Gender identity will now be included in next census after all

The Albanese government has once again changed its position on LGBTI+ questions in the 2026 census.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers told ABC TV’s Insiders program on Sunday morning that the 2026 census will now count transgender Australians, following consultation with the LGBTI+ community.

“We have listened to the community,” he said.

“We worked very closely with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. I wanted to say how professional and diligent and sensitive the chief statistician, David Gruen, has been as we worked through these issues. LGBTIQ+ Australians matter. They have been heard and they will count in the 2026 census.”

Two weeks ago, the government announced it would cancel plans to trial LGBTI+ questions aimed at identifying the number of sexually diverse, transgender, and intersex Australians.

Following the decision, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the government wanted to exclude the questions to avoid “divisive debates”.

Drafted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the three original questions were revealed by the ABC late on Friday. The questions, with accompanying explanatory notes, were:

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.

During a meeting of cabinet ministers on August 26, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reportedly expressed frustration at the questions, saying, “I have to clean this up”, and insisting “We’re not including these questions in the census”, according to sources cited by The Sydney Morning Herald.

Albanese then made a captain’s call to remove the questions, the Herald reported, before flying out of Australia to attend the Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga.

The decision sparked strong backlash from the LGBTI+ community and within Labor’s own ranks, particularly because counting the LGBTI+ population was a key part of Labor’s 2023 platform, which committed to ensuring that the 2026 census would gather “relevant data on LGBTIQ+ Australians”.

The ABS, too, had committed to counting LGBTI+ people after acknowledging its failure to do so in the 2021 census.

Following days of backlash, Albanese partially reversed his stance, offering to include a single LGBTQIA+ question.

“We’ve been talking with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and they’re going to test a new question, one question about sexuality, sexual preference,” the prime minister said on Friday last week.

Now though, Chalmers said that the government had changed its position once again and would include a question on gender identity. He would not say if this would include questions about intersex characteristics.

This change follows advocacy from groups including Equality Australia, which had a petition with more than 25,000 signatures calling on the government to honour their initial position to count all LGBTQIA+ people.

“This is the sensible, pragmatic and moral course of action that will ensure vital data about some of the most vulnerable populations in Australia is collected nationally for the first time,” Equality Australia chief executive Anna Brown said on Sunday.

“It is now time to let the ABS get on with doing its job and proceed with the planned testing so we can finally count every Australian in 2026.”

The ABS will now test the proposed questions, with any changes requiring parliamentary approval.