Separating sex and gender is statistical malpractice

On August 11 2026, it will be Census night in Australia. The Census is an important instrument for collecting data on the Australian population, and informs policy decisions at every level. It is conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and they are an extremely professional organisation that takes their work seriously. Every time a new Census is conducted, they reconsider the questions it asks and will make changes from time to time in order to suit a policy environment that changes over time. They are diligent, and they research their questions very carefully.

For the 2026 Census there are two new optional questions that have been introduced, applicable only to people over the age of 16. Both of these questions relate to Australia’s LGBTQIA+ population. One of the new questions allows people to specify their sexual orientation. This post is not about that question.¹ Rather, I want to talk about the second question, which allows people to specify their gender identity if they would like to.

The intention behind the two questions is clear: the sexual orientation question has been added to allow policy decisions about the LGB population to be informed by the census, whereas the gender identity question exists to inform policies related to the T subgroup of the LGBTQIA+ population. These questions were added on the advice of academics, LGBTIQA+ advocacy organisations, and they have been extensively praised in the progressive, left-leaning, and queer media (e.g., here, here, here, and here). Taken at face value, you would be tempted to conclude that the new gender identity question is a step forward for transgender inclusion in Australia.

It is not. In this post, I hope to convince you of the exact opposite claim: somewhat counterintuitively, the new question is catastrophically bad for transgender people. It is dangerous, it puts our safety at risk, and borders on statistical malpractice. It should not have been added, and in future it should be removed.²

An anecdote

I’ll start the post with an anecdote to illustrate why I am making this claim. A few weeks ago I had to find a new GP. I’d been with the same practice for many years and was happy with them, but I’ve moved apartments and needed to find something closer to home. After a little research I discovered one extremely close to where I live, so I decided to make an appointment to get a prescription renewed. As with all medical practices, this one has a patient intake form. Because it is the 21st century, the form was online. Being a diligent person I started to fill it out. Within minutes I ran into a problem: just like the forthcoming ABS Census, the clinic separates sex and gender on their forms. In fact, the wording on the questions was almost word-for-word identical to what the ABS now puts on the Census:

• Question 1 (mandatory): What is your sex, as originally recorded on your birth certificate? Response options are limited to “male” and “female”.
• Question 2 (optional): How do you describe your gender? Several options were presented, including many that are appropriate for trans people.

There was also an optional question about pronouns, but it’s not relevant to the story.

As an older trans woman who transitioned over a decade ago, and who has a lot of professional experience with the collection of confidential medical data, psychological measurement, and a lot of direct personal experience with how organisations handle data that pertain to transgender people, I stared at these questions with a sense of utter dread. Everything in my professional and personal experience screamed at me that the correct thing to do here was to lie on the birth sex question and select “female”. But my conscientiousness overruled my better judgement and I did as I was asked. I selected “male”.

Within 24 hours, the medical practice had nonconsensually disclosed my transgender status to third parties who have absolutely no right to this information. This is of course a blatant violation of medical ethics, but those ethical standards don’t seem to apply to transgender people: our privacy does not get taken seriously, and I confess that I am rather bitter about it.

How did this happen? You might be tempted to think that it must have been malicious. Perhaps I had a bad doctor, one who does not take her professional responsibilities seriously. This is not what happened at all. What happened is something much, much worse: the underlying database that stores the intake data is configured incorrectly, and systems that interact with that database will leak transgender status by design. It is not a “one bad apple” problem: the entire infrastructure that underpins the “sex/gender” data collection is broken, and dangerously so.

Here’s the mechanics of how it happens. Internally, the database stores sex and gender as separate fields, mirroring the intake form: there is a sex field that records the birth sex information. It can have only two values, M or F. There is also a gender field that records the optional gender question, and it can have a wider range of values. When the GP logs into her software, the information that is displayed on her screen displays the gender field. From her perspective, looking at this screen, there are no issues: the screen is not misgendering me, and it helpfully also shows her my pronouns. However, when she prints out a form for some blood work that I need to get done with a pathology lab, what gets printed is the sex field. In practice, doctors never actually look at those forms because they are so routine, so she did not notice.

This is where the breach happens. My GP does need to know my transgender status, because one of the things I talk to her about are the medications I take for my HRT. The pathology lab, on the other hand, does not need this information. It is a breach of confidentiality for a GP to disclose a patient’s transgender status to a third party, in exactly the same way that it would breach confidentiality to print sexual orientation on that form. But that’s exactly what happened. In everyday life, people rarely notice that I’m transgender, and I prefer it that way. I am not comfortable sharing this information with every person I happen to interact with: it is private data. If my doctor prints “male” on a form that I have to share with someone else, it outs me to that person without my consent.

When my GP printed out that form I spotted the issue immediately, because I knew exactly what was going to happen from the moment I filled out the intake form and was waiting for it. I pointed this out to her, and highlighted that it is a breach of privacy to print that information on the form but there wasn’t much she could do about it: once the “birth sex” field has been defined it is baked into the database, and every linked system will treat it as public data rather than private. My doctor is not transphobic. But the intake form and the IT infrastructure upon which her practice relies are transphobic by design.

I have seen this happen over and over again, across many different systems. The moment you separate sex and gender on the data collection instrument, it is inevitable that your database will leak people’s transgender status and violate their privacy. I’ll talk more about why it happens, and the well-intentioned but misguided reasons why this situation happened, but before I dive into all that I want to emphasise the core point. If you take only one thing from this post, I would like it to be this:

You should never separate sex and gender on a form. Collecting information about people’s birth sex is dangerous for transgender people, and it is statistically and ethically irresponsible. You are in breach of your professional responsibilities if you do this.

Databases almost always treat sex as public data. If you collect birth sex data, you will inevitably out every transgender person who participates in your survey. Indeed, this is the precise reason that other countries (notably the US and the UK) are pursuing the exact same policy: they are doing it to force transgender people into dangerous situations. They are doing it out of malice; Australia is doing the exact same thing out of stupidity.

Why did that happen?

The anecdote I just shared is just one instance, but it’s an experience that transgender people in Australia are starting to encounter more and more (e.g., here). Administrative systems all over the country are starting to create a distinct “birth sex” field in their databases, and they keep that field separate from the “gender” field. Almost every story I have heard is the same as mine: the database splits the two fields to support the “sex and gender” data collection, and then later on another subsystem queries the wrong field and shares someone’s trans status to a third party who should not have access to that information.

Given how severe the problem is (it has been a feature of almost every data storage system I’ve encountered that separates sex and gender), it’s worth asking how otherwise-competent people tried to do something trans-inclusive, and instead built a system that violates transgender people’s privacy on a mass scale.

I don’t know all of the history, but I know some of it. It is awkward for me to say it, but the blame largely lies with LGBTIQA+ advocacy organisations who don’t know enough about the practicalities of transgender data, academics who don’t understand the risks that transgender people face in the real world, and the ABS who – despite their many many virtues – are thoroughly ill-equipped to handle the nuances of this issue. During the process of designing the data collection standards that are now causing all these problems, a lot of people were consulted: the Australian public, statisticians, transgender people, social scientists, people who work with confidential data, etc.

You know who wasn’t consulted? Australian transgender statisticians with specific expertise in social science and confidentiality issues that attach to private medical data. They would be the optimal group to consult because they would have the most insight into how all the different aspects interact. But they weren’t, and in fairness I can understand the oversight. It’s a small demographic.

It’s entirely possible that I am the only person in it.³

The 2020 ABS standard

In my opinion, the root cause of the problem goes back to the 2020 ABS standards. Discussions and advocacy around these standards took place many years before they were finalised: I recall having a number of conversations with colleagues at UNSW about what should be included as far back as 2016. The standards themselves specify a 4-part data collection regimen, but for the purposes of the current post the key thing to recognise is that this is the place where the ABS formally asserted that it is best practice to separate sex from gender on data collection instruments.

These standards and this advice were designed with all the best of intentions. During the whole process leading up to it, I never encountered someone hostile to trans people.⁴ As terrible as it has played out on the ground for transgender people, that consultation process was not done with any malice. It was naivete and a lack of relevant competence, plain and simple.

The failure happened because people who designed these standards never even considered what would happen when an ordinary GP equipped with an ordinary IT system tries to follow the ABS standard. The catastrophic data leakages that are happening everywhere in the country at the moment are a direct consequence of people implementing the ABS standards in situations where those standards are entirely inappropriate, and using IT infrastructure that isn’t fit for purpose when the sex/gender split exists in the data set.

It should have been foreseen, but almost nobody did foresee it. As it happens I did foresee it, but I cannot claim any special wisdom. The only reason I saw it coming was that I was a statistician, programmer, and behavioural scientist transitioning within the academic system at the precise moment those conversations were taking place at UNSW,⁵ I had the horrible experience of watching as the IT infrastructure at UNSW turned out to be utterly incapable of preventing the data leakage from happening. It wasn’t designed to handle the existence of transgender staff members, and despite having all my HR records correctly updated it would leak my trans status everywhere because ancillary systems didn’t synchronise correctly.⁶ My thinking was very simple: if an organisation as dedicated and well-resourced as UNSW is incapable of preventing data leakage relating to transgender status, it is an absolute certainty that smaller organisations will be even less capable. So I became very cautious on this topic, and my advice to people went down a very different path to what the ABS (and later, all the Australian medical agencies) went down. My advice was this:⁷

If you are a smaller organisation and do not have a deep, mission-critical need to know the transgender status of every person who you interact with, the best practice is to never ask about birth sex in the first place.

If your database does not include birth sex or transgender status, systems that interact with that database cannot leak it. If you have ever taken a GDPR training course, you will already be aware of this as a fundamental principle. Do not collect data you do not need, and birth sex is almost never something you need.⁸

Mission creep from medical agencies

Looking back at the 2020 ABS standards with some hindsight, I would have to say that while those standards are the root cause of the problem that trans people are now grappling with on the ground in 2026, the ABS isn’t most at fault here. The problem “went mainstream” once other organisations started to uncritically adopt the ABS standards, and promote them in contexts that go well beyond what the ABS itself does. The worst offenders, in my opinion, have been medical organisations. For example, medical research funding organisations like the NHMRC chose to treat the ABS standards as best practice guidelines for collecting sex/gender data, and – as far as I can see – failed to do their due diligence on this matter. I’ll quote the NHMRC directly here, because I want to emphasise how influential the ABS standards are outside the context of the data collected by the ABS itself:

We encourage use of the ABS 2020 Standard and associated guidance on data collection and analysis by researchers in all research projects, along with adherence to the Privacy Act 1988, as appropriate. The ABS 2020 Standard is designed to collect demographic information on the Variables and routine use of the Standard across research projects will enable consistent and comparable data to be collected.

This is terrible advice.⁹ It is flat out wrong, and it was inappropriate for the NHMRC to make statements like this. The 4-question format laid out by the ABS standards is designed for the ABS to use, and its core purpose is to collect as much information around sex, gender, orientation, and variation of sex characteristics as possible. This is almost never the correct approach for academic researchers to adopt in their typical research project. In psychology, for instance, you almost never need all four of these variables: usually you only want gender, and your study should not collect data beyond what it needs. Even in medical contexts, we rarely need all four variables. Given that those variables contain extremely private information and the data collection itself is intrusive,¹⁰ it is a plain violation of ethics standards for human research¹¹ to cause unnecessary distress for your participants. The NHMRC statement is just wrong. It’s that simple.

Unfortunately, people do not look to me for advice on this topic. Instead academic medical researchers in Australia are being actively advised to use the ABS standards in their research. The NHMRC is the single most important body for funding medical research in this country, and academics take its advice very seriously. Those academics in turn train medical students, who then become doctors. Those doctors then join organisations like the AMA who write statements in support of the sex/gender split advocated by the ABS and the NHMRC, such as this:

The AMA supports the development of a NHMRC/MRFF joint statement on Sex, Gender, Variations of Sex Characteristics and Sexual Orientation in Health and Medical Research. The AMA would also like to see the adoption of the Statement by the wider research community.

In other words, the entire medical establishment in Australia has ended up treating the 2020 ABS standard as “the” correct way to measure sex and gender.¹² When the ABS created this standard in 2020, they did not merely lay the foundation for the questions that would eventually land in the 2026 census, they also set themselves up as the authority to define best-practice guidelines for other organisations, who have then gone on to badly misapply the ABS standards.¹³

This is, of course, a recipe for disaster for trans people in a world where every IT system in existence treats sex as a static, public field. It is inevitable that this advocacy from the NHMRC and AMA will lead to privacy violations for transgender people. It was irresponsible behaviour from both organisations, and a gross misuse of ABS standards that were not designed for the purposes that medical organisations have tried to use them.

LGBTQIA+ advocacy requires data competency

Up to this point in the story, I’ve focused mostly on the role of medical, statistical, and scientific organisations. The ABS creates standards, partly in response to advice from academics, the NHMRC adopts and misapplies those standards in a medical context, and then the AMA pushes the same advice into places where doctors and other health practitioners will adopt it. That’s the “official” part of the story, because those are the organisations with the institutional authority to make the sex/gender split an accepted data collection standard.

But it is not the whole story, and those are not the only organisations who have mishandled this issue. Because when the issue at hand relates to the lives of LGBTQIA+ people, the ABS, NHMRC, and AMA all take advice from LGBTQIA+ advocates. Organisations like ACON, Equality Australia, LGBTIQ Health Australia, and so on. What have these organisations had to say about the partial adoption of the 2020 ABS standard in the 2026 census? Here’s ACON praising the new census and giving credit to advocacy organisations:

This year’s Census is a historic milestone. For the first time, Australians aged 16 and over will be asked about their sexual orientation and gender identity, marking a significant moment in the recognition of LGBTQ+ communities in national statistics. This change came after years of advocacy from LGBTQ+ organisations who argued that access to this data would have an enormous impact on improving social cohesion and the health outcomes of LGBTQ+ communities.

Here’s Equality Australia being equally glowing:

“In 2027 we will finally have a more complete picture of who we are as a nation, including where LGBTQ+ adults live, what our jobs are, our health issues, where we go to school and what our families look like,” said Equality Australia CEO Anna Brown. “We still know so little about LGBTQ+ Australia because the 2021 Census failed to meaningfully count people of diverse sexualities and genders, and our families.”

Here’s LGBTQ Health Australia, again expressing their endorsement:

These updates are significant as the Census is one of Australia’s most important sources of population data. Governments, researchers, health services and community organisations use Census information to understand communities, identify needs and make decisions about policy, funding and services. For many LGBTQ+ people, these changes are not only about better data. They are about visibility and recognition in one of Australia’s most important national collections of population data.

Across the board, Australian LGBTQIA+ advocacy organisations have endorsed the new census questions specifically, with very little critical commentary.¹⁴ On the ground, if you talk to any transgender person who has had to interact with the medical system recently and who has encountered the same nightmarish experience I described in the opening anecdote, you will find that we are all extremely unhappy with the 2026 census.

There is a massive disconnect between what LGBTIQA+ advocacy groups are saying, and what transgender people are experiencing. But government agencies do not look to regular transgender people for advice: they go to ACON, Equality Australia, etc. Unfortunately, because those organisations are not really qualified to talk about the practicalities of data infrastructure as they pertain to the inadvertent leakage of transgender status, they give the wrong advice.

So here we are. Australia has ended up in the rather peculiar situation where data collection standards for trans people look strikingly similar to those used in the US and the UK. In all three countries, transgender people are now being forced to disclose birth sex information on a regular basis, often in situations where this is entirely inappropriate. In the US and the UK those policies were pushed by conservatives and opposed by LGBT advocacy organisations. In Australia, however, they have been pushed by progressives and encouraged by LGBT advocacy organisations. Unfortunately, the end result for trans people is exactly the same. The good intentions of the Australian organisations are irrelevant. Our private data gets leaked to people who have no right to that information, and this happens very openly and with no negative consequences for the people violating our privacy.

It is rather depressing.

Fixing the failure modes

My pessimism and depression regarding this issue notwithstanding, I would be remiss if I did not talk a little about possible solutions to the problem, and how organisations can handle data collection issues in those (rare) special cases where birth sex data is genuinely relevant. I am not a person who likes making strong recommendations, so I will be careful here, but I will make a genuine attempt. My advice is rather different depending on who you are.

• If you are the ABS. The 2020 standard is appropriate for your core purposes, but it has not been properly qualified: you need to make sure that organisations that do not have your same rigorous standards are not misled into thinking they should be using your data collection methodology. In contrast, the 2026 census is badly designed: transgender people will not answer the “birth sex” question honestly. Most of us will lie, with good cause. It was a mistake to create an asymmetry between the “sex” and “gender” questions, because most people will skip the optional question. That in turn means that downstream researchers will use the sex field rather than the gender field as covariates in their analyses. So transgender people will end up misclassified in almost every analysis. Most of us know this, because we all know how cisgender people respond to these questions. Lying is the best strategy for us. If you cannot make the full 4-question version mandatory (which of course is both politically impossible, and impractical on a mass scale), you should collapse the sex and gender questions to a single item, and do not force transgender people to humiliate ourselves on the census.

• If you are the NHMRC. With all due respect, I’d urge you to stop encouraging medical researchers to apply the ABS standards to data collection processes where it is not appropriate. Even in the medical context it is not common for the transgender status of participants to be relevant, in which case the distinction between sex and gender is not worth collecting data on. You are the premier organisation for funding medical research in this country, and other people are following your advice. With regard to the 2020 ABS standards the advice was the wrong call, and you do have a professional obligation to make amends for the damage it has caused.

• If you are running a clinical trial for a new drug with dense PK sampling, and you expect to have transgender participants. You are the rare exception. If your study design includes transgender people in the first place, it is because you have reason to think that the differences in metabolic processes for a transgender participant on HRT, a transgender participant not on HRT, and a cisgender participant might be important. You will need this data as a covariate for fitting your PPK model later on. However, if you’re skilled enough to have worked that out, you are also skilled enough to recognise that the 2020 ABS standard is not the correct way for you to collect that data. You will need to include specific questions about transgender status, not a generic “sex versus gender” instrument. You need to know concomitant medications like HRT, and you will want measurements of the relevant hormones. You also know that you have extremely strict rules around data confidentiality, and you will know that you cannot share the birth sex data to anyone except unblinded analysts working on the project. The ABS standards are not for you because you need something more sophisticated.

• If you are doing some other kind of research. Think very, very carefully about what measurements your study actually needs. Just because the ABS produced the 2020 standard and the NHMRC endorsed it does not mean your study should implement it. Collect the data that you need, and only the data that you need. In most cases, that won’t include birth sex because very few social, behavioural, or medical studies need it. Asking for gender will work just as well in 99% of cases. Indeed, there is virtue in being deliberately ambiguous here. Asking a single question that requests “sex/gender” and letting people interpret it however they like is fine. Your data are not so precise that the subtle distinctions built into the ABS 2020 standard will have any impact on your eventual p-value or the results you publish in academic journals. As George Box famously said about statistical models: “Since all models are wrong the scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong. It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers abroad”. The same statement holds for measurement instruments: the sex/gender split is a mouse. The ethical concerns with being pointlessly cruel to your transgender participants, however, is a tiger. If your ethics committee were competent and paying attention to this issue, your study should properly be rejected if you unnecessarily collect birth sex data. Either way, though, you have a professional responsibility to not distress your participants. Drop the sex/gender split: you don’t need it.

• If you are a doctor or a hospital. Do not include birth sex questions on an intake form. The ABS standard is inappropriate here. Intake forms are not always as private as they need to be, and in particular you need to be aware that your own database will probably leak birth sex data (and hence transgender status) to unauthorised third parties. You are better off having a single, ambiguous sex/gender question on your intake form. If and when your transgender patients have decided that they trust you enough to disclose our status to you, do not enter it in the sex field. It goes in private medical notes, because those notes do not get printed out on pathology forms or revealed to receptionists. You should treat birth sex with the same sensitivity that you would treat sexual orientation. If you believe it is unethical for a doctor to out their gay patients to strangers, you should show the same respect to your transgender patients. That means you must always treat birth sex as blinded data, in every context.

• If you are the Births, Deaths, and Marriages office. Actually, you’re doing great. More precisely, if you’re the South Australian BDM office, your current practices are almost perfect, as far as I can tell. Having updated my birth certificate sex/gender marker some time ago, the process was not as difficult as I feared, and the end result was surprisingly thoughtful. Legally recognised transgender people born in South Australia are issued two versions of our birth certificates, one with the marker change made explicit (useful for us when we have to prove we have transitioned) and one without it (useful when someone else asks to see the certificate and they have no business knowing our transgender status). Honestly, my main advice here would be very simple – the transgender status in your database should not be shared with any other organisations, including other government agencies. You are the official register for this kind of information: you should know that I am transgender. The tax office has no reason to know that.

• If you are ACON, Equality Australia, etc. Please spend less time lobbying the government and more time talking to regular transgender people. You’ve been advocating for a policy that is causing us a huge amount of distress, creating an administrative nightmare for us, and is leading to transgender people being outed by people who have foolishly listened to you. Separating sex and gender on data collection instruments is inherently bad practice in almost all situations, but the people who have been taking advice from you are not grasping the risks involved. Indeed, I worry that you might not understand the risks involved. Please be careful here, because there are serious downstream risks that attach to this advice.

• If you are just a regular person. Mind your own business. You do not need to know other people’s birth sex. Do not ask. It is very, very simple.

I hope some of this is useful.

Footnotes

1. I remain neutral on the virtues of that question, and don’t think it’s my place to comment on it.

2. This post represents a departure in style for this blog. In most posts I am lighthearted, jokey, and occasionally very crass. This one plays it straight, because I am deadly serious about this topic.

3. For the record: my Ph.D. in mathematical psychology was awarded in 2003, I worked as an academic specialising in statistics, psychological measurement, and behavioural science from 2006 to 2021, I worked in the tech sector for a year, and since 2023 I’ve been an industry-based statistician and pharmacometrics consultant working with clinical trial data on a daily basis. I came out in 2013 and transitioned in 2016, so I am not new to that either. I really do have the expertise I am claiming. Look me up if you don’t believe me.

4. It should be noted that I did meet a lot of academics during that time frame who were extremely transphobic, and horrible to be around. But those weren’t the people involved in the conversations leading up to the ABS standards. That process unfolded with the absolute best of intentions from everyone involved, as far as I know.

5. The conversations weren’t just at UNSW, but it’s the ones at UNSW that I was tangentially involved with.

6. The typical failure mode was painfully stupid: at some point, a programmer assumed that the sex/gender marker is a static field, so a subsystem populates its own copy of the field in the central database once and never refreshes the value. So the system that then displays information to third parties never gets the update from HR, and my trans status gets disclosed. This happened to me dozens of times, and nobody could prevent it from happening. Each time I would have to contact IT and get them to investigate. They’d fix one subsystem, and then the same problem would reappear a few weeks later with another one.

7. My own data collection practices at that time was to include a single optional question asking people to identify as “male”, “female”, or “other”. It wasn’t perfect, and in hindsight I’d probably have added “nonbinary” as an explicit category. But making it optional was critical: it was a deliberate, unobtrusive way to let people opt out of answering the question if they didn’t want to.

8. More on this later: the word almost matters in that sentence.

9. For completeness, I should note that the NHMRC then goes on to give this qualification: “there will be other occasions where the ABS 2020 Standard may not provide sufficient information on the Variables to answer the research question the project will address, and researchers are encouraged to collect demographic information and then use other best practice data collection methods to collect further information on factors that are relevant to their project”. That’s a very sensible qualification, but from the perspective of the topic I am discussing it is the wrong one. It reads like an encouragement to collect more data. It does not issue any caveat suggesting that researchers should refrain from collecting birth sex data when it is not needed.

10. Forcing trans people to disclose our birth sex is extremely likely to make us angry or distressed. This is not a question you should ever ask unless you absolutely have to. It’s more than rude: it’s offensive and distressing.

11. Yet again I will assert my qualifications: I have served on ethics committees for the approval of research on human subjects at Australian universities.

12. As an aside, I notice that the AMA statement also says this: “Imbalances in sex and gender also adversely impact clinical trials. The fundamentals of different pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics within males and females must be considered. For example, women who take beta blockers, used to treat heart problems, have higher concentrations in their blood. The reasons for this are multiple but include factors as simple as differences in blood volume. Women also metabolise many medicines differently to men, because of sex hormone levels and enzyme activity”. The statement is fine as far as it goes but it’s easy to misread as a claim that birth sex is the relevant covariate for the underlying PPK model. That would be incorrect: taken at face value it’s arguing that volume of distribution (V1, V2, etc) relates to birth sex, but the metabolism claim suggests that HRT affects CYP-mediated drug metabolism and hence that sex hormones influence clearance (CL). For transgender patients on HRT, then, clearance will be associated with our gender and not our birth sex. But since clinical trials don’t typically include any transgender participants, the point is moot. We don’t usually get included in the data set, even for studies where it would actually be incredibly relevant. Sigh.

13. In this specific respect, I would like to defend the ABS. It’s not their fault that other organisations misuse their data collection standards, and I don’t hold them morally responsible for the consequences of what other people do with their guidelines. I’m only stating this because I think that it’s historically what happened, as far as I can tell. The ABS defined guidelines for the ABS to use, and then everyone else was too lazy to do their own work and simply copied the ABS as if their guidelines were a single source of truth. I will later on have some quite pointed criticism of the ABS with regards to how they adapted the 2020 standards for the 2026 census, but that is a different issue to this one. In this specific sense, the ABS is blameless.

14. I should be precise here: it is quite common for these organisations to criticise the 2026 census for including only 3 of the 4 items from the 2020 standards. The one related to intersex people has not been included in the census, and the organisations are all at pains to be critical about that. But not one of them has made any public commentary about the downstream consequences that the 2020 standards/2026 census have for trans people and the inevitable catastrophic data leakage that happens when those standards get widely adopted. Not a word on that.