UK Government sex and gender review 'harmful', study warns

A UK Government review on sex and gender could “undermine” scientific research and “erode academic freedom”, researchers have warned.

UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting previously welcomed the Sullivan Review [Image: PA]

It comes alongside the publication of a peer-reviewed study in response to the “Independent review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender”, which was conducted by sociologist Professor Alice Sullivan at the Tory-run UK government’s request and published in March 2025.

Sullivan concluded “sex” is “constant across time” while “legal sex” is “subject to change”. She said that the word “‘gender’ should be avoided” and that “questions which combine sex and gender identity in one question should not be asked” in order to ensure consistency across data.

The Labour Government welcomed the review, however, concerns were raised that Sullivan’s conclusions may have been “biased” because of her role on the advisory group to gender-critical campaign Sex Matters.

On Tuesday, Professor Felicity Callard and Dr Jay Todd published the first peer-reviewed study in response to Sullivan’s conclusions, arguing that it “wrongly portrays trans and gender diverse people’s self‑determination of sex and gender as incompatible with scientific truth and legitimacy”.

The University of Glasgow academics said that Sullivan’s recommendations could have negative consequences for the conduct and quality of clinical research “by making it impossible to properly account for people whose sex or gender does not conform to a binary definition of sex, or align with the sex they were assigned at birth”.

They argue that Sullivan’s recommendation that descriptions of datasets and groups of people should not acknowledge sex or gender beyond a binary established at birth “entrenches its focus on trans exclusion”.

UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting previously welcomed the Sullivan Review [Image: PA]

Todd, the paper’s corresponding author, said: “The UK Government’s Health Secretary Wes Streeting MP has claimed that the Sullivan Review ‘will lead to better, more inclusive and fairer outcomes for everyone, including the trans community’. We strongly disagree.

“The Sullivan Review promotes a harmful approach to research that systematically excludes trans and gender diverse people at a time when trans communities already face systemic erasure.

“It would reduce the ability of UK researchers to recognise and engage with the people involved in a wide range of studies in a dignified and accurate way.”

Callard said: “We can find no evidence trans or gender diverse people were involved in the review’s design, analysis, or writing.

“It uses what we see as dehumanising language, including by deploying culture wars about trans participation in sport to make key recommendations and by referring to trans women as ‘males who identify as women’.

“The review includes recommendations that encourage researchers to record a person’s sex according to their own observation rather than participants’ self‑description, an approach that could miscategorise both trans and cisgender people. These proposals clearly do not align with basic ethics of participant dignity and autonomy.

“The review’s recommendations raise serious questions about the independence of scientific inquiry, and we urge decision makers to consider the potential harms the review could cause if widely taken up.”

Todd and Callard argue in the paper that Sullivan’s review misrepresents scientific understandings of sex, with a narrow binary definition potentially opening the door to some people with variations of sex characteristics finding they do not identify with any given responses.

The paper also argues that the review, while “consistently appealing to the ‘clarity’ of science and ‘ordinary mainstream views’, discounts decades of social scientific and critical inquiry which has demonstrated that both sex and gender are socially as well as biologically produced”.

Dr Jay Todd said the review's recommendations could 'undermine scholarship' [Image: Supplied]

Todd added: “If the Sullivan Review’s recommendations are accepted and normalised, they could contribute to a wider rollback of trans inclusion and of the rights of marginalised people more broadly, and undermine critical scholarship internationally.

“We are calling upon researchers across the UK to reject the recommendations of the Sullivan Review and push back on the possibility of their implementation by government and our public institutions.”

Their research has been published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

It comes after a similar study from Dr Kevin Guyan, the director of the University of Edinburgh’s Gender and Sexuality Data Lab, also concluded that anti-trans campaigns targeting data collection could be negatively impacting scientific research.

Guyan coined the term “trans-exclusionary data activism” to describe campaigns insisting biological sex assigned at birth be recorded in all data collection, regardless of context.

He told The National: “At a basic fundamental level, it goes against the 101 of what researchers do and should be doing.

“This kind of one-size-fits-all approach to sex data that says ‘in all situations we should be capturing data on binary biological sex assigned at birth’ is a really crude approach to doing research that basically misrepresents the world we're trying to capture.”

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