Census day (80/365)

[white_hart]

Today is census day in the UK, and I just filled ours out. I'm slightly perplexed by the insistence that answers to the questions about workplace and travel to work are supposed to be filled out for now, while we're still locked down in the middle of a global pandemic, and not for what we would have done in normal times, and I really hope this doesn't end up being used to justify cutting public transport funding "because no-one is using it".

I dithered a bit on the "national identity" question and ended up putting "European" and "British but embarrassed about it" in the write-in box. ("British but embarrassed about it" is basically accurate".) I also used the write-in box for sexuality to put "biromantic asexual", and dithered a bit about the gender identity question because today is one of the days when "female" feels more or less OK, but then I remembered all the days when it doesn't so wrote in "demigender" instead. (I'm not convinced "demigender" is actually right; on the whole I mostly just think gender is bullshit, but I don't find being identified as female or using she/her pronouns particularly painful - I get more of a niggling sense of concealing something than a feeling of actual wrongness - so demigender feels like a reasonable alternative to writing a whole essay about it.)

Anyway, that's that for another ten years.

Comments

[sollers]

Re workplace etc: it’s supposed to be a snapshot of one particular day. I did some research on the census returns for the area where I used to live in London and for one the population was far higher than normal because the railway was being built and all the navvies had to be included (my heart goes out to the person who had to question them).

For national identity I was very happy to be able to record “Welsh “ (and was able to tick read/write/speak/understand Welsh)

[white_hart]

I know it is, it just seems a bit daft to have a snapshot of a day in such an unusual time. I think Scotland had the right idea postponing for a year, really.

[owl]

I put down Irish, Northern Irish and wrote in European. Never regretted so much that I don't have more than the cupla focal of Irish.