thanks for sharing, rosemarina! they have a page on it
here and around (?) 300 employers ask for 'gender' instead of 'sex'. nothing is done about this of course...it appears effectively decriminalised :/ & im not surprised because this happens everywhere, from EU & UK government policy and the ICO's comms to local authorities and small-time companies.
the protected characteristic "gender reassignment" encompasses "proposing to undergo [...] a process (or part of a process)" to reassign your sex (rather than just having undergone that process already) so i suspect this causes further uncertainty, especially because the government wording is "reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex". "other attributes" and "part of a process" are pretty vague... i think the best thing employers could do would be to heavily emphasise that by "sex" they mean the sex you biologically are and that this is separate from gender reassignment, and where this data will be used to monitor/improve women's access to certain fields and roles, consider "sex" and "gender reassignment" data together in their reports and analysis.
but again, it appears almost decriminalised - even on the ICO's website, they themselves say 'gender' in place of 'sex' as
the protected characteristic about a dozen times. they refer to the 'gender pay gap' a lot in other cases...in their own '
gender pay gap' report, the word 'sex' isn't mentioned at all. i assume they are referring to sex and they do say "male" and "female", but still...
gender is also mentioned as being a protected characteristic in
this government document. woman's place
mentions the ECHR does it too. gender critical people have been saying this for ages - you can find it all over the place and in some cases it is being proposed as a change in legislation (e.g.
seemingly to the scottish government by Public Health Scotland). because of brexit, there is a much bigger risk that gender discourse in the UK will impact legislation as it won't have to go through the EU. it also looks like the civil service is in the process of '
harmonising' this element of data collection in censuses to include questions about gender identity, which has the potential to influence data collection legislation in general...
parliament said they had no plans to amend the equality act to include gender, though they say that further legislative drafting is subject to questions about language around sex and gender. but, the punishment for a data collection violation judged as significant is a huge fine from the ICO, and crucially they also say they will only do this if they think it is appropriate. i just dont know how or if they will enforce this law if they and government bodies use inconsistent language themselves. it seems like they don't take it that seriously in practice. sex not gender are right to be pressuring orgs to use sex, not gender, but there is a lot of inverse pressure too...i worry that if my generation and those younger overwhelmingly subscribe to gender ideology, the tides will turn as we enter government. sidenote,
mermaids got fined by the ICO for a GDPR breach lol
sorry for another essay ha i just find policy really interesting. fun friday evening am i right!!
(when a lot of TRA aren’t even clear what intersex actually is, I’ve seen some class women with PCOS as intersex) ugh whatever - I sent the application off anyway. 
. I phrased that badly.
