Review of 2021 Census Topics

None, but we are indebted to the work of the LGBTI Health Alliance, whose work we draw heavily on.

The LGBTIQ Ministerial Advisory Council (‘the Council’) acknowledges the initial attempt, made in the 2016 Census, to allow the sex and gender diversity of Australians to be reflected.
However, despite accompanying review notes demonstrating that the ABS understands there is an inherent difference between the concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, the 2016 census went ahead with a question that conflated these two concepts.
The Council understands that this consultation is not about methodology, but the fact that the response category ‘other’ in the ‘male/female’ question required a respondent to make special contact with an ABS hotline is in direct contradiction to your own Assessment criterion 5 “the topic can be collected efficiently” and Criterion 4 “the topic would be acceptable to census respondents”. It would surely not be acceptable to many people to be instructed that their response is too difficult/special/controversial to be collected in the standard way. Therefore, whatever the intent behind this approach, it appears that respondents found the “Other” response in the 2016 survey somewhat stigmatising. Council also notes that there are many potential question setups that signal the intention to give visibility to gender diverse people, but fail in that they mix concepts that aren’t mutually exclusive and force respondents to give answers that aren’t fully accurate. This is a concept that is explored as we address each of the assessment criteria below:

As an advisory committee for the ACT government we wish to identify areas of need for the local LGBTIQ community and promote sound evidence based policies and service delivery to address those needs. We need service provision and resources to be directed in a way that is data driven - if, owing to being of small population, our Territory does not have the appropriate research base, we are happy to extrapolate from national figures. However, if there are no quality statistics at all about the communities who request our assistance, then how to we justify any resource allocation to them, when we know anecdotally that they exist? We know that gender diverse and intersex people live in our area and pay taxes, yet the idea of state or federal service provision for them (e.g. a gender clinic for transgender people), or that include them (gender diversity training for community workers), or policies about them (e.g. a hospitals policy around ‘cosmetic’ surgery on intersex infants) needs to be underpinned by data of the reach and quality that we know only the ABS can provide.

These data are often thought of as pertaining to a small population group - but given that the only thing we can surmise from the 2016 census is that there was a massive undercount in the ’Other’ response category, it is hard to estimate the population. So we still have no idea how many gender non-binary, transgender or intersex people live in this country (NB those three categories are not mutually exclusive, which is addressed later in this submission).
Local surveys (including one in the ACT) have demonstrated large unemployment and under-employment in the transgender and gender diverse community. Employment is an issue of national importance and policy is set at a Federal level - therefore it is proportionate that it is included in a national Census. The fact that the Census already captures income and employment data means understanding the link with gender diverse people would be a statistically simple exercise.

A question that conflates sex and gender identity will inherently yield inaccurate data.
The notion that ‘male’ or ‘female’ confers on the respondent some specific physical characteristics is not entirely accurate. For instance, if a transgender man was answering the census he would respond with ‘male’. For understanding the population through the lens of ‘gender identity’ then it serves the purpose. However, if a purpose is to use data for health service planning, then there would need to be a significant accuracy caveat. A transgender man would not ever require prostate cancer screening or treatment, but his ‘male’ response would’ve been used in the prostate cancer resource planning. Conversely, the same man would require cervical screening but his existence wouldn’t have been noticed by a health service planner counting the number of ‘females’ in a geographical area.

This criterion does speak to the accuracy of “collection” of data , but ultimately the accuracy of this data item rests in its ability to be accurate in each context in which it is used, not just at the point of collection.

The wording of any response categories beyond ‘male’ or ‘female’ needs to be considered sensitively. The nomenclature should also reflect the structure of the question(s) (for example, questions about having an intersex variation may exist completely separately to a standard male/female gender identity question, or other structures may include conditional logic to branch between questions).

There are some sample questions/question structures available in this document from the AIDS Action Council
https://aidsaction.org.au/images/resource-library/LGBTIQ%20Inclusive%20Data%20Collection%20-%20a%20Guide.pdf

If a gender identity question were to contain response categories “Male; Female; Intersex” then a women who happens to have been born with an intersex variation will be presented with a false choice: She can either accurately assert that her gender identity is female OR she can accurately assert that she has an intersex variation. Neither answer gives the full story, and even worse, the survey designers would have fallen into the trap of believing that the response categories would yield a count of intersex people in Australia...when in fact there would be a massive undercount. This scenario demonstrates how good intentions lead to inaccurate data.

As stated in the overview, the ABS already created inefficiencies for itself with the ‘Other’ response in the 2016 Census. Our recommendation is not to use this method again.
It is not council’s recommendation to have a panoply of the latest terms and descriptors in one long list of response categories, lest anyone feel excluded. This could produce a backlash amongst some (cisgender) responders and that would also create inaccuracies. Council understands that first and foremost the collection must serve its purpose, and that creating a big list of LGBTIQ identity terms would not achieve that. However, the very fact that the ABS has invited feedback on this specific question demonstrates that the entire purpose of counting ‘males’ or ‘females’ needs to be re-examined.
Our society instinctively believes that ‘males’ and ‘females’ is a crucial social disaggregator . We find value in being able to extrapolate that say, “ x% of males drive to work but only y% of females do”, however we don’t ask or care what proportion of left-handed people drive to work, or redheads, etc, etc. Why is “assumed-genital-morphology-at-birth” (aka sex/gender) of such interest when it comes to driving habits, (or countless other social signifiers)?
This is a philosophical question that is beyond this respondent’s remit to address, but it is being raised here to underline the point about the utility of the final product, i.e. the data collected.
IF the ABS is serious about being able to understand the lives of those who live outside the comforts of a cisgender, endosex existence (and we believe it should be), then it behoves the organisation to pay respect to the structure and granularity of the answers, and not fall into the trap of believing that being intersex or transgender are types of gender identity when they are not.

Any survey of young people that addresses gender identity will yield a significant (and often surprising) number of respondents who classify themselves as non-binary or some identity other than male or female. These are the generation of people who will be filling in their own census surveys for the first time in 2021 and crucial social, administrative and physical aspects of their lives will not be accurately represented unless this topic is addressed properly.

Thank you for allowing us this opportunity to provide feedback. For a further, fully referenced examination of this topic, the ACT LGBTIQ Ministerial Advisory council recommends that the ABS note the following paper:
Ansara, Y. G. (2016). Making the count: Addressing data integrity gaps in Australian standards for collecting sex and gender information [White paper]. Newtown: National LGBTI Health Alliance. Available at: www.lgbtihealth.org.au