by Joanna Williams on Substack
A review of Sex, Lies and Statistics by Alice Sullivan
Whether it’s counting the entire population or planning changes to the local swimming pool, sex matters. Knowing how many people are male or female is vital, so gathering accurate data is essential. Not that long ago, this was considered obvious. It was such basic common sense that it did not need stating.
But, as Alice Sullivan explores in her excellent new book, Sex, Lies and Statistics, something has gone very badly wrong. Over recent years, institutions have either refused to gather data on sex, or they have confused sex and gender, producing data that is worthless.
Sullivan sets out to uncover why common sense was abandoned and accuracy rejected. She considers the emergence of gender identity as a concept distinct from sex, and how transgender activists, working through organisations such as Stonewall, have deliberately blurred the two categories together.
Gender identity theory insists that everyone has to believe in gender identity theory, failure to believe is a denial of the ‘right’ of people to be seen as who they say they are.
Her thorough analysis exposes how campaigners overturned traditional ways of working to steamroll their own ideas. Crucially, she also highlights the willingness of once-highly respected institutions, such as the Office for National Statistics, to acquiesce to activists’ unscientific, politicised demands.
A culture of silencing and policy capture affected data collection on both sex and transgender identities.
The other side of this story, which Sullivan powerfully narrates, is the experiences of those who have valiantly fought back against the attempts by transgender activists to tell women they do not count. People, most often women and including Sullivan herself, have stood up to institutions determined to silence and erase them, whether that’s by rejecting female-only categories for sport or forcing female nurses to share changing rooms with male, trans-identifying colleagues. Sullivan does a great service in relaying this account and detailing the struggle for women’s rights over the past two decades.