You're probably familiar with the Cass Review which came out last year in the UK. That report, which was four years in the making, concluded that gender-affirming care and the medical pathway many kids with gender dysphoria were put on was not the best approach. It resulted in changes to the UK approach to trans issues including putting an end to the use of puberty blockers for pediatric patients.

This month another report came out which identifies another nationwide problem with adopting the trans agenda wholesale. The Sullivan Review, written by sociology professor Alice Sullivan, looked at the ways in which careless use of the words sex and gender resulted in years of poor quality data collection.

In February 2024 the government commissioned the UCL professor Alice Sullivan to review how data on sex and gender identity was collected by public bodies. Her report, published on 19 March, revealed that scores of official statistics and data sets have been corrupted over the past decade. “The term ‘sex’ has lost its ordinary meaning in data collection,” she wrote, with implications not just for public policy, but for safety and safeguarding. Some of the greatest risks have been to children.

In the 1990s, “gender” crept into official data collection as a synonym for sex. Figures shared with the New Statesman show that before 1990 just 2 per cent (or less) of questions used the word gender instead. That increased to 16 per cent during the 1990s, and 37 per cent between 2000 and 2009. More fundamental changes have taken place over the past ten years. First, “gender” began being used not interchangeably with sex, but as a proxy for gender identity. Then, questions on sex were replaced by ones explicitly about gender identity. From 2020, the majority of questions did not ask about sex at all. A quarter asked about respondents’ “gender identity” – a contested and ill-defined concept – and 41 per cent asked about “gender”. Only 17 per cent asked explicitly about sex. How did the UK sleepwalk into collecting years’ worth of dodgy data?

One result of all this was that data collection at every level has suffered. Last September the government announced it would have to downgrade census data collected in 2021 as a result:

The 2021 census was the first time the voluntary question on gender identity was included in the wide-ranging survey, which takes place every 10 years.

It showed that 262,000 people in England and Wales, 0.5% of the population aged 16 and over, reported that their gender identity was different from their sex registered at birth.

Following the publication of the census data, concerns were raised that the question might have been confusing for people whose first language was not English...

It concluded: “The evidence indicates that people may have found the question confusing and therefore gave a response that did not reflect their gender identity.

But the real world problems connected with misleading data go beyond a loss of accurate information. In some cases the lack of accurate data on someone's sex can be life-threatening.

Although a baby’s sex is recorded at birth and the baby is given an NHS number, individuals – or an individual’s parents – can change this marker on request and be given a new NHS number. There is no requirement for any diagnosis of gender dysphoria, treatment or surgery, before this change takes place...

In the Sullivan Review, one paediatrician and safeguarding expert who was consulted for the report gave a shocking example of a mother who changed the gender identity of her child when it was still a baby. “The child had been brought up in the preferred gender of the mother which was different to their birth assigned gender. She 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.”...

In another case, a female who presented as male and whose NHS medical record also indicated they were male, turned out to be pregnant and their foetus was exposed to potentially harmful ionising radiation in error when they were given an x-ray.

Medicine isn't the only area where this matters. The criminal justice system is another example where it matters to record data on sex rather than self-identified gender.

Surrey Police also issued a statement asking for the public’s help in finding a “woman” Skyla Stone – before updating its appeal to refer to Stone as a “transgender woman”. The force was rebuked by its own police and crime commissioner, who said Stone was “a male, however they choose to identify”.

The Sullivan Review 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’.”...

One serving officer told the Police Sex Equality and Equity Network (SEEN) that when arresting a naked suspect it was obvious that he was male but he claimed to be female. “The custody officer told the female police officer to search the subject but she was not comfortable doing so. However because the ‘gender’ of the prisoner had been recorded as female, she was then ordered to do so.”

And in UK schools, many of which now record a child's gender rather than sex and will change it whenever someone asks. 

One father from London said that he was shocked to find that his six-year-old son’s primary school was recording “gender” rather than “sex”, and that one of the little girls in his class was now – at the request of her parents – being referred to as a boy.

“I’ll never forget helping out on one school trip where the children were taken off the coach to go to the toilets and she was led to the boys’ toilets,” he says. “I went with them and it was really awkward because as the other boys were using urinals, she had to go into the cubicle and came out looking – I don’t know – sad, self-conscious? I’ve never forgotten it as I’ve never seen that expression on a child’s face before.”

The fact that we have incorrect data on these kids is really just the least significant sign of a larger problem. When you have toddlers and six-year-olds being declared transgender by their parents, that ought to result in a visit from social services rather than a willing acceptance of these claims.

The Sullivan Review is another clear indication that trans ideology has gone too far with no regard for common sense, accuracy or the truth. The truth is that there are many areas in life where sex matters more than gender identity, not just in women's sports. Failure to accurately acknowledge biological sex creates real world problems in many areas of life and going forward the government should make efforts to record accurate data whether trans activists find this offensive or not.