The UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has published a Review of Data, Statistics and Research on Sex and Gender, a hangover from the former Tory government’s mission to address ‘wokeism in science’.

Led by prominent ‘gender critical’ academic Prof Alice Sullivan, with research conducted by ‘gender critical’ campaign group Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, the Review – unsurprisingly – recommends that all research and data exercises (in all contexts) should ask a binary question about ‘biological sex’.

This catch-all approach to data collection goes against a fundamental principle of research design: methods should be chosen based on the specific question(s) under investigation. The Review’s top-down approach to all data collection practices suggests that its authors (somehow) know better than the many data experts working across a diversity of fields, including health and social care, criminal and civil justice, and travel and transport.

The Review’s overall argument is premised on an invented past: the belief that – once upon a time – a clear, stable concept of sex existed that everyone agreed on. Doing social research in the 1950s was easy before pesky queer participants got in the way. To demonstrate this claim, the Review leads with a graph that shows that 100 per cent of surveys held by the UK Data Service from 1946 to 1969 asked about ‘sex’.

By the 2020s, less than 20 per cent of surveys asked about ‘sex’. For the Review authors, this steep decline is framed as a ‘loss of data on sex’ rather than the more simple explanation that language used to describe what is understood as ‘sex’ and/or ‘gender’ has changed since the mid-1940s.

The mistake of equating ‘terminology’ with ‘concept’ is a rookie historical error. For example, in my research on LGBTQ data, if I found that most sexual orientation surveys from the 1990s asked whether the respondent identified as ‘homosexual’ now ask whether the respondent identifies as ‘gay’, I would not conclude that ‘homosexuals’ cease to exist just because the language had changed.

The Review’s similarities to what is currently unfolding in the USA are stark. The DSIT and UK Government, researchers, funders and public bodies need to recognise this Trumpian intervention for what it is: an attempt to erase trans and non-binary people from existing in data.