It's uncomfortable for a Leftie like me to admit, but Trump is right on trans issues

Telegraph

30-03-2025

On my way to meet Prof Alice Sullivan it occurs to me that if Marvel were dreaming up a new franchise, it probably wouldn't alight on a quantitative data scientist as its new superhero.
And that would be a terrible miscalculation. Her recently published Sullivan Review reveals that when it comes to liberating public bodies from 'institutional capture' by trans activists and highlighting the dangerous lunacy of conflating sex with gender, our doughtiest defence is data.
Sullivan, a professor of sociology and a quantitative data scientist at University College London, was commissioned by the previous Conservative government to investigate how data on biological sex is collected by public bodies after deep concerns were raised about the stranglehold of gender ideology in our key organisations. She was chosen to do the review because of her specialist work on the topic and well-publicised views on the need to record accurate data on sex.
'Sex and gender identity are distinct characteristics and are not interchangeable,' has always been her message. 'But unfortunately people in a great many organisations don't understand data collection as a discipline and have been taking advice from other people who don't understand it either; the result is a mess. We need – we have a responsibility – to record both sex and gender identity'.
She and her team carried out interviews, collated evidence and heard from whistleblowers too fearful of reprisals to speak out. What they uncovered was shocking; across key organisations like the NHS, schools, the police and civil service, factual information on biological sex has been replaced by subjective (and highly contested) feedback on gender identity since 2015.
As a consequence 'robust accurate data' has been lost, the review concluded. Criminals – including sex offenders – are being permitted to choose a self-identified 'gender' rather than be identified by their biological sex, and the police and courts are complying. Then there are the schools that immediately change children's 'gender ' on IT systems if they self-identify as the opposite sex – often without consulting the parents – and civil servants hounded out for perfectly ordinary opinions on biological sex. It's absurd. Enter the Sullivan Review. For those longing to turn the tide on aggressive gender politics, this detailed 226-page document has drawn a long-overdue line in the sand.
Maya Forstater, CEO of pressure group Sex Matters welcomed its findings: 'This review is devastatingly clear about the harms caused by carelessness with sex data and a decade-long failure of the Civil Service to maintain impartiality and uphold data standards. The destruction of data about sex has caused real harm to individuals and research, and undermined the integrity of policy-making. Conflating sex and gender identity is not a harmless act of kindness but a damaging dereliction of duty.'
Or, as transgender lobbyists TransActual put it on their website; 'This review is providing an academic gloss on what is a political call to strip trans people of our hard-won rights to privacy, dignity, and respect in public spaces.'
'We are beyond the point where we can be silenced'
It's the sort of binary response that has landed Britain in such a nonsensical quagmire in the first place. Sullivan has, in fact, called on organisations to record gender preference as well as sex when gathering data – but nuance has gone the same way as common sense.
Thankfully cometh the hour cometh the quantitative data scientist in the shape of Prof Alice Sullivan, who is as far from a Gradgrindian number-cruncher as you can imagine. To my mind it all feels terribly bleak. But when we meet, in her corner of north London, where the magnolia trees are in full creamy bloom and the local coffee shop is so vegan I almost cause a riot when I unwittingly ask for 'real milk', Sullivan is in surprisingly high spirits.
'I'm optimistic. I think this review marks a watershed. It has taken a long time but I really do believe we are beyond the point where we can be silenced. It's the beginning of the end for no debate.'
Wouldn't that be nice? I can't help suggesting that Donald Trump of all people may have had a part to play in changing the proverbial mood music surrounding gender issues.
'As a life-long Leftie, it feels uncomfortable to be put in the position of agreeing with Donald Trump. But the fact is that he is simply saying that there are two sexes and that this matters, for example in prisons and sports. If Donald Trump says that the earth is round, should Leftists claim it is flat just to avoid being on the same side as him? This kind of tribal thinking has been horribly damaging to the Left. The idiotic positions that the Democrats took on these issues helped to gift the election to Trump. Mainstream politicians of all stripes need to learn from this that denying observable facts about the world is dangerous.'
Above: Trump signed an executive order banning transgender women from female sport in February
For years now Sullivan has refused to be silenced by gender militants who have bullied and threatened her online. Instead she has continued to focus on 'biological truth' and has striven – not always successfully – to staunch the tide of 'ideological capture', which has seen LGBTQ+ networks within our key organisations mount successful, sustained campaigns to change the culture within them.
'As a result, an atmosphere of fear has been created making people scared to speak out against or even discuss issues surrounding gender,' she says. 'Bad decisions have been made by management because they have erroneously assumed these highly vocal activists represent far greater numbers than they do.'
Later, Sullivan happily confides she hasn't had any death threats recently, which tells us everything we need to know about the toxic tactics employed by some trans militants who have somehow managed to weaponise 'hurt feelings' and bully public servants into accepting a parallel reality.
We meet in the week that the University of Sussex was handed a record fine of £585,000 by the Office for Students (OfS) for failing to uphold freedom of speech. It came following a lengthy investigation into the university's handling of the case of Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who resigned after being targeted by protests over her views on gender.
'Kathleen Stock had a horrific level of abuse, and I've received nothing like that. By and large my peers have been very supportive but there have been exceptions and it is totally unacceptable that women are being horribly intimidated just for believing in biological sex.'
A Left-wing upbringing
But back to Sullivan. Five feet tall with bleached pixie-cut hair, when we meet at her north London home she is wearing a teal-coloured dress that matches the extravagant Designer's Guild wallpaper in her straight-from-the-pages-of- Living etc dining room.
She takes me through the hallway hung with interesting art to the bold moderniste kitchen where on the breakfast table there are two lovely patterned plates, the sort most of us would keep for visitors, and a recipe for linguine with fresh crab is open on a book stand – and it's not even midweek! She laughs at my chippy indignation.
But it later transpires she's half Spanish (hence the good food) and has never wanted children (hence the glamorous colour supplement interiors) so I am forced to retract my remarks about her being 'a member of the metropolitan elite'. Sullivan, who lives with her mathematician husband John Armstrong, an academic at King's College London laughs a surprising amount.
I find myself wondering aloud if that's because it's physically, or indeed metaphysically impossible to be cancelled twice? She was famously 'no-platformed' in late 2019 when a research methods seminar where she was due to speak, held by the National Centre for Social Research was axed on the grounds 'the topic was of too much public interest'. Sullivan rolls her eyes at the ridiculousness. 'That is what I was initially told, although I'd never heard of something being called off because it was deemed too interesting,' she says.
Her perceived misdemeanour was that of having 'anti-trans views' because she had raised her head above the parapet and criticised the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for failing to collect data on biological sex. When she was bluntly told she was the reason for the cancellation she broke down. 'I cried,' she says. 'I'm normally Captain Calm but I felt utterly bewildered that this was happening in my world, a world of sober data science. Data is about trust and once you lose trust, democracy itself is at risk. That way lies authoritarianism.'
Sullivan was born and raised in Bristol. Her late Glaswegian father left school at 14 but became involved in the Trades Union movement. He took opportunities offered by the Workers' Educational Association and moved to London, where he took five A levels – he had no idea that three was the norm – and later completed a degree and then a PhD as a mature student, during which time he met Sullivan's mother, who was from the Basque region.
'My parents were both socialists,' she says. 'But my dad, who died twenty years ago, also had a built-in bulls--t detector which I think he passed on to me. He also had a mischievous sense of humour and there have been times when I would really have appreciated him being around so he could help me find the funny side of the more stressful things that have happened.
After reading PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) at Balliol College, Oxford, Sullivan undertook a masters in sociology and then a PhD in the sociology of education. She took a job at the Institute of Education which became part of University College London and worked her way up from research officer to professor. And from 2010 to 2020 she was also director of the hugely important ongoing 1970 British Cohort Study, which followed the lives of around 17,000 people born in England, Scotland and Wales in a single week of 1970.
Sullivan's cancellation
Her involvement with gender issues began, as is so often the case, on a personal note. Both she and her husband are keen runners and often use the track at Hampstead Heath. In 2018, Sullivan discovered that moves were afoot to allow individuals to access areas such as the Women's Pond and other facilities based on self identification. This gave her pause.
'I use the changing rooms there and I thought 'that's a bit much, you can't just ID yourself into a woman's space'. Then I saw the consultation document which was a really badly written questionnaire – and I care a lot about questionnaires.
Having thought long and hard about going public, she felt it was important, so she contacted the local paper in Camden who ran a story. But despite her best efforts, self identification was introduced, giving transgender women the right to use the Ladies' Pond and other facilities, a policy that still persists today. Meanwhile as she became more familiar with grassroots feminist movements who were taking a stance against the eradication of sex in officialdom, the ONS announced that it was rolling out a new, 'inclusive' version of the sex question on the 2021 national census.
This would allow respondents to answer according to their self-identified gender rather than their physical sex – thereby making a nonsense of its data collection. Sullivan took a stand – and garnered hate mail – when she criticised this bias in an open letter she organised in 2019. It was signed by more than 80 eminent academics from Oxbridge and Russell Group universities, pointing out that it would 'undermine data reliability on a key demographic variable and damage our ability to capture and remedy sex-based discrimination and inequality'.
The ONS refused to back down and in 2021 was taken to court by the feminist group Fair Play for Women and the judge found in the group's favour, ordering changes to the census – only this week the ONS admitted that the number of trans people was 'incorrectly recorded' in the latest census
The case highlighted just how tightly gender ideology had taken hold. 'I was so young and naive,' she laughs, ruefully. 'I genuinely thought that getting eminent data scientists and academics to sign an open letter would sort everything out. Surely everyone would agree? Then came the backlash.'
Cue a volley of unpleasant messages on what was then Twitter, intimations of violence and death threats on Facebook. 'It's easy to ignore random strangers online but when it's someone from the academic world, or professional people who should know better, amplifying the voices of abusive trolls, it's disappointing'.
Throughout all this, Sullivan had no regrets. In 2023 she co-edited a book, Sex and Gender: a Contemporary Reader with the Oxford historian Selina Todd and has organised events on the subject – which other academics have sought to cancel, giving a lie to notions of free speech. But her commitment is undiminished. As a sociologist she is fascinated, among other aspects, by the sex divide when it comes to gender identity; at present there seems to be a spike in the number of biological girls choosing to identify as male. But without accurate data this can't be understood. Similarly, without reliable data on sex, the world would have no idea about the gender imbalances in some societies where female babies are aborted.
'One of the recommendations in the review is that the nonsensical expression '[sex] assigned at birth' should no longer be used,' she says, which will have a great many punching the air in jubilation, myself included. 'It's a term that comes from the postmodern philosophical idea that sex is a purely social construct and is not real but assigned at birth. This is just bonkers. Sex is determined at conception and the fact it is observable in-utero is why there were so many sex-selective abortions in China under the one child policy.'
Gender gerrymandering
But here in the West there are those who stubbornly insist on denying biology. Of all the outrageous instances of gender gerrymandering, one in particular stands out for Sullivan. During research for her eponymous review a paediatrician cited a mother who 'changed' the sex of her child when it was still a baby. Within weeks of the birth she decided she wanted to bring up her newborn as the opposite sex and went to her GP to request a new NHS number and have it officially recognised in the sex she had chosen. The GP complied. When children's social care was alerted, they denied there was any safeguarding issue.
'When I heard about that case, I felt physically sick,' admits Sullivan. 'I was appalled that an infant could simply be erased from NHS records and given a new identity with a new NHS number. It's unbelievable, but it happened. The vast majority of parents are loving and responsible but it's inevitable there will always be some who are attention-seeking and abusive – the scandal is that our institutions are not protecting children, because somewhere along the line it became taboo to challenge gender-identity theory.'
Sullivan wasn't the only one to react with visceral horror. The day after publication, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced that from now on, no-one under the age of 18 will be given a new NHS record. 'It's completely wrong that children's NHS numbers can be changed if they change gender, and I've made it clear this must not happen,' he said.
'We must deliver safe and holistic care for both adults and children when it comes to gender, and that also means accurately recording biological sex – not just for research and insight, but also for patient safety.'
He acted swiftly but many commentators feel the rest of the Government has a long way to go when it comes to stamping out this extraordinary bias towards gender self-identification. 'I'm delighted with the strong leadership that Wes Streeting has shown. It's important that the Government as a whole tackles this issue systematically, as the need for accurate data doesn't only apply to health.'
But damningly – disappointingly – Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has refused to issue an order compelling all police forces in England and Wales to collect data specifically on sex. 'Sex is a powerful predictor of both offending and victimisation,' urges Sullivan. 'This is particularly obvious when it comes to violent and sexual crime. It's vital that the home secretary acts to issue a mandatory requirement for all police forces to record data on sex.'
Sullivan won't be drawn on whether a Tory government would have adopted all her review recommendations wholesale. 'The fact is that this problem was apparent under the previous Conservative government, and the likes of Teresa May and Boris Johnson facilitated it. Michelle Donelan [former secretary of state for science, innovation and technology] deserves great credit for commissioning the review, but this isn't a Left-Right issue, it's a matter of common sense. Accurate data benefits us all.'
How many times will she have to say it? A great many more, I expect. But the mere fact the Sullivan Review was commissioned spurs her on. 'I've been working in this area for years so being given the opportunity to undertake research in this way was almost like an answer to a prayer; I've been over the moon with the reception for it. It was even written about in The Sun.'
For now, her focus is on the forthcoming second part of her review which looks at barriers to research on sex and gender, primarily in universities. The quantitative data scientists may not inherit the earth, but it seems we desperately need them to make sense of it.