Welsh Assembly and the lost equality impact assessment

[thatdamnedwoman]

The Welsh Assembly produced a 'Welsh Government Action Plan to advance equality for transgender people' in 2016

gov.wales/atisn13028

and said that an impact assessment had been carried out.

A Freedom of Information request was issued on March 2019 asking to see the impact assessment. The Impact assessment appears to have been lost. No trace of it anywhere — even though the Action Plan to Advance Equality for Transgender people mentions the importance of Impact Assessments. Here's the correspondence:

tinyurl.com/y6kxt29n

(I've had to do tinyurl as the original link was so long) It links to whatdotheyknow.com

If anyone here is sitting around at home today with nothing special to do you could check your local council (and possibly also town council and even parish council) on line and find out what resources/ action plans/ policies they have relating to transgender issues. If you find any, you could then use the letters in the whatdotheyknow link above as a template for making an FOI request asking about impact assessments.

My guess is the Welsh Assembly won't be the only body pushing change through without considering the impact on half the population. Let's help reveal this as the scandal we know it to be.

Thanks: will try and find time to read it all. So many of these policies seem to have been implemented on a 'women will just have to learn to deal with it' attitude. 50% of the population, 50% of voters, being expected to sacrifice single-sex spaces because of policies that they weren't consulted on.

Can anyone point me to a thread or detailed info on Edward Lord/ City of London/ single sex loos/ consultation and whether an EIA was carried out there?

So many of these policies seem to have been implemented on a 'women will just have to learn to deal with it' attitude.

This started with the GRA 2004. They never asked women, they (mostly men) decided what we didn't know wouldn't hurt us, as if women can't tell a transsexual male from a female in the majority of circumstances... And now it's not even transsexuals.

“A profound conceptual change” in our understanding of what it means to be a woman or a man has been taking place “without due diligence, democratic oversight or scrutiny”

www.holyrood.com/articles/news/scottish-trans-policy-detrimental-women-and-girls

www.heraldscotland.com/news/17800511.snp-women-39-s-convener-criticised-insisting-canadian-trans-woman-jessica-yaniv-39-female-predator-39/

Sexual violence is a gendered phenomenon which is overwhelmingly committed by men. 98 per cent of sexual assaults are committed by men as are most violent crimes. Any analysis has to recognise that reality.

Has Leanne Wood commented on this yet?

as if women can't tell a transsexual male from a female in the majority of circumstances

This attitude is deeply annoying and oh so prevalent. The constant claims of 'but transwomen have been using your spaces for years and no one noticed or if they did, minded'. Um, yes we did notice, and yes we did mind. I know I'm not alone in having walked out of women's spaces upon finding an XY trans person there. I know because I've had conversations with other women saying the same thing dating back years.

The idea of 'passing' is laughable. People who look male, sound male, smell male, move male stand out a mile in women's spaces. Of course we can bloody tell the difference.

The "passing" thing is just one aspect of the overall delusion. Women used to be polite about it (some probably still are) in order to preserve the person's feelings. It seemed cruel to say: "Newsflash - you will never pass."

Thanks for starting this thread, thatdamnedwoman. I'm the person who made the FOI request. It followed a series of emails to the Welsh Government over several months. I was struggling to get any straight answers to my questions, just obfuscation and answers to questions I didn't ask.

In an email a year ago, I asked Welsh government if they had carried out an Equality Impact Assessment for the Transgender Action Plan. They replied that they had (but didn't attach it). I asked to see it and was told that they couldn't locate it, so I did the FOI. After their final 'bog off' reply in June, I was unsure what to do next. I probably should have posted something here, because there have been some great suggestions on this thread. I didn't go to the Information Commissioner, because I don't think the problem is to do with compliance with FOI procedures, but to do with the workings of Welsh Government. I suspect that no impact assessment was actually done, or if it was, it was inadequate and so they 'lost' it.

I will try and put together another FOI based on the suggestions by Michelle and others on this thread and also write to the Minister for Equalities in Welsh Gov., who I think is currently Jane Hutt (it's not very clear from the website, so if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know). Not that any of this gets anywhere near an actual minister as far as I can tell - all the responses to my emails have come from the Equalities office, even when I wrote to Kirsty Williams (Education Minister) about issues relating to safeguarding in schools and educational issues arising from the use of the TransForm Cymru toolkit, which was funded by Welsh Government.

The idea of 'passing' is laughable. People who look male, sound male, smell male, move male stand out a mile..

This. With knobs on.

(That's just an expression where I'm from.)

Oldstyle
Here's what they should have done - bit of a gap between theory & practice.

The link in your post doesn't work for me. Can you post another link, or tell me what search terms will find it? It might be useful for me to be able to quote their own words back at them.

AGirlHasNoCake
Please feel free to join me in FOIs to Welsh Gov. It's very easy to do on the whatdotheyknow site, and you don't have to give your real name if you want to be anonymous.

Hello FOIrequester, I'm really pleased you don't mind me posting this here and can't thank you enough for kicking this off. And thank you for being prepared to to take it further. There have been some excellent observations made by others on this thread and it's clear that the WAG haven't abided by their own policy.

I've met Jane Hutt a couple of times and I would be very surprised if she wasn't GC. And of course Helen Mary Jones is openly GC. Perhaps we need to raise it with HMJ and see what she has to say.

FOIrequester - fantastic to find you here and thank you so much for pursuing this. Shero of the revolution. Lots of response on twitter too. It's not going to go away.
Just dashing off but will repost the link shortly and will DM you if I may? Several of us are intending to take action and it would be good to co-ordinate.

Lots of response on twitter too.

Can you link to that? I'm not on twitter.

Here's the link to the EIA information:
www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/advice-and-guidance/equality-impact-assessments?fbclid=IwAR2ADGpVybs228Yw3D9kqRzVBPxNV7iAz5DE9fpU_wER0MTCZHBd4-JVjTE
The 'myth busters' link on the page is very clear re requirements.

Asking for Equality Impact Assessments can be a very effective tactic for dealing with this bollocks.

On a micro scale, a youth centre in our city changed the women and men's toilets to 'gender neutral' and 'gender neutral with urinals'. The 'gender neutral (with urinals)' facility was absolutely perfect for predators to exploit- not only were the urinals directly opposite the sinks, but there was a fire exit in there as well. It would have been easy to lie in wait for someone, assault them and escape without detection. A local woman emailed to ask if they'd done any kind of impact assessment and guess what? They hadn't and very sheepishly changed the signs back in short order.

FOIrequester Bravo Thank you for chasing and exposing this, its another crucial part of the jigsaw.

Tech used to be able to search all emails by key words and time scales and locate every mention of a specific subject. The roles and qualifications of those doing the EQIA would also be interesting to know, especially if it was in house personnel or commissioned from an outside agency.

This is of course presuming that it was done at all.

Here's the main twitter thread FOIrequester - over 200 RTs so it's gone off in all directions:
twitter.com/CResisters/status/1156522554024255488

Thanks for the link, Oldstyle. Happy for you to DM me. Is this the twitter thread?
twitter.com/RadFemsCardiff/status/1156460162653315073

Cross posted. I'll look at the other twitter thread as well. Thanks.

This is shocking

Bloody, bloody slipshod policy making

Obviously it needs to be uncovered either way, but do you not think it's more likely that they did an EIA but focussed solely on how trans people would be affected, given that's what they publicly said they were going to do?

I don't think they're covering up the fact they didn't do the EIA - I think they're covering up the fact they did it wrong.

Interesting, Longines

I thought if the information was held then on a FOI request it had to be shared (with obvious exemptions/bits redacted as needed)? The FOIs I've been (peripherally) involved with, everything was checked and logged and nothing could be 'disappeared' or claimed as lost to conveniently avoid sharing material if it existed.

The powers that be have seriously underestimated how angry and tenacious women are about this issue.

Lying to avoid handing something over should be an offense?

The only FOI I have done for my local council (and those others have done to the local council on the same topic) seemed to land on the desk of a junior information admin type who appeared to forward the request to randomly selected individuals who may or may not be in the correct department. If that individual didn’t recognise the request you got a reply from the information bod saying the council didn’t hold that information (even if you knew they did).

Perhaps you're right Michelle - I wondered whether because they had only focussed on the impact on trans people in the EIA they were proposing to carry out and because this isn't how an EIA is supposed to be done, that they could argue that it didn't count as a valid EIA at all (because it wasn't) and therefore doesn't need to be disclosed when someone requests the EIA.

Either way, it still begs the question 'why didn't you do an EIA, and if you did, why can't you produce it?'

Have DM'd you FOIrequester. Would you be up for an interview (trusted journalist)?