The 2026 census questions on gender and sexual orientation that have been at the centre of a political brawl for the past week have been revealed to the ABC, despite the Albanese government declining to release the details.
The ABC has learned the exact wording of the questions that had been under development by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), in conjunction with an expert panel from the LGBTQI+ community, for some months after extensive public consultation revealed an interest in more details on these issues.
The government — and ABS — announced at short notice that it would not be proceeding with releasing the questions for testing amid reports of concerns at the top echelons of the government that they would start a culture war, and public commentary by senior ministers that there were concerns they would be divisive.
But the decision to abandon the questions caused a big backlash in the LGBQTI+ community, which had been promised the questions at the 2022 election.
Apart from the issue of having their identity recognised, the value of the questions in public policy terms is seen as giving very detailed demographic information about things like health policy affecting particular communities, including mental health.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese subsequently relented and said there would be a question on sexual orientation, but suggestions have continued in the media that the questions were along the lines of “do you have the same genitals you were born with?” and that a question relating to a person’s gender identity was “verbose, complicated, confusing and utterly impenetrable”.
The three questions, with accompanying explanatory notes, are
1) What is the person’s gender?
(Gender refers to current gender which may be different to sex recorded at birth and may be different to gender recorded on legal documents.)
Respondents are asked to mark one of the following boxes: Man; Boy; Woman; Girl; non-binary; uses another term; prefer not to answer
2) How does the person describe their sexual orientation?
The options are: straight; gay or lesbian; bisexual; uses another term(specify); don’t know; prefer not to answer. This is marked as a question for people aged 15 and over.
3) Has the person been told they were born with a variation of sex characteristics?
(Sometimes called intersex or differences of sex development, this question refers to innate reproductive development, genetics or hormones that do not fit the medical norms for female or male bodies. These specific characteristics may be noticed at birth or develop in puberty).
The options are: yes; no; don’t know; prefer not to answer.
The Kirby Institute’s Bridget Haire had been working with the ABS on these issues since 2019 and, in describing the questions, earlier told the ABC’s News Channel that the ABS had “already released a policy document that has been in use since 2020”, which contained a standard on “sex, gender, variations of sex characteristics and sexual orientation”.
“The questions that are proposed for the census come very, very tightly from that document,” she said.
Dr Haire said there might be “minor tweaking of a word here and there” but they would essentially be based on the 2020 standard.
“Basically, the request from the communities and the researchers who have been working in this area is that we implement what is in this policy document,” she said. “And the Australian Bureau of Statistics has already been doing so.”
“These questions have been used in a range of different surveys, around about 85,000 Australians have already answered these questions in things like the Mental Health and Wellbeing Survey and the Disability, Ageing and Carers Survey, for example.”
She said when people spoke of testing the questions, “the kind of testing you might be talking about is — ‘gay or lesbian, do we put them together or do they go on a separate line?'”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said last week it was a “commonsense position” to include the questions, after earlier deciding not to. (ABC News: Adam Kennedy)
Dr Haire said it was really important in framing the questions that “first of all, you don’t offend people, but also that you ask a question in the way that people know what it means”.
“And that the people who you want to answer yes to it, recognise that they need to answer yes to that question. Of course, people have the option not to do so, but it’s important that the questions are phrased properly so people understand them.
“For example, with the variations of sex characteristics, you want to make sure that it’s people who are born with those conditions who are ticking that box. So you need a word in it like innate or born or diagnosed with.
“You need to do a little bit of focus testing around which one is most broadly understood, so that trans and gender-diverse people don’t get confused and think, ‘Oh, have I got a variation of sex characteristics? Because I’ve done some gender affirmation, which is a different process.'”
Dr Haire said that from the perspective of researchers, the significance of the data and what could be learned from it was that “we need to get those denominators in place”.
“We don’t even know the size of the trans and gender-diverse community,” she said.
“There’s this general idea that numbers are increasing, but we don’t know that because we don’t have a baseline.
“What a census gives you is a baseline and then all research that we do builds on that, then we can know our sample sizes, how they work in relation to the population. It’s a really, really important tool. And it’s important for all of our communities.”
