Confusion between sex and gender identity in official data has dangerous implications, review warns

A growing tendency in official data to ask a person for their gender identity rather than their sex is having serious consequences in some areas of healthcare such as missed cancer screenings and mistakes in blood testing.

An independent, government commissioned report1 into the collection of accurate data and statistics on biological sex concluded that public bodies should collect distinct data on both sex and gender identity to ensure that nationally held data are accurate and clear.

The report, published by the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology, sets out a timeline of how survey data have been collected since the 1960s. It shows how the word “gender” started to replace “sex” in some data collection in the 1990s, and in some survey data, gender was …