namelessWrench

A Jeb With No Name

@namelessWrench

The Only Rotten Dollhart Webring

A hideous fruit, disgracing itself.

Allo-Aro

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namelessWrench
@namelessWrench
irina
@irina
irina
@irina

the two-question model sucks and shouldn't be used

"hey this thing you do in this survey is like, awful, kinda transphobic, and you need to fix it or you'll end up erasing trans people from your results"

"this is the national standard set by the australian bureau of statistics"

time to go complain at a government agency, i guess

the two question model is, instead of asking "are you trans/intersex?" asking "sex", and then ask "gender". i hate this for two (imo good) reasons:

  1. im a female and a woman, im not answering anything else. wanna fight about it? ive got the birth certificate to prove it
  2. if i tick "male" (so that at least the count of trans people is accurate) then the rest of my responses probably get assessed as "men who are/do x" rather than "women who are x"

they at least gave the option of "other/indeterminate" for both questions but i'm not 'other', so that doesn't help.

im gonna bother and contact the ABS to try and push against the giant boulder that is bureaucracy, on the slim chance this can be less-awful for the next census (since in theory that'll be the first national count of trans people in the country, they were gonna ask in 2021 and scrapped it). wish me luck. anyone know any australian queer media? like my first thought is the ABC but i dont trust them as much as i once did 2 3

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in reply to @irina's post:

cofruitrigus
@cofruitrigus

Yeah that sucks. In the UK we've recently had our first census that included questions about sexual orientation and gender identity, and they asked:

Question 3: What is your sex? Male/Female
Question 27: Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth? Yes/No, write in gender identity

And that resulted in only about a third of trans people selecting their sex as their birth sex. I wouldn't be sure if asking "What was your sex recorded at birth?" is going to be that much better, either. No idea about Australian media, sorry, but good luck!

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irina
@irina

Our last national census ditched it entirely, only asking "Are you Male / Female / Non Binary or Other / Intersex / Prefer Not To Answer".

The one before that, in 2016, made you request a separate extra form ahead of time to fill out, to then manually write-in your answer. It recorded a grand total of 100 trans people out of 25 million... and then news media ran with it despite the ABS saying its own data sucked

The ideal to me would be to ask

  • What is your Gender
  • What is your Sex Assigned at Birth (optional)
  • Do you consider yourself transgender? yes/no/write in
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somewhatnifty
@somewhatnifty

The Scottish census was slightly different, it asked "What is your sex" and "Do you consider yourself to be trans, or have a trans history?". Which I feel like is probably the best way of asking it, though asking for gender rather than sex would probably be more in line with what people would actually answer (the guidance itself basically said trans people could choose, and it's not like there's going to be any penalty for not choosing your assigned gender, so it's pretty much gender identity the question was asking)

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