Police Scotland consultation on recording sex and gender-identity data. Our response.

Police Scotland were consulting organisations on their new approach to collecting and recording data on sex and gender identity. (We tweeted a long thread about it here). They've got the general idea that they are separate concepts and that sex has to be accurately reported. But they wanted feedback on the wording of their proposed questions. Which were to ask about 1. Sex. Right idea, but none of their proposals for the wording of the question are acceptable. 2. Gender identity. Probably good idea to ask about this for statistical purposes. It could be useful for us to be able to analyse how many suspects think they're some version of "trans". But it's difficult to find an appropriate wording.

3. Whether the person considers themselves to have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. We don't agree with asking this question at all - the PC of GR is an objective measure as set out in the Equality Act. Not a subjective notion of what someone thinks - and many people don't understand the EA definition anyway.

Our full response is here

Response to PS Data recording of sex and gender.pdf

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