Did Stonewall invent 300,000 non-existent trans people?

How many people in Britain are transgender?  Until today, there hasn’t been an official answer to that question. New census data give us a number: there are 262,000 people living in England and Wales in March 2021 who ‘identified with a gender different from their sex registered at birth’, in the words of the Office for National Statistics.

Making some broad assumptions for Scotland and Northern Ireland, we might therefore guess that the trans population of the UK is around 300,000. Which raises some slightly awkward questions for people and organisations who have been keen to suggest that the trans population is much bigger. Organisations like Stonewall, for example.

Stonewall, Britain’s leading trans rights campaign group, has spent several years telling politicians and the public that the trans population is growing rapidly, meaning more attention and resources must be devoted to their needs.

According to Stonewall, ‘the best estimate at the moment is that around 1 per cent of the population might identify as trans, including people who identify as non-binary.