The New Zealand government is pushing to ensure questions on gender identity and sexual orientation are included in the country's 2023 census.
This year's census will not include a third response option for the sex question, or questions on sexual orientation or gender identity.
If people want to indicate their biological sex is neither male nor female they will be able to mark both male and female on a specially requested paper form.
On Sunday Statistics Minister James Shaw said he had written to the Chief Statistician making clear his expectation that work to include census questions on not just biological gender, but also sexual identity and sexual orientation will be a priority for the next national census in 2023.
"While their sexual identity doesn't solely define them as people, I have always known that it is intrinsic to them and matters. And I understand that being seen and counted matters," Mr Shaw said.
Government Statistician Liz MacPherson made the decision not to include a third response option for the sex question, or questions on sexual orientation or gender identity for purely statistical reasons.
"Our testing did not give us confidence in collecting quality information on these topics through the census at this point in time," she said.
She directed staff to continue working on other ways to collect information on these topics.
Biological sex refers to a person's biological sexual characteristics - male, female, or a third category for people whose biological sex is not male or female.
Gender identity is a person's internal sense of being wholly female, wholly male, or having aspects of female and/or male. A person's gender identity can be expressed in several ways, and may or may not correspond with the sex recorded at birth.
Sexual orientation covers the ways in which a person's sexuality are expressed and the terms they choose to identify with. Sexual identities include heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, and asexual, among others.
