It’s time to COMMIT to fixing the data

We’re calling on the government to take the three steps that are urgently needed to protect everyone who uses or values single-sex spaces and services. We’re asking you to write to your MP demanding action. 

This email campaign has now finished – thank you to all those who wrote to MPs.

So far more than 2,000 people have written to their MP. This is the second of three blog posts about our asks. 

2. Commit to fixing the problem of inaccurate sex records, and their use in new forms of digital identity

The law is clear. But one of the things that makes it difficult to provide single-sex services with confidence is that service providers cannot rely on official documents such as passports and driving licences to provide reliable information on anyone’s sex. Even medical records can be changed, and none of this requires a gender-recognition certificate. 

No systematic records have been kept, so the numbers are not known: there could be as many as 100,000 people whose ID shows them as the sex which they are not. And the government seems set on making it worse by developing digital identities based on this unreliable sex data.

Official data systems are in such a mess in relation to sex because of decades of ad-hoc and informal measures attempting to accommodate the wishes and protect the privacy of people who identify as transgender. There are better ways of protecting privacy – by making it clear where sex is recorded, making sure it is accurate and only sharing the data if there is a lawful basis to do so. 

Whether or not the UK adopts a digital identity system, the problem with flawed, contradictory sex records must be addressed now, following the Supreme Court’s judgment which made clear that many ordinary services can and should be provided based on biological sex.  

The public-sector equality duty requires data collection about sex, not about heterogenous groupings of women and trans-identifying men who, the Supreme Court pointed out, “may have little in common”. The Supreme Court warned against corrupting data collection and said: 

“We do not understand how the interests of this heterogenous group can begin to be considered and addressed”. 

It’s time to address this so that government data and official documents can be trusted.