Tuesday night’s national population survey includes new questions about gender and sexual orientation for everyone aged 16 and over, which will be optional for all respondents.
And it still fucks trans people over.
Using these questions, they can’t tell how many trans people there are, because the questions they have asked reduce trans people to their birth sex as if that is the single most important feature about them, and many trans people are just going to lie about that, because why would you choose to other yourself by providing “pure” data that ignores and erases your needs.
Because the questions they do ask conflate trans people with their assigned sex, the questions won’t help with medical care, social support needs, or anything else. The gender question is optional, and the sex question is mandatory, so except for the specific context of trying to determine how many trans people there are, trans people will be reduced to their birth sex, as if their needs are the same.
If they want to know if someone is trans or gender diverse, just fucking ask that. If you want to know peoples’ assigned sex at birth, then ask them their sex and have an optional question about their birth sex.
I’m happy to tell folk that I’m trans, but I’m very much not happy to be reduced to a single sex marker that stopped being relevant a decade ago and a gender that is considered optional, and can be ignored when you don’t want to think about it.
