Every five years since 1801, Britain has counted its people in order to aid planning. The questions tend to vary but tend to be somewhat basic. I filled ours in yesterday. As I was going through it, I experienced some issues but probably not so many as I would’ve done had I been in various other groups. I also spoke on behalf of the others in my household, which is not ideal. I thought today I would go through various issues which it brought up for me, which would’ve been helped if I’d been making notes as I worked through it, but unfortunately I didn’t.
One of the big issues, of course, is religion. It’s possible to write in what your religion is, and “no religion” is the first option in that section. Many people used to write “Jedi” as a protest, but there are people who seriously follow that as a faith as well. If this were not confidential, it could be problematic. When I first went to university, I filled in a form where I was to specify my religion, so I wrote “C of E” because back then a lot of people did. I suspect that doing this led to the immense amount of hassle I was then to experience from fundamentalist Christians which almost drew me into what I’m tempted to describe as a cult, but since they insisted on continuing to be sexist, homophobic and anti-vegetarian, obviously I didn’t succumb. On the census form, I described myself as Christian because of the doctrine of the perseverence of the saints, but this is questionable because it artificially inflates the number of Christians in Britain. I’m theistic, but don’t currently accept the Trinity. I’m possibly closest to Noahide but since I associate that with conservatism and bigotry I’m not about to write that. Sarada is of course a Quaker, for which there was no option because it’s often thought of as a denomination of Christianity, so I ticked “Christian” for her too. The other two members of this household are not religious, so that was easy, and it was quite refreshing to tick those boxes. However, as a strong secularist I believe in equal treatment of all belief systems within certain limits (I wouldn’t, for example, include racism and fascism in that and by extension some forms of Germanic paganism and Christian Identity are also distinctly dodgy though they might destroy themselves if scrutinised closely, so maybe), and it probably would’ve been better to reflect that in the form. In 2011 the British Social Attitudes survey recorded 50% of respondents as non-religious and 44% as Christian, but the 2011 census form recorded 59% as Christian. Therefore there seems to be an overestimate, and this is not good, particularly since many people associate Christianity with various other attitudes such as sexism, homophobia, intolerance of other religions, and on another level as associated with White identity. This question is therefore for whatever reason likely to yield inaccurate results. Another survey regarding religious affiliation included further questions as to why someone selected Christian, and it was found that 59% of people chose it because they were christened and 44% because at least one parent was Christian (this is correctly reported incidentally, despite the coincidence of percentages), which reduces the percentage of Christians to less than 25%. The higher figure enables prominent politicians and others to claim Britain is a Christian country, which often had racist and sometimes also homophobic undertones.
There is also a section for sexual orientation, which I did end up writing “none of the above” into on account that none of the categories I was presented with appeared to describe me. I can to some extent forgive them this, but I also think that sexuality is such an individual thing that although it can be helpful to attempt to subsume it under a small number of headings, I’m more queer than anything else. I’m aware that I’m trespassing onto the territory of another blog here so I won’t say too much, but since it was the first time they’d asked, it’s not surprising that it needs ironing out. A further question covered gender identity, presumably as an attempt to detect trans people’s economic and social conditions. However, I found it rather stark to be asked my birth-assigned sex. It seemed cold and brutal, although there is of course very much sex-based oppression. But again, what is one saying when one says one identifies as female when one was birth-assigned male? Is there too much focus on the trans issue? What about good old-fashioned sexism?
Then there was ethnicity. I marked myself as Scottish and everyone else as British, but learned later that there was a movement to write “European” in, which had I known I would’ve done, not because I am part of a pro-EU movement but because more than anything else I see myself as Northwest European. So it’s a shame I didn’t hear about that. Health and care was a bit of a blunt instrument too, because the debilitation we have in this house is quite variable. Since I see being trans as a disability, I went along with the ICD classification of gender identity disorder as something which seriously impairs everyday functioning, which of course it does, but I am also physically the healthiest person I know, so it would’ve been helpful to make more of a distinction between psychological and physiological disability. I felt like a bit of a fraud to be honest.
Finally, there was the question of employment. Although someone might be officially unemployed, they may also be very helpful, doing unpaid house maintenance, caring, helping out with the shopping and housework or doing emotional work. I think it’s quite judgemental and dismissive to regard anyone as unemployed. Marx once said that it was part of human nature to work, and there is paid and unpaid work, and work which is pretty much useless is often well-paid. This needs to be worded differently.
On a slightly different tack, it’s also been discovered that there are rather counterintuitively no “average” people. The US Air Force once undertook a measurement survey for the design of flight suits and they found that nobody was average. If stature, chest circumference, inside leg, arm length, nipple height, hip circumference, waist circumference, nobody was even close to anyone else in this whole set. Similarly, an Australian survey recently revealed the following modes: female gender, residence in a state capital, thirty-seven years old, a three-bedroom house, ownership of two cars, living with a husband and having a son and daughter aged respectively nine and six. It sounds perfectly straightforward to find someone satisfying all of these criteria, but in fact there are no Australians answering this description at all. This is most surprising. My source, incidentally, is here. In another sense, there is an average person. This person is a twenty-eight year old Han Chinese male, which probably shifts all the time. However, these people, and I think there are nine million of them, so it can be done.
It would be interesting to know how many, if any, people share all the characteristics asked about on yesterday’s census form.
A Box Of Chocolates 