Official UK data recording people’s biological sex and their gender identity is often unclear or conflated, a government-commissioned report has found, causing confusion and potential risks, for example in healthcare and safeguarding.
The review, led by Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology and research specialist at University College London, said guidance should be updated to make sure both sets of data were recorded in a clear and distinct way.
Sullivan said the use of “gender” as catch-all term had begun being used in the 1990s and had become increasingly common, leading to what she termed “a widespread loss of data on sex”.
A lack of clear guidance for how such matters should be recorded had led to individual organisations often developing their own systems, the report said, some of which mixed up sex and gender identity, making it impossible to trace the future outcomes of certain groups, including people with mixed gender identities.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Sullivan said that some crime statistics recorded people’s preferred gender, rather than their sex, and that people had been able to change their gender marker on NHS records.
“It’s this confusion around the word gender, which I think everybody used to recognise as simply a synonym for sex, and it’s become something else – it’s become a way of recording gender diverse identities,” she said.
“What I’ve argued in this report is that sex is really important, we should be recording it by default – transgender and gender diverse identities can also be recorded where that’s appropriate.
“There’s no reason to see this as a trade-off between the two. They’re two distinct variables.”
The report was commissioned just over a year ago by the Conservative government, with the expectation it would report by August last year. However, following the election, it has been released now.
The health department said it would urgently look into what it called “serious findings”.
Luke Polland, the defence minister who was speaking for the government on Thursday morning, said it was “vital” that data collection on this improved.
The study, based on a review of evidence and practices, as well as interviews with organisations including government departments, regulators and other bodies, concluded that “the meaning of sex is no longer stable in administrative or major survey data”.
It went on: “This instability is evident across key policy areas including health and justice. This has led to a widespread loss of data on sex. In some cases, the loss of data on sex poses risks to individuals. This is particularly apparent within health and social care. These risks are especially high in the case of minors.”
Another issue the report highlighted was a lack of clarity over how particular reports or surveys gathered data on biological sex or gender. In some cases, conflated data had been embedded in IT systems, making the distinction even less clear.
Among a series of recommendations, it said the “default target” for any such question should be biological sex at birth, without any combining of gender identity, including for people who have a gender recognition certificate.
It also said the NHS should stop giving people new NHS numbers with changed markers for gender, saying this could put people at risk in areas like screening.
It called for organisations to take a dispassionate and robust approach to the subject, saying there was evidence of “a partisan climate” on some issues, including gender, within the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the UK’s official data-gathering body.
A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: “This government is clear that the collection of accurate and relevant data is vital in research and the operation of effective public services, particularly when it comes to sex.
“We are grateful to Professor Sullivan for her work, which has been shared with relevant government departments and public organisations, including the ONS.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Health said: “There are new, serious findings in this report which the department will urgently investigate and address with the gravity they deserve, as we reform gender identity services across the board.”
