1/ People often claim that the numbers of people identifying as the opposite sex are too small to make a difference statistically. This is a clear example showing why that is false. The proportion of child sexual abusers who are women is tiny. Therefore, stats can be... https://twitter.com/fairplaywomen/status/1351632859950411777

2/ ...seriously distorted by including males who 'self-id' as women in the female category. In this case, it is reported that the number of female child sex abusers has rocketed by 80% in the last few years. As a researcher, I would ask "why has that happened?"

3/ And, if there's no plausible explanation of why such a change may actually have occurred, your thoughts turn to whether there is a problem with the data. Is this artefactual? Is there a disjunction in the time series, e.g. because a key variable is being collected differently?

4/ The fact that police forces now record gender -identity instead of sex is the most plausible explanation for this change. But we can't directly test this hypothesis, because to do that, we would need data on the sex of these offenders.

5/ By allowing males to be recorded as female, police forces are collecting false and misleading statistics. This obscures male-pattern offending. This is unethical, and brings both social statistics and the police into disrepute.

6/ The fact that the BBC reports this purported increase in female sex-offending as though it reflected a real change in the world, rather than (most likely) a change in data collection could be disingenuous. But I suspect it actually shows how easily people are deceived.