Gender on form. What shall I say?

[MrsKrabbapple]

My daughter has been chosen to do something with her school which is being run by and paid for by an outside company. She's already started it but we've been asked to fill in a form which asked for lots of details.

One of the questions is gender.
^Male
female
trans
gender fluid ^
Prefer not to say

I've crossed out gender and written sex already and the form has been taken in by dd today.

In the meantime, I emailed them as there was a special email address if you had any questions about the form asking why, as they asked so many questions, there are about twenty choices for race for example, were they not asking what sex the participants were.

I've had a reply this morning but I'm getting nowhere with my response. I think it's because I'm too close to it.

What I want to say is 'but how can you know if you are getting enough boys in if you don't ask their sex?'

Here is her email.

Many thanks for getting in contact with us in relation to our data collection forms. We welcome any feedback from parents/carers and are always looking at ways to improve our practices.

As you rightly suggest we are required to help our partners ensure they are targeting the children who will benefit most from their activities. As such we also need to monitor who attend these activities and thus ask a series of questions to check targeting is effective.

We specifically ask about gender, rather than biological sex, as research has shown that gender identity affects how a student is perceived by the rest of the world and this is what can have an affect on their chances of progressing to university (e.g. boys being under-represented because of stereotypes about them getting out and earning money, particularly for boys from working class backgrounds).

We feel it important to ask in this way as some individuals may prefer to present their gender differently to their biological sex and this again may affect their chances of progressing to university. Collecting data in this way also allows us to analyse the impact of gender identity on progression to higher education and degree outcomes.

I hope the above has helped to answer your query but please do let me know if you have any further questions that I can help with.

As a side please note that the forms are not compulsory so if you would prefer not to complete it or not answer that particular question that is perfectly OK and would not prevent your daughter from attending any events.

Goodness .. what a lot of waffle. They are seriously the quality of the data they get.

Seems like quite a sensible response from them (at least saying you can it out and not being too dogmatic about it) but I’d ask them where their evidence is that ‘gender identity’ rather than sex affects chances of going to university. Seems unlikely to me.

You need to put something about sex being a protected characteristic in the equality act due to acknowledged sexism within society. If they collect information about gender only and not sex then they can't analyse their data by sex.

Remind them that they need to collect both.

I work at a school, as they say boys do worse than girls on average in exams. We could easily fix those stats if we counted girls-who-day-they-are-boys as boys.

These figures need to reflect reality!

"research has shown that gender identity affects how a student is perceived by the rest of the world"

The writer is making shit up as they go along. There is no research because how can an internal sense of identity, which has no existence in material reality, be perceived by others? Unless they are referring to presentations like clothing or blue hair. There's nothing to be gained by trying to debate with idiots.

Girls who say they are boys, obviously.

I started typing "trans girls" but realised that supposedly means actual boys. The language around this is designed to obscure meaning.

I work at a school, as they say boys do worse than girls on average in exams. We could easily fix those stats if we counted girls-who-day-they-are-boys as boys.

I wonder if that’s the point?

Anyway I’d reply with details of the EA and also mention that girls (as in the female kind) will face discrimination due to their biology. Particularly in the work place when they reach a certain age or enter a LTR.

I’m going round in circles with the language of it all myself.

Yes, you can’t target boys if anyone can say they are a boy. And thinking about it I think they are mostly girls doing it.

I’m so enraged about it. The Equality Act is a great place to start, thanks for that.

(Oops that should have been *undermining the quality)

Thanks foe doing this OP.. we have to take every opportunity that comes up.

For proper analysis They need thereforeto know

Sex
Gender identity ..internal
Gender identity ( or presentation) ..external, how they are viewed by others

It’s interesting there’s a “prefer not to say” rather than “none” for people who don’t buy into the ideology of gender identity.

I work at a school, as they say boys do worse than girls on average in exams. We could easily fix those stats if we counted girls-who-say-they-are-boys as boys.

I looked at the GCSE results for my child's school and noticed that this year, for the first time I can recall, they listed them under 'All pupils', 'Female pupils', 'Male pupils' instead of their usual 'All pupils, Girls, Boys'.

Given they had at least two transboy females at the high-achieving end of things, I think that's very honest of them.

Equality Act and the legal ramifications, the WPUK letter should help you there.

Followed by the obvious difficulty of being able to adentify those boys if they don't 'identify' as male. Ask them, do they then just assume that all trans, non binary and prefer not to say responders are all male, or female, depending on the issue to hand?

womansplaceuk.org/sex-is-a-protected-characteristic/

Sorry, link to the WPUK letter

Thanks, that’s useful.

I’m doing a paragraph on ‘what is the female gender anyway?’

I actually genuinely didn’t know what to tick.

Maybe you could explain to them that gender is a set of socially constructed expectations as to the roles, behaviour and presentation of a person based on their sex.

And that these expectations vary across time and space, as different societies have different expectations (blue used to be the colour for girls, in the US a boy who wants to play soccer is seen as gender-non-conforming while in the UK it's gender-conforming).

And whichever of these stereotypes a person wishes to externalise or internalize, the school is unwittingly forcing these stereotypes upon the children by expecting them not only to have a gender - as if meeting sexist expectations was in any way beneficial to children - but also for parents to be asked to impose one on their children or to other them by refusing to declare one.

And I would point out to them that there is no legal definition of gender - neither in international human rights law nor in domestic law - that does not reference sex roles and sex stereotypes and that's why it is not a protected characteristic under the EqA. As gender is also fluid and may change from day to day (or may be declared as non-binary), what value does such a wildly fluctuating data set have for a school anyway?

Boys are underperforming because of their sex. Because of their sex, they are socialised into sex roles and sex stereotypes they are expected to conform to, some of which directly interfere with their learning. To address this, these socially constructed expectations need to be challenged, actively resisted and hopefully in the long run disempowered, negated and finally abolished.

As you rightly suggest we are required to help our partners ensure they are targeting the children who will benefit most from their activities. As such we also need to monitor who attend these activities and thus ask a series of questions to check targeting is effective.

As sex is one of the protected characteristics of the Equality Act, meaningful data must include the possibility of monitoring for Diversity & Equality purposes any disadvantage due to sex.

Data on a child's gender identity may also be valuable given the beliefs of the company:
"as research has shown that gender identity affects how a student is perceived by the rest of the world and this is what can have an affect on their chances of progressing to university (e.g. boys being under-represented because of stereotypes about them getting out and earning money, particularly for boys from working class backgrounds)."
However in order to monitor or prove such a hypothesis both sex & gender identity (if a child has one) need to be recorded together.
The current form does not enable accurate data collection & so risks misidentifying groups of young people who may be disadvantaged.

We feel it important to ask in this way as some individuals may prefer to present their gender differently to their biological sex and this again may affect their chances of progressing to university. Collecting data in this way also allows us to analyse the impact of gender identity on progression to higher education and degree outcomes.

The only to progress to university is to put the time in for revision and to get the grades. Gender has sweet FA to do with it.

Oh and I didn't have a gender identity when I applied to university nor did my two daughters, who are in their twenties, though one is bisexual. Both daughters are very woke, might I add. My son, who is 17, is repeating his sixth form for one year (already sorted). He believes there should be a third space (and a third gender).

Male and female are sexes, not genders. They're all over the place.