How many people in Britain are transgender? Until today, there hasn’t been an official answer to that question. New census data give us a number: there are 262,000 people living in England and Wales in March 2021 who ‘identified with a gender different from their sex registered at birth’, in the words of the Office for National Statistics.
Making some broad assumptions for Scotland and Northern Ireland, we might therefore guess that the trans population of the UK is around 300,000. Which raises some slightly awkward questions for people and organisations who have been keen to suggest that the trans population is much bigger. Organisations like Stonewall, for example.
Stonewall, Britain’s leading trans rights campaign group, has spent several years telling politicians and the public that the trans population is growing rapidly, meaning more attention and resources must be devoted to their needs.
According to Stonewall, ‘the best estimate at the moment is that around 1 per cent of the population might identify as trans, including people who identify as non-binary. That would mean about 600,000 trans and non-binary people in Britain, out of a population of over 60 million.’
(Actually, based on today’s population, it would be closer to 700,000.)
That estimate of 600,000 trans people comes from a Stonewall document amusingly entitled ‘The Truth About Trans’. Now that the census has shown that the truth is that Stonewall has been overstating the number of trans people in the UK by at least 100 per cent, will the campaigners correct the record?
Not if the Stonewall twitter feed is anything to go by. Stonewall has tweeted approvingly about the census numbers, citing that figure of 262,000 trans people – but making no mention of how badly wrong its own estimates were.
Stonewall is a lobbying charity that makes its money by telling big companies and public bodies they need to pay for training to make sure they’re accommodating Britain’s large and growing trans population.
Surely it didn’t just invent 300,000 non-existent trans people to support its own lobbying and sales pitch?
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