Bar chart of gender modality and sex

Inputting the data

ONS had not released cross sectional data for gender modality by sex but did produce a table on these variables, which is available here.

The following code indicates how I input this into R. This could be used to create bar plots of any two categorical variables.

library(tidyverse)
sex <- c("Male", "Female", "Male", "Female")
genmod <- c("Trans Man", "Trans Man", "Trans Woman", "Trans Woman")
frequencies <- c(32695, 15740, 16100, 31470)

sex_data <- rep(sex, times = frequencies)
genmod_data <- rep(genmod, times = frequencies)

genmodsex <- data.frame(sex = sex_data, genmod = genmod_data)

table(genmodsex$sex, genmodsex$genmod)

        
         Trans Man Trans Woman
  Female     15740       31470
  Male       32695       16100

Visualising the data

I then created a basic bar chart. This bar chart indicates that despite the use of documented or “legal sex” guidance in the 2021 census at least 67% of people who indicated they were trans men or women in the census responded to the sex question based on how they live.

genmodsex %>%
  ggplot(aes(genmod, fill = sex)) +
  geom_bar(position = "dodge") +
  labs(
    title = "How trans men & women responded to the sex question in England & Wales",
    x = "Gender",
    y = "Count",
    caption = "2021 Census of England & Wales (ONS, 2023)"
  ) +
  scale_fill_manual("Sex", values = c("Female" = "#16552f", "Male" = "#678D75")) +
  theme(
    panel.background = element_rect(fill = "transparent", color = NA),
    plot.background = element_rect(fill = "transparent", color = NA),
    panel.grid.major = element_blank(),
    panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
    plot.title = element_text(face = "bold", hjust = 0.25)
  )