The UK is set to become one of the first countries in the world not to require its citizens to identify their sex as part of its census forms.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) is proposing to make the sex question in the next census scheduled for March 2021 voluntary after protests that it discriminates against transgender and other non-binary people who do not identify as male or female, The Sunday Times reported.
The change will leave Britain without an accurate figure for the number of men and women living in the country. The proposal was greeted with horror by some feminists, who see it as part of a growing trend to remove all mention of the biological female sex.
Germaine Greer, UK-based Australian feminist writer and academic, said biological women were “losing out everywhere”. “I’m sick and tired of this. We keep arguing that women have won everything they need to win. They haven’t even won the right to exist,” she told the newspaper.
In a report last month, the ONS had said the existing census question, which requires respondents to choose whether they are male or female, was “irrelevant, unacceptable and intrusive, particularly to trans participants, due to asking about sex rather than gender.” An option to add a third choice of “other was rejected as “irrelevant”.
