The UK NHS, continuing its role as the vanguard of the woke, social justice intersectional politics movement, has been caught with its non-binary underpants around its knees and been told to gather data on the biological sex of patients. This must be serious as even The Guardian ran the story.
Articles on the issue are long on details about why this is a sensible turn of events, but short on outrage that it was even necessary to make such a decision. How on earth could it ever be the case that, instead of recording the biological sex of patients, some corners of the NHS were recording gender according to how the patient self-identified?
Did the thought never cross the mind of anyone involved in the process of collecting such data, that in their extreme efforts they were going to not to offend the sensibilities of transgender people (aka the mentally ill), lives were being endangered? “Yes, we’ll get your gender right, Priscilla, but too bad if your prostate swells up to the size of a grapefruit because we didn’t call you in for your PSA test.”
The government webpage on the Sullivan report which investigated the collection of data on sex and gender by public bodies, is written in such a neutral, verging-on-self-congratulatory, tone. It is much more “didn’t we do well to notice this anomaly”, rather than “how the hell did this happen in the first place?”
Having set out to identify “obstacles to accurate data collection and research on sex and on gender identity in public bodies and in the research system”, it takes over seven thousand words to explain what it found and to issue recommendations. Recommendations, mind you, not actual instructions.
What possible ‘obstacles’ could there be to collecting such data? The occasional transgender female may be hard to distinguish from a real female and vice versa. But, with most transgender women having hands like spades, an angular jaw and a gait like farmer Giles on a ploughed field, it can’t be that hard. Some even have beards for goodness’ sake.
Of course, we must express sympathy for the truly intersex individuals with genetic anomalies that give them vestiges of both reproductive tracts. But we are not referring to a handful of people or to genuine biological aberrations. Figure 1 of the report shows that up to the millennium, while the term ‘gender’ was creeping into official questionnaires as a replacement for ‘sex’, its use tripled in the first decade of the millennium.
From 2010 onward, the use of gender as someone’s identity crept in and increased by an order of magnitude in the next five years, and continues to increase. Up to that point, the use of these terms still, generally referred to sex, but in 2015 the use of ‘gender identity’ arose. Its use had increased by an order of magnitude by 2020, until we arrived at the point where less than a fifth of official questionnaires used the term ‘sex’ at all.
To be fair to the authors of the government webpage on the collection of data on sex and gender by public bodies, they are uncompromising in their recommendations – even if they are only recommendations. To what one imagines is outrage amongst experts on gender studies and intersectionality, the report states “Data on sex should be collected by default in all research and data collection commissioned by government and quasi-governmental organisations.”
Lest some dunderheads are in any doubt about what that means, the authors usefully add that sex refers to “biological sex, natal sex, sex at birth”. Not much wiggle room there for the terminally woke. For good measure, they give an example of the kind of question that could be used: “What is your sex? Response categories: Female, Male”. But again, I ask, how did we ever get to a situation where something like the above had to be spelled out?
The Sullivan report is wider ranging than the NHS, although that is what got most publicity. It is also relevant to the criminal justice system and reiterates the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) Inclusive Data Taskforce recommendations that “sex, age and ethnic group should be routinely collected and reported in all administrative data and in-service process data, including statistics collected within health and care settings and by police, courts and prisons”.
But again that word—“recommendations”. Is nobody in government capable of issuing instructions to those employed by said government? Clearly, the above recommendations are not followed. Thus, we have the situation where men are allowed to be jailed in women’s prisons, Pakistani rape gangs are allowed to flourish for fear of us appearing racist, and riots on our streets because the government did not release the identity of the Southport killer, leading people to fill in the gaps based on precedent.
The Sullivan report has exposed what many of us already knew and, as many of us will strongly suspect, nothing will change as a result.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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I always understood gender was the same as sex (i.e. in 99.99999% of cases M or F). If those who state they are what they are not in a health setting then suffer adverse outcomes as a result or are later exposed as fantasists and embarrassed, tough.
In other settings, where there is any doubt get a second opinion (probably best not from any ‘professional’) by looking at the physical evidence down below as the top bits either added or removed are now merely fashion accessories for the delusional.
Another timely and healthy dose of right-thinking and superb dry satire from our talented medical correspondent! Thank you. We always look forward to your reassuring ‘traditional’ normality and wit to balance much of the deluded woke drivel that many contemporary organisations now spout. And we can think of a few so-called democratic populist movements that could do with your calm intellectual approach to steady their erratic courses…