March 20, 2025 - 10:50am
Earlier this week, Surrey Police asked the public for help. The force was trying to find “wanted woman Skyla Stone”, who had failed to attend a recent court hearing. According to the notice, “she” is white and has brown hair. The accompanying photo, however, clearly shows that “she” is a man. The force was rebuked by the Surrey Police and Crime Commissioner, Lisa Townsend, who pointed out that “it is clear to everyone that this is a male, however they choose to identify.”
The practice of recording someone’s gender identity in official data instead of their biological sex has now been condemned by an independent review, carried out by Professor Alice Sullivan of the Social Research Institute at University College, London. The review, published yesterday, urges the Home Secretary to order all 43 police forces in England and Wales, and British Transport Police, to accurately record sex.
It points out that “collecting high quality, robust data on sex is critical to effective policymaking” in health, justice, education and the economy. It laments that the meaning of sex in major surveys is “no longer stable”, however, because of a confusion between sex and gender identity. It gives the example of a data management system used by rape crisis centres in Scotland, where biological sex could hardly be more relevant, that uses the following “gender” fields for both victims and alleged perpetrators: “Male/Female/Intersex/Gender queer/Other”.
In the 21st century, it’s astonishing that publicly-funded organisations need to be told to stop skewing data in this way. The review is long overdue, and should have been welcomed by ministers committed to reducing violence against women. It’s not part of police officers’ remit to indulge the claims of men who claim to be female, which actively obstruct justice in some cases.
Ominously, however, ministers are prevaricating. The Government hasn’t committed to accepting the review’s recommendations, saying instead that they will be shared with departments for consideration alongside the views of “other interested parties”. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has posted on X this morning that the review “underlines the importance of recording biological sex”, and promises that “we’ll act on findings.” But his message goes on to include the usual genuflection to gender ideology, adding that “doing so does not prevent us from recording, recognising and respecting people’s gender identity where these differ.”
Many people think that respecting unverifiable claims about gender identity is precisely what got us into this mess. Even the work of the Office for National Statistics has been affected, using a confusing question in the 2021 census that led to an over-estimate of the size of the trans population. Indeed, Sullivan has warned about the influence of trans activists, telling the Telegraph that ministers should “consider the vulnerability of government and public bodies to internal activism” that seeks to influence policy.
The consequences are far-reaching. Previous convictions, committed under another name and “gender”, have been overlooked, allowing suspects to be released before their full offending history is known. Cancer referrals are being missed because men who are recorded as female may not be invited for prostate cancer screening, while women who identify as men could miss out on cervical cancer screening. “The default target of any sex question should be sex (in other words, biological sex, natal sex, sex at birth),” the review recommends.
That’s obviously what should be happening, yet accuracy in official statistics has been sacrificed to appease gender zealots. For decades, right up until the late Nineties, the UK had gold-standard data on sex. Not any more: a startling graph in the review shows that questions about sex are now outnumbered by those relating to “gender” and “gender identity”. The responses are worse than useless, except as an illustration of the gullibility of publicly-funded organisations when pressured by entitled activists.
The Government’s failure to act promptly could hardly be more shameful. Public records have in effect been falsified, creating avoidable risks and exposing organisations to ridicule. What’s more, who will now trust official Government data on important subjects? Worse still, institutions have forfeited trust in a way that makes society less safe for victims of crime. Nothing could undermine trust in the police more than asking us to look out for a “woman” with a receding hairline and five o’clock shadow.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeThe point of government data is not to provide an accurate picture of how things are, it is to support whatever the current government’s agenda is at the moment.
I always quote the old saw, attributed to Andrew Lang, that politicians use statistics as a drunk uses a lamp-post: for support, rather than illumination.
Perhaps an execute order equivalent stating that there are only two sexes, male and female, is needs in the UK. Enough of this violence against science and reason and what every 2 year old already understands. Suicidal empathy.
It will not happen. This government is striving to prove its Orwellian credentials and mere facts will not stand in the way.
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.” 1984
Can’t imagine for a minute that this would even be necessary. Surely if members of our blameless trans community are wanted for criminal behaviour, the police should be the ones addressing their own transphobia. For example, I can’t imagine any trans woman ever being a rapist or sex offender, that’s for sure.
It must be difficult for the police to find someone who identifies as an ‘otherkin’ feline trapped in a human body.
“Wanted: soft and furry feline with a penchant for sleeping, eating, playing with cat toys, and being cute. It robbed a bank yesterday….”
… followed up with a picture of some gnarly-looking biker dude who doesn’t look anything like a cat.
It would be interesting to have both sex and gender stated, especially when it comes police and courts. There do seem to be a significant number of criminals within the trans community.
Are you suggesting reverse correlation – Criminals claiming to be trans?
“I’m shocked, shocked I say!”
The war on women, as it was called in the US, is over. Women lost, in no small part due to the work of their own who went along with the gender woo.
Trump is fighting back and fighting hard.
Feminism erased women.
First rule of misogyny:
Women are responsible for what men do.
Reverse the sexes in that statement and you have the first rule of Feminism.
First rule of misandry. Blame men for anything women fail to achieve.
Could not be better expressed. Perhaps we no longer expect honesty and transparence from government.
It is not only in this area that government is hiding the truth. For example, how much is UK paying to support the war in Ukraine? We cannot afford ballooning welfare payments, but can apparently afford to increase our expenditure on defence. And we can afford to put up illegal immigrants in hotels at something like £14m per day, but government never admits to it.
In the case of the police I expect it was lost in error; disappeared into the same black hole as inconvenient evidence.
Would it not be possible to record both sex and gender, where sex is biological sex and gender is what the person identifies as. Which was most relevant would depend on context. Prostate – sex.
Bit of a bore for the rest of us, but forms are always a bore.
In Australia questionnaires (which I suspect are a composed by a single ‘woke’ firm) ask
What is your gender?
male/female/nonbinary/I prefer not to say
I always prefer not to say, and if there is space for a comment I state my objections to the word ‘gender’. I don’t know how any kind of reliable data can be obtained in this way.
Yes it’s possible and potentially useful. Just not in the way genderwang activists believe. It could be useful to know how stating a trans identity correlates with crime, other mental illnesses, suicide etc.
However, the main problems would be twofold:
First, very hard to reliably count a concept like gender which does not have a stable definition with a common shared understanding. It’s a Humpty-Dumpty term which it’s advocates use to mean whatever they want it to mean at a given moment.
The government could arrive at an authoritative definition, but that would require months if not years of “consultation” and no-one can guarantee that trans activists would accept it. It has proved to be in their interests to obfuscate their terminology at every turn as a means of avoiding scrutiny of the key concepts of their ideology.
The second problem is that even if we can arrive at a stable definition, the thing being counted is unstable anyway. People who believe that a persons gender is a matter of self-expression almost inevitably believe that a person can express a different gender whenever they want. In fact this very instability is often celebrated by gender ideologues as seen in social media videos demanding to be addressed by different pronouns whenever they choose.
So what would be counted may be no more useful for the purposes of longer term demographic planning than counting what colour shirt you are wearing today.
there are no consequences for the police that do this,they need to lose their jobs, their pensions. Why are Police commissioners above the law , they are not
A minor point, but men are not ever invited for prostate screening. No such programme exists. A better example would be cervical screening or breast screening when biological women are recorded as male.
Madness but it won’t end until there is a criminal conviction for negligence and not just of police officers or collectors of statistics but Ministers.