Last week, the Office for National Statistics published the data on gender identity in England and Wales, as revealed in the latest UK census. For the first time ever, the census included the following question: ‘Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?’ This was asked of those aged 16 and over and 45.7 million people, about 94 per cent of the total, answered. In total, 45.4 million (93.5 per cent) answered yes and 262,000 (0.5 per cent) answered no.
The lobby group Stonewall welcomed the news. ‘It’s incredible to see the true size of the LGBTQ+ community,’ it tweeted. But it must have come as something of a blow, since Stonewall had previously said the size of the country’s trans and non-binary population is 600,000. If we assume the percentage of people who would have answered no to the question in Scotland and Northern Ireland was the same, that would bring the total to about 300,000 in the UK.
That a few thousand people have attracted so much attention to their cause is impressive
But if you drill down into the census data, the number identifying as trans or non-binary is even lower. When those who’d answered no were asked what gender they identified as, 48,000 ticked ‘trans man’, 48,000 ‘trans woman’ and 30,000 ‘non–binary’. The rest either didn’t specify or wrote in another gender. So the actual number identifying as trans and non-binary in England and Wales is 126,000, or 0.26 per cent.
Which makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. Why have politicians been tying themselves in knots about how to define a woman, why has the government been agonising over reforming the Gender Recognition Act since 2018 – and why has Nicola Sturgeon used up what little political capital she has left on railroading through a bill that would lower the age at which a person can apply to change their gender and make it easier to get a gender recognition certificate? There can’t be many votes in it. If the proportion identifying as trans in Scotland is the same as in England and Wales, that’s about 14,000 people.
More to the point, why have so many lavatories been made ‘gender neutral’, at considerable expense and not a little inconvenience – particularly for women – given that just under 0.3 per cent of the population identify as trans? (I’m assuming that people identifying as non-binary wouldn’t mind using the loo that corresponds to their birth sex.) If I suffered from Shy Bladder Syndrome, rendering me un-able to pee at a urinal in a public convenience, I would be a little cheesed off that the minority I belonged to – as high as 25 per cent of the male population, according to some estimates – had been ignored for centuries only for urinals to be ripped out overnight to accommodate the much smaller trans population.
And given how tiny the number of people identifying as trans is, it’s difficult to understand why the conflict between women’s rights and trans rights hasn’t been resolved. On the one hand, you have a group of feminist activists campaigning to exclude biological males from single-sex spaces such as women’s changing rooms and women’s refuges and to stop them being housed in women’s prisons and competing in women’s sports – they can plausibly claim to be standing up for the rights of half the population. On the other, you have a group of trans rights activists (TRAs) campaigning for trans women to be given access to all of the above, even though we’re only talking about 0.1 per cent of the population. I know the rights of minorities should be defended, no matter how small. But the imbalance here is bordering on the ridiculous.
Until now, I had thought of TRAs and lobby groups such as Stonewall as being a bit ham-fisted when it comes to campaigning. Their strategy of refusing to engage in public debate and calling anyone who disagrees with them a ‘bigot’ hasn’t won people over. In the most recent British Social Attitudes survey, the public was found to have become more liberal on most social issues, with the exception of whether they think it should be easier for trans people to change their sex on their birth certificates. On that issue, support has dropped by 21 points in the past two years.
But the fact that a few thousand people have been able to attract so much attention to the issues they care about is quite impressive. Maybe TRAs are in the wrong business. Instead of lobbying the government to change the law, they should go into PR. Left-handed people, those with peanut allergies, the ginger–haired – all of them could benefit from hiring some TRAs to promote their cause. I may suggest it at the next meeting of the Bald Men’s Alliance.
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