On Tuesday August 11, the Australian census will ask specific questions about gender identity and sexual orientation for the first time. It will also amend the previous wording about a person’s sex, which conflated sex and gender, to “sex recorded at birth”.

For many in the LGBTQ community, these changes are hard-won. They come after the federal government reversed its decision in 2024 not to include questions about gender and sexual orientation, amid widespread backlash.

But the 2026 census will not include a question about variations of sex characteristics, otherwise known as intersex status, meaning some in the broader LGBTQIA community will remain invisible.

As a result, the “most progressive census Australia has ever seen” is still failing to capture Australia’s real diversity.

What happened last census?

The last census, in 2021, raised serious concerns about the failure to meaningfully count LGBTQIA people.

In 2023, the government pledged to count LGBTQI data in the 2026 census. This included discontinuing “the practice of randomly assigning non-binary people and intersex people as male or female”.

In 2024, the government abandoned this pledge, before eventually reversing the decision under pressure. It announced it would add the gender and sexual orientation questions........

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