to DEFINE AND DETERMINE people’s sex. For the Sullivan Report, at least, trans women are not women, nor are trans men men—not in the official sense.

h/t: Richard

I’ve written sentences like this many times: “While biological sex is a binary, gender in humans forms more of a spectrum.” But I was never really sure what “gender” meant. I know that it’s generally synonymous with “sex”, but that is clearly not what I meant when I spoke as I did above. What did I mean?  Some time ago, I read philosopher Alex Byrne’s book Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions, which parses the term at hand. Alex concluded that “gender” is a confusing term that shouldn’t be used. In fact, when I read his book I agreed with him. But somehow I continued to use the word “gender”, perhaps to show that I don’t impugn, erase, or dismiss people who don’t adhere strictly to the behaviors and appearances associated with the two types of people in the sex binary.

So I called Alex yesterday to get some more clarity on the term, and now I think I see what the problem is. He sent me an article from Fairer Disputations that gives about as succinct an account of the problems as I’ve seen. Click below to read it:

Gender is of course used as an indicator of what type of noun you’re using (“le/la” in French, “der, das, and die” in German), and it’s also been used for decades as a synonym for sex. But that’s not what people mean today when they refer to “gender”, as I did in my first sentence above. Sometimes it’s used only with respect to human sex: “a woman” is a gender in humans, as is “a man.”  But that makes it synonymous with sex save that the two terms refer to adult versions of biological sex. A “woman”, for instance is an adult human female. You can then use “girl” and “boy” for the juvenile versions.

What do activists or “progressives” mean? It’s not clear! In the end, Alex’s article makes a persuasive case that instead of using “gender—which can mean other things like where one sits on the internal “sex feeling” spectrum, or the degree of masculinity or femininity expressed in a performed sex role—and so on, one should simply use simple English to express your meaning. For example, when I was younger people used the word “tomboy” to refer to a girl who showed masculine behaviors or appearances. Isn’t it simpler to just explain what you mean by “tomboy”, then, instead of classifying it as a gender, saying Ia girl who shows many masculine traits/behaviors.  If we are referring to people who feel they are of both sexes, you can say the person is “androgynous”.  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how Alex starts his piece:

It is sometimes said that “gender” had an exclusively grammatical sense before the 1950s, as in “The gender of ‘chaise’ in French is feminine.” Henry Fowler, the English philologist and author of the quirky 1926 style guide A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, sternly pronounced that the word “is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine g., meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.”

But the (non-jocular) use of “gender” to mean sex—male and female—goes back centuries, with the Oxford English Dictionary recording an example from 1474 (“His heyres [heirs] of the masculine gender…”). These days there is an embarrassment of riches: “gender” is used to mean social roles and norms attaching to the two sexes, or masculinity and femininity, or an internal sense of being male/female/neither, and more. Many words have multiple meanings, which usually doesn’t produce incomprehension, but “gender” is a kind of lexical brainworm, a parasite eating away at understanding. As Abigail Favale puts it in a recent essay, it’s “a word with no stable definition that is nonetheless endlessly deployed, shifting meanings to suit a particular agenda.” This “linguistic bedlam” prompts her to ask whether we should “abandon the word” or “attempt to redeem” it.

Here’s the crux of the problem: the two most common uses of “gender” by gender activists or confused people like me:

Other proposals for what the word should mean face a similar question. For instance, the UCLA psychiatrist Robert Stoller defined “gender” his 1968 book Sex and Gender as masculinity and femininity (more exactly, albeit rather obscurely, as “the amount of masculinity and femininity found in a person”). Masculinity and femininity are interesting subjects, but there is no obvious reason why we need a special word to talk about them. The words “masculinity” and “femininity” will do quite nicely.

To take another example, “gender” is sometimes understood to refer to sex-typed social roles, “the social roles expected for males and females within a given culture,” which we do not want to ignore. But again, alternative terminology is ready to hand: “sex roles” is a decent compact label, and “gender roles” is even better, with “gender” understood to mean sex. Abbreviating “sex roles” or “gender roles” with the single word “gender” only makes the intended meaning less clear. [Note that here Alex does countenance the use of “gender”, though I’d use “sex roles” as you don’t then have to define what a “gender role” is.]

As to women, men, girls, and boys, there is no need to introduce any new vocabulary, because we already have the appropriate words. If we want to talk about women, men, girls and boys collectively, we can use “people” or “humans.” If we want to talk about women and girls, a single word will do the trick, namely “female.” That is because “female” has a restricted sense in which it applies to “a person of the sex that can bear offspring,” to quote the OED. (That is actually the first entry for the noun “female” in that dictionary; the broader sense in which the word applies to Lola is the second entry.)

More importantly, we must contend with the sense of “gender” on which it is a synonym of “sex.” As the moon pulls the sea to the shore, “the latter-day upheaval in sexual mores” pulls “gender” towards sex, male and female. Resistance is as useless as King Canute’s attempt to stop the incoming tide. Favale’s proposal inevitably introduces an unwelcome ambiguity where there was none before. In one sense, Taylor Swift’s gender is female. In Favale’s sense, Swift’s gender is either woman (the four-gender version), or else woman-or-girl (the two-gender version).

Byrne thus recommends that we deep-six the use of the word except insofar as it’s synonymous with sex, but it’s too late for that. As Alex says, “the high priests of genderology will not see the light.”

The pushback to Trump’s new EO (and the HHS definition of sex) specifying that biological sex be put on all government documents comes in two forms. One could specify the present and confusing notion of gender, but there are hundreds of specified “genders” and it’s impractical to do that, as well as confusing for anyone using the documents. The other suggestion is to put your “felt” sex on the documents rather than your biological sex.  That’s entirely possible given that in many states you can go back and change your “sex” on your birth certificate to correspond with what sex you feel yourself to be Thus a trans-identified male could change the birth “sex” to “woman”.

To me that seems a bit of a lie, because, to me (and of course this will get me in trouble), a transwoman is not the same thing as a biological woman, and ditto for a transman and a biological man. It’s also damaging for women in sports, as the NCAA now says that what it says on your birth certificate tells you whether you can compete in men’s or in women’s sports.  In other non-official documents, of course, anything goes. But the government, and the states, should not be participating in what is effectively lying when they countenance using “felt sex” to fill in the blank for “sex.” For none of this is intended to damage or “erase” people, though of course some may have hurt feelings.  But of course women who are beaten in athletics by a biological male also have hurt feelings.

Finally, those benighted people who advance a multifactorial, multidimensional definition of “sex” (hormones, chromosomes, genitals, etc.), under which they don’t ever specify a way to determines one’s biological sex, must surely agree that there are more than two specification for “felt sex”!  What do you do then?

Readers can (and will) dissent of course, but that’s what the comments are for. Oh, and I just realized that I’ve violated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which says, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”