How Britain ‘hugely overstated’ its trans population

“It’s eminently clear that this is not a huge hub of trans life,” says Prof Michael Biggs of the borough he calls home, Brent in northwest London. “The idea when I walk down the street there that over 1 per cent of the population are trans doesn’t make any sense.”

Yet the Office for National Statistics (ONS) had recorded the area as having the second highest proportion of transgender people in the UK – 1.3 per cent. “I live in Brent and obviously it is not the place with the second most trans people in Britain,” he adds. “That’s ludicrous.”

Biggs not being able to reconcile the data with the reality of everyday life has led – after a long-running campaign, which has come at some personal cost – to the ONS admitting it may have overestimated the number of trans people in the UK.

Along with other academics and campaigners, the Oxford University sociology professor waged a two-year battle with the ONS to try to get them to admit that their data was deeply flawed. During this process he was shunned and branded a “transphobe”, by individuals not linked to the ONS.

But last week Biggs was finally vindicated when a review by the Office for Statistics Regulation concluded that one of the questions in the 2021 census had been confusing, and ruled that the numbers of trans people recorded in the census would no longer be recognised as an “accredited official statistic”. This was the first time in the more than 220-year history of the census that data from it had been downgraded.

The ONS itself admitted that some people may have misunderstood the question “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”, leading to people recording that they were trans when they were not.

This also vindicated Whitehall sources who, The Telegraph reported last year, said the ONS had “hugely overestimated” the number of trans people in the UK in the census, after the body had admitted it should have carried out “additional probing” before releasing the data.

After the 2021 census – in which the ONS attempted for the first time to count the trans population – the body had concluded that there were 262,000 people identifying as trans, equal to 0.5 per cent of the population aged 16 and over.

But a detailed investigation of the data by Biggs revealed that there was a high probability these results were unreliable and had been skewed by the fact the ONS had “asked the wrong question”.

Biggs says that, instead of directly asking people if they were transgender, the form convolutedly asked whether the gender people identified as was the same as their sex registered at birth, which many misunderstood, particularly if English was not their first language.

Not fully grasping the question, it appears many answered “no”, and as such indicated they were transgender when they were not.

In the aftermath of his vindication, Biggs has lifted the lid to The Telegraph on how he helped bring about this extraordinary turnaround, which asks pertinent questions about the culture in the ONS, and the potential role that the LGBT charity Stonewall has in this.

Biggs says he immediately smelt a rat about the 2021 census figures when they were released in January of that year and Brent was identified as one of the most populous places for trans people.

The ONS had found that the borough of Newham, in east London, was the area with the highest proportion of transgender people, with 1.5 per cent agreeing that their gender identity did not match their birth sex. Brent trailed a close second with 1.3 per cent.

This meant that, officially, the trans communities in both these London boroughs were around a third larger than in Brighton & Hove – an area well known for its LGBT communities.

“It’s just not the kind of area that would attract trans people like, say, Oxford and Brighton,” Biggs says of Brent.

“We know the milieu that many trans people come from, which is often a professional, very queer, alternative milieu – the sort that you find in Brighton.

“And this is a very different milieu in Brent. It’s a very mixed, immigrant-heavy population, and there are just not the sort of people who are going to be trans.

“You can see the difference visibly. When I go to Oxford, on almost every street corner you have a trans sticker somewhere. In Brent you don’t get that. There’s no queer cafes with Progress flags.”

Taking a closer look at Brent’s demographics, Biggs’s comments ring true, in that it is a relatively deprived area, with the third largest demographic of black, Asian and minority ethnic groups in the capital.

The borough also has a large Muslim population – with one in five residents following the religion – and more than 50 per cent of the people who live in Brent were born outside the UK.

Of course, transgender people can come from an immigrant, lower socio-economic or Muslim background, Biggs acknowledges.

But for the highest levels of trans people to be in places where these demographic factors are dominant seemed unusual to him, and led him to wonder if there was a link between the census results and people not speaking English proficiently.

He became even more sceptical of the census figures when he discovered that they suggested that as many as one in 67 Muslims were transgender. “I was so concerned that I asked the ONS for cross tabulation – which they weren’t planning to do – of individual English proficiency by trans status,” he says.

“And that showed exactly what I suspected, which was that there was a really high rate of transgender people among those who don’t speak English well.”

He found that both Newham and Brent topped the table of places where residents do not have English as their main language, with 35 per cent and 34 per cent speaking it as a second language in these areas respectively. “This confirmed my suspicions that the question the census had asked was completely misinterpreted by those who had answered it,” he adds.

Other issues that fuelled his doubts that the ONS’s methodology had exaggerated the statistics on trans people were that only a minority had specifically written down what their gender identity was.

The census stats show that out of the 262,000 said to be transgender, some 118,000 chose not to provide further details about their gender identity. “This was odd because trans people are usually proud of their gender identity, so why would they not write it in?” the perturbed academic observes.

He compared the census results with other sources of data, such as local authority referrals to the recently closed down Tavistock NHS gender clinic for children. “I found that very large numbers come from Brighton, but very few came from Brent.”

He adds: “It had one of the lowest rates of referrals to the Tavistock. Obviously, not all trans people go to the gender clinics, but that just deepened my suspicions. So all this information is adding up to suggest that the census results do not make sense or triangulate with other information we have on the trans population.”

At that point, Biggs decided to go public and publish a paper on the outcome of his investigation on a social science website – a move that seemed to prompt the ONS to open their own inquiry.

But the ONS findings were a “whitewash”, he says. He points to one paragraph, which states that there had indeed been “some patterns in the data that are consistent with, but do not conclusively demonstrate, some respondents not interpreting the question as intended”.

The report did not state that this meant the veracity of the figures was now in question. Instead the report insisted that the ONS was unable to say with certainty whether the census was likely to have overestimated or underestimated the total number of trans people.

Biggs reveals that, at the same time, the ONS tried to explain away the oddities in the gender identity data by suggesting that this possibly reflected a rise in the number of transgender refugees coming to the country.

“But the only evidence they had was the Foreign Office website with advice to British LGBT people going overseas, so it had no relevance to the question,” he says.

He sensed that the body was far from keen to admit that a major error may have been made in the collating of the figures, and wondered if the LGBT rights charity Stonewall – which has close relationships with many public bodies – had any involvement in its stance.

But he persevered, passionately believing that he was right to warn there was a fundamental problem with the formulation of the census question.

However, he admits that there has been a personal price to pay, with some choosing to vilify and shun him for daring to speak out.

An example was when he tried to point out to a British Medical Journal editor last year that there was an issue with an article on the results of the annual GP patient survey, which had used the same question on gender identity as the census.

“The article on the GP patient survey found that trans people are more likely to have dementia, but we don’t know if this is actually the case or if people who have dementia are just more confused by the question,” he recounts.

“But when I pointed out the problem to the authors, they just stopped emailing me.” His next rebuff came when he submitted a comment on the article to the BMJ Open website and the editor refused to publish it.

It subsequently emerged in internal emails released by the journal on Biggs’s request that in taking this decision, the editor had warned his staff that the academic was “known for being transphobic”.

Fortunately, the concerns of the then maligned professor and others – such as the campaign group Sex Matters – were eventually taken seriously. They were listened to by one key body – the Office of Statistics Regulation (OSR) – who launched a review last October.

Yet even then, the ONS appeared more concerned with whether its LGBT staff felt “safe” rather than the accuracy of its statistics.

A leaked message from Jen Woolford, the director of population statistics, showed she informed ONS employees a month later: “Over the past few weeks, we have been speaking with trans colleagues and those in the wider LGBTQ+ community about the impact this has had on their wellbeing.

“In light of this, we want to reaffirm our commitment to providing an inclusive workplace in ONS where everyone can feel safe and can bring their full self to work.”

According to Biggs: “That was the most explicit evidence we have of the sort of climate within the Office for National Statistics, as with so many public bodies. There is this sort of terror of ignoring the LGBT staff.”

Amid all this ongoing controversy, one pressing thought that arises is how on earth the country’s most trusted and independent source of statistics found itself in such an awkward position.

A number of interested observers, including Biggs, have speculated that the ONS’s relationship with Stonewall is the clue to answering this conundrum.

Notably, until 2020, ONS staff received regular training from the LGBT charity, which has increasingly been criticised for how it promotes transgender ideology. The ONS also took part in a “trans allies” programme.

Correspondence released under Freedom of Information laws between Stonewall and the ONS show that the two organisations had meetings in 2020 to discuss sexual orientation and gender identity questions being included in the 2021 census.

The letters disclose that Stonewall and other LGBT groups drew up a series of recommendations on the possible questions. Most concerning, perhaps, is that Stonewall is revealed to have demanded that the ONS hand over a list of attendees of a round table they had planned on the census question asking about a person’s sex.

The charity then went on to request that certain attendees who may have been absent from the list were included, while “strongly” recommending that others who might create a “hostile environment” for trans participants were not invited.

The ONS said the OSR report found there was “no evidence” of them working closely with certain groups.

But in its announcement about the trans figures from the census, the ONS deputy national statistician, Emma Rourke, admitted that “there is potential for bias in how the gender identity question was answered by those in England and Wales who responded that they did not speak English well”.

A Stonewall spokesperson said the charity was “one of many organisations that responded to the ONS’ consultation on questions relating to LGBTQ+ people.

“It is standard practice for the ONS to listen to a wide range of voices with different perspectives when preparing census questions.”

A spokeswoman for the British Medical Journal said: “We do not comment publicly on individual editorial decisions, but deny absolutely any suggestion that BMJ Group would reject content for political or ideological reasons.”