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Comment by hfbff | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the selection of criticisms is not great. I agree with some, but then it mixes it with things like

>The UK Office for National Statistics has already succumbed to such ideas, proposing that respondents should be allowed to self-identify their sex in the 2021 census.

This is something we've been doing in my country for decades and I don't see a problem with it (the alternative is to ask the person that does the census to take a guess on the gender of the person...sometimes it's easy, sometimes not so much)

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The census is a set of forms. It isn't like there's someone in front of you trying to guess your age, gender etc. What "self-identify" means here is that you're allowed to pick whatever you want regardless of biological truth, whereas normally lying on a census can result in a fine.

This literally is the history of race on census forms.

A census taker would decide what race you are, from categories thought up by other people.

https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/race/MREAD_1790_2010....

> While people nowadays are enumerated by race based on self-identification, until 1950 their race on the census was mainly determined by their census enumerator.[170] During this time multiracial people who were White and of another race were usually marked down as belonging to the other race due to the One drop rule.[170] The instructions provided to enumerators endorsed this practice.

I think "biological truth" is loaded here. In terms of a census there is an ambiguity about what it is that you're counting, are you counting people biologically born a given gender, people who are going to pair with the opposite sex, people who prefer a particular prefix or people that can give birth to children?

It appears in this case the census is content in counting people who prefer a particular prefix and only counting that (which can be self-identified) achieves its aims.

Tbh I don't massively see how this changes how one might treat census data (especially since the numbers remain small enough). I would suggest that if your research requires data points for people born as women then maybe you should be looking for other datasets such as births.

The problem is inaccurate data. Depending on how the census data is used, it may well be important to distinguish between, for example, a man who thinks he's a woman, and an actual woman.

The number of trans people is so minuscule that any perceived inaccuracy due to people identifying as their non-biological gender would not make the slightest difference in any statistic.

Plus, if you wanted to have more accurate data, you could ask more accurate questions, e.g. "are you able to give birth" or anything like that. Now, people might refuse to answer, but that's their right.

How would you know? Did the last one to pop out rip out everything on the way out? Have you been trying to conceive for years without success?

Being able to conceive is not a simple yes or no answer. If you simplify beyond the conversation with your doctor, you need to make unfortunate assumptions. That’s why it’s so thorny.

Exactly, it's not. Not every biological woman can conceive, so I don't know why <1% of trans people would invalidate the results of some survey.

Some people believe that trans rights mean that suddenly everyone will try to claim they're "actually" men or women without any real skin in the game. I find this line of reasoning, no matter what your opinions about biological vs. other types of gender or about pronouns are (personally, I find pronouns besides he, she or they to be slightly ridiculous), to be akin to "gay rights mean people are going to stop having children" types of arguments. It's just not such a big deal that it's worth starting a culture war over IMHO.

There are males being placed in what were previously female-only prisons, some of whom have sexually assaulted and impregnated the women there. This is what so-called "trans rights" has given us.

Care to cite any numbers?

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