"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

1. the people running this survey didn't follow the standard. the standard says "do not ask sex, ask birth sex." (still bad) they asked "sex". they quoted me the standard and that part is the paragraph above what they quoted!¹

2. every study i can find saying "use the two question model!" is comparing it to something god awful. notable examples include:

• comparing it to asking "Are you Male, Female, or Transgender/Other" (page 770)
• comparing it to not asking
• comparing it to the interviewer filling it in for them
• comparing it to basing your data on 'vocal timbre' (i lost my source here, but trust me)

none of which compare it to asking "Hey, we asked your gender, but also, are you trans"

1. i would like to note this person seems lovely and is probably just the bearer of bad decisions she didnt make

and even though it's not super original i still like it and i might write a song around it