By Geraldine Scott, The Times Senior Political Correspondent
London, March 19 – 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.
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.
It is understood that the review has been circulated to all government departments by Peter Kyle, the technology secretary, with an acknowledgment that accurate data collection is essential.
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.”
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”.
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.
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.
In the justice system Sullivan found that definitions of sex and gender were “highly inconsistent”.
Gender 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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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”.
She said: “The destruction of data about sex has caused real harm to individuals and research, and undermined the integrity of policy-making.
“The government should swiftly implement the recommendations of the Sullivan review in order to restore administrative integrity in every place the state collects data on the sex of its citizens.”
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has been contacted for comment.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/sex-gender-review-alice-sullivan-25rgbk8vj
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