October 3, 2023 - 10:30am
In her 2019 book Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez tracks the way in which a dearth of accurate data on biological sex affects women’s lives. Ignoring the female body, she writes, “has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate”.
Invisible Women is an international bestseller and winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize. Yet, along with other works warning of the lack of female-specific data in science and medicine, it has risen to prominence at the same time as what Kath Murray, Alice Sullivan and Lisa Mackenzie describe as “the rapid loss of data on sex”.
Following several years of protest from grassroots feminist groups, the Government has finally decided to act. This week Science Secretary Michelle Donelan has announced a review into public bodies gathering data on self-identified gender without also collecting it on biological sex. This is welcome news, not least because the review will be led by Sullivan, head of research at UCL’s Social Research Institute and one of the first academics to raise the alarm.
Nonetheless, it should never have come to this. It is a measure of how effective trans activists have been at positioning themselves as the only victims who matter. When feminists have criticised the removal of sex-based questions from standard data collection, they have been dismissed as petty, as though they are creating an imaginary problem in order to make others feel excluded.
It took a judicial review crowdfunded by Fair Play for Women for the ONS to agree to define the sex question in the England and Wales 2021 Census to specify legal sex, rather than gender identity. The claim that trans people are too small a population to really change results continues to be used to dismiss concerns for accuracy. Yet if “woman” does not mean “someone who is biologically female”, no data on women can reliably be said to capture the needs and experiences of that group.
Donelan is portraying the review as a response to “the denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness”. While this will likely sell well to social conservatives, it’s also important to emphasise just how anti-feminist — and anti-progressive — a refusal to collect sex-based data is. Because the world is already organised to accommodate one type of sexed body at the expense of another, what we get is not a situation in which all bodies are treated as sexless (albeit with varied gender identities), but one in which all continue to be treated as male by default.
Such a world leads, as Criado Perez notes, “to us injuring ourselves in jobs and cars that weren’t designed for our bodies. It leads to us dying from drugs that don’t work. It has led to the creation of a world where women just don’t fit very well.” These are significant human rights issues. It is obscene that finding a solution to them has been conflated with bigotry.
Hopefully the review will lead to a return to the tracking of sex-based data by institutions, including the NHS, which should have known better than to ever consider conflating sex with gender. The alternative to this is simply saying female people don’t count. It’s saying that they’ve thus far been relatively invisible, and can afford to be even more so.
While it’s perfectly possible to say this and be on the right side of history (since when has history prioritised women?), no one should kid themselves that it puts them on the side of what is good and humane.
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In particular, the recording in some jurisdictions of male sex offenders crimes as being committed by women is a sickening outrage.
In whole areas of health, sport, criminal justice etc, it is women’s biology and bodies which determine treatment, fairness, vulnerability etc etc. A man can’t self-identify into women’s biology, even by cutting bits off.
My only slight disagreement with the article is that from experience the world isn’t really made to fit 6’5″ tall blokes either. Especially airplane seats.
Yes, unfortunately capitalism has sold out your comfort on aeroplanes.
At least you’re a hit on dating apps, although that’s only useful if you use those apps (I never have).
I’m great at jumping and climbing on things and at 5’5” (fairly average for a women) that’s necessary to access lots of things in my work and home and general life on a daily basis, or a foot stall. I can get comfy on an aeroplane for sure but there’s been a lot of height related annoyance prior to that. And as for being left handed haha no space for that ergonomic discussion here!
I’m very strong but often reminded that my arms or legs are just a bit too short for the object I’m trying to carry, regardless of my strength, almost as if it’s been designed for someone else…
Spare a thought for my boy who is not yet 16 but already as tall as me and left handed!
I’ve never used a dating app either. My wife and I got together back when we all had Nokia phones. I don’t feel I’ve missed out because the whole dating thing these days sounds horrible to me.
Great article, thank you.
As a social researcher I am utterly shocked at the poor use of language within these clumsy attempts to measure ‘gender’, at the expense of women (adult human female). As with all research and science, we need data that is real, reliable, and where the people being surveyed can actually understand the language and concepts behind it. When I have been sexually assaulted; when I have had gynaecological or hormonal issues; when sexually harassed in the workplace or streets; and so many real aspects of my life are a direst result of my sexed body, as much as a younger me would like to believe I could circumvent it, I couldn’t and I didn’t. Sad truth, you cannot imagine yourself out of your sexed body.
Women are 51% population, we are not a minority that should be accommodated, we are the majority. It’s not acceptable to expect women to fit into the world as simply small men. We are not that. Or that men who think they are women (and vice versa) can screw the statistics by having their imaginations and feelings given precedence over reality.
Women, trans people and men deserve to be seen through the lens of reality, otherwise medicine, statistics, ergonomic design, stages of life events, will mean nothing.
In many cases the obfuscation of language is surely deliberate on the part of the trans-ideologues. If “gender” can be anything and “gender” and “sex” are interchangeable terms, then “sex” can be anything.
We end up with a language which has no way to even describe why women should have the right to sex-based services, spaces, sports etc.
And of course, if the data we use to help record, analyse and understand the world maintains this obfuscation, then eventually it will follow the ideology. “Women” raping women, for example, will be a statistical reality.
Its a cliche these days to describe this manipulation of language as Orwellian, but sometimes cliches become cliches because they are so unremittingly accurate.
I agree with you, though I would slightly qualify your last statement. I don’t think “trans people” can be seen as reality, as people cannot “transition” from one sex to another. This is not to say that the delusion/mental illness does not exist; unfortunately, that much is all too real. Validation of delusion as reality is how this madness proceeds.
The problem seems to be that these trans weirdoes and their supporters are embedded in the Civil Service and quangos at every level.
Many thanks to Victoria Smith for this excellent piece.
Regrettably, here in Scotland, the SNP and Scottish Greens are still under the spell of the trans lobby. The guidance on data collection is as follows: “a question requiring the disclosure of a person’s biological sex may be an unjustifiable breach of privacy: in some cases this would have the potential to reveal a trans history that otherwise a person may wish to keep private.” So “privacy” trumps biology as far as the SNP and Scottish Greens are concerned.
Thanks for this astute reflection. “Trans activists … positioning themselves as the only victims who matter,” has been key to their political success. Yet I’m still having a hard time finding documentation of this allegedly rampant persecution, while the plight of girls and women remains obvious.
A welcome circuit court decision in the United States recently called out this “victim” posturing for the lie it is, noting the powerful lobbies — government, legal and corporate — backing transactivism. The court’s ruling allowed Tennessee and Kentucky bans on puberty blockers for minors to take effect. Learn more on The Distance substack, a publication by LGB opponents of trans ideology. (We are many.)
I don’t agree that Perez’s book is accurate at all.
If one looks at the two chapters dealing with women’s health (10 and 11), there are numerous errors. For example, she claims that women from lower socio-economic backgrounds are “25% more likely to suffer a heart attack than men in the same income bracket.” Perez cites an article published by the George Institute. This in turn cites an article by Kathryn Backholer, in which she compares the relative risk ratio(RRR) for heart attacks between wealthy and deprived men, and wealthy and deprived women. The RRR for poorer men cf richer men is approximately 8% but for poorer women cf wealthly women it is 10%, thus the difference between the RRR’s is 2, that is 25% (of 8). Sorry that this is a bit convoluted, but Perez is plain wrong.
A second example. Perez reports that women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack (STEMI) than men, rising to 60% for some types of attacks (NSTEMI). She cites a report by the BHF, which itself refers to work by Wu and Gale. However, both Perez and the BHF misrepresent the data. What Wu actually found was that if you are a male patient suffering from a STEMI heart attack, then you have a 19% chance of being misdiagnosed. For a female it is higher at 24%. If you are a male patient and you are suffering a NSTEMI heart attack, then your chances of being misdiagnosed are 33%. For a female it is 41%. Thus, for both types of heart attack women are at greater risk of being misdiagnosed but based on Wu’s published data and contrary to what Perez claimed, the difference is not 59% or 41%. It is 4% and 8%.
I can add more examples of this type of thing.
What I find particularly egregious about Perez’s work however, is her casual sexism. There was a report that contradicted her claim concerning gender differences in clinical trials, which she casually dismissed as “the all-male-authored paper”. She had referenced many other articles before, some of which happened to have all female authors, but not once had she commented at the sex of the authors. Suddenly it becomes significant when she wants to discredit something that she disagrees with. This is hardly a scientific approach.
What I don’t understand is how this book could have won “Science Book Prize” 2019 when it contains hyperbole such as this “… a medical system which, from root to tip, is systematically discriminating against women…” and “women are dying and the medical world is complicit..”
To sum up, I do not believe that Perez’s book is at all accurate. Furthermore, I doubt that she is acting in good faith.
I must say that more than any other nation the British have been very effective in taking on this 40-year tradition of transhumanism from Californian academic culture (Butler’s post-feminist Queer theory and Donna Haraway’s cyborgs before).
Is it because the British created feminism from the intellectual radicalism of the Victorian Age and then distrusted what De Beauvoir did with it, which was to have a significant influence on the Americans in their fixation with ‘gender’ as a new path to individual freedom?
As far as corporations and modern work places go, there is no difference between men and women. Why then should we distinguish between men and women in social spaces?
I’m afraid that this is the apotheosis of feminist ideology – now that all differences between men and women have been erased, men can put on a dress and act as nasty and as vicious as their female contemporaries, but now with all the strength and vigor of men.
Transideology: the ideology where toxic masculinity and toxic feminism meet and become one.