Big research project to decide if we still need sex as a legal category

[PencilsInSpace]

Reforming Legal Gender Identity: A Socio-Legal Evaluation

It started in February and runs for 3 years.

... should gender remain a legal status assigned at birth; and what would be the implications of reforming this?

Our project addresses this question. It critically assesses different options for reform and their complex implications for law, policy and NGO agendas, focusing on the legal jurisdiction of England & Wales, but drawing also on developments in Scotland and overseas.

Research is organised into three consecutive work packages.

The first draws on international developments and activist arguments to outline possible options for reform (for instance, birth certificates with more than two gender options; allowing people to choose a legal gender on maturity; or modes of regulation that are more like sexual orientation and religion which are not, for the most part, formal statuses in English law while still identifying protected equality grounds).

The second work package explores the implications of different reform options. It focuses on what different options mean: for gender-differentiated provision, such as single-sex schools, domestic violence shelters, and women's groups; for diverse equality agendas including ethnic, religious and other equality grounds as well as transgender and women's equality; and for how gender is codified in law, including the key technical and administrative challenges new legislation would face. This second work package also explores public attitudes to reform, and what this can tell us about the significance of legal gender in everyday life.

The final work package draws the research together to understand key points of disagreement and tension regarding reform; and to assess the best reform option for going forward. This recommendation will be elaborated as a draft Bill in light of the data and legal principles of "good reform" to emerge from the research.

I don't know what to say about this yet, it came up on a different thread and looked important enough to have its own thread.

If the State Decertified Gender, What Might Happen to its Meaning and Value? by Cooper and Renz, two of the researchers on this project.

This looks like the precursor to this current project. It's open access, I won't have time to read it today I don't think.

One thing that strikes me with this project is the timing. They've obviously designed it and bid for funding on the back of Miller's trans equality report, but since then the government have announced the GRA consultation and women's groups are popping up all over the place, already having the debate despite all efforts to shut it down.

And there's that other group now calling for a review of the EA.

This project runs until 2021. Where will we be by then? How relevant will their research outcomes be? I think they might have missed the boat.

I don't think it is open access Pencils... I can't open it...

I opened it from this page

kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/if-the-state-decertified-gender-what-might-happen-to-its-meaning-and-value(18db3300-1881-4739-829e-9274979a2a52).html

Yes, just under where it says 'Documents'.

Try this (direct link to the PDF) - kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/86823522/If_the_State_Decertified_Gender_COOPER_Published1December2016_GREEN_AAM.pdf

Got it. Thank you both!

Interesting in the bit about geriatric trans issues that suggests trans people with dementia sometimes forget they are trans.
If their gender identity is so strong and innate, how would they forget it?

The problem seems to have arisen as we British don't like the word 'sex' because it sounds salacious, so we have replaced it with gender which sounds nice and soft.

Anyway, I am Head of HR and have changed all our documents to say sex. I've just had a template privacy notice from our legal people which says we record people's gender, I've changed it to sex - we do not record gender, how could we anyway?
I will be giving that feedback to them too.

Wow Van Gogh. That's real world change!

West Yorkshire academics are a hot bed of misogyny. Lots of trans activist types. They even, without any critical eye, bleat on about the made up suicide stats. Terrible waste of tax payers money.

Interesting in the bit about geriatric trans issues that suggests trans people with dementia sometimes forget they are trans.

Imagine.

And I don't need a fucking research grant to figure out why that might be.

This needs a thread in AIBU too, I think.

People do not understand what is happening, and what the whole Trans thing really means.
They think it is connected to gay rights, which (obviously) should not be a controversial issue now.

Davina Cooper is IMHO an excellent researcher. She is a feminist and (if I remember rightly from her blog) a lesbian. I’d trust her to do this work well, and heartened that there’s a mention of women’s equality.

I’m not sure I share your optimism to be honest - the premise itself looks very biased.

For starters, how can gender be codified in law? Are we going to actually define what female gender means in law? How? What repercussions will that have for. Girl who doesn’t conform to it?

It’s like codifying belief.

I had a quick look at the paper linked to by pencils. Note 1 says:

The relationship between sex and gender is complex and contested ... To avoid repeatedly referring to sex/ gender, we use “gender” to cover both the state’s legal assignment of sex or gender status, and the regulation and expression of both sex and gender identities.

So it looks as though the whole research project is based on the conflation of sex and gender.

Terrifying....

especially given the fact that the government is not commissioning an impact report re impact of Self Id on women and girls (real ones that is)

Wow - they admit to conflating sex and gender : thus totally begging the question?

That's not research, it's PR.

This is what the ESRC is about:

esrc.ukri.org/about-us/what-we-do/

Could we get involved in the research project? Or may be women's group(s) or Transgender Trend could seek funding for a research project?

Research council funding is highly competitive. You will not have a hope in hell of getting any without an excellent record of academic achievement in the field of research you propose to study. Plus, you would be expected to have infrastructure to support your research (i.e., usually a university or research institute position).

So, unless any of us has academic records similar to those of the researchers on this grant, we wouldn’t be likely to get any money for this type of research.

I wrote a big grant for the Medical Research Council (MRC) a few years ago. It got the best possible rating, but wasn’t funded because other research that also got the best possible rating was considered more competitive.

It's all tied up with Stephen Whittle. They are referred to in the Trans Ageing powerpoint I linked to, and the Yogyakarta principles are partly SW work, his paper is obviously wanting sex =gender.

Gender: What Future does it have? Professor Stephen Whittle

Stephen Whittle wants to change the meaning of the word 'sex'.

So what implications does the Gender Recognition Act have for current conceptualisations of what constitutes a ‘sex change’? Does this effect changes in what constitutes ‘male’ or ‘female’; ‘man’ or ‘woman’? Has the category ‘sex’ changed?

We demonstrate, using the debates about the Gender Recognition Act in the House of Lords, how the assumed embeddedness of sex in scientific knowledge was used to discredit the idea that one can legally ‘change sex’. Yet, paradoxically, it was also the mobilisation of scientific discourse in discussions over the category ‘sex’ which demonstrated the failure of science to fully locate ‘sex’ at all - suggesting that ‘sex’ may not be an immutable somatic fact in ways that it has been previously understood.

Changing sex for the purposes of legal recognition then, is not about changing biology or changing bodies to ‘match’ genders, but about changing how sex is legally defined. In that sense ‘having a sex change’ has a different meaning with new political consequences and challenges.

www.socresonline.org.uk/12/1/whittle.html

flowersonthepiano thanks

I don't think Stephen has the best interest of women at heart. In fact I strongly suspect Stephen is a bit of a

should gender remain a legal status assigned at birth; and what would be the implications of reforming this?

Eh? But it's not, is it?

Your sex at birth is recorded. It's your biological sex that is noted and written onto the legal document recording your birth.

Nothing is "assigned". Certainly not "gender".

How could this study be helpful if it starts there?

The question should be “should gender BE a legal status assigned at birth; and what would be the implications of reforming this?”

How can they possibly study the implications of reforming something which isn’t actually the case in the first place?!