Council forms requiring gender and pronouns for children

[parrotonmyshoulder]

Any thoughts on how to deal with this? The referral forms for lots of services (I’m talking about SEND as that is my field) have just begun asking for ‘gender’ and ‘pronouns’ for primary aged children. These are online forms with no option to skip or not respond.
I need to make the referrals, but can’t go along with this.
What would you do?

He/ him or she/her. Unless you have some reason to think your child doesn't suit one of those.

I would raise concerns about this and ask for those sections to be made optional. If there is a child where it might be relevant then you would be able to fill it in but otherwise the sex of the child should be sufficient information.

Not asking for sex. Only gender. Also, not my child and have had no reason up till now to ask a 5 year old which pronouns they prefer.

Oh come on - it's an ideological question.

Complain - there's no other choice - and encourage everyone else to complain. Demanding pronouns from a 5 year old is unacceptable. Failing to collect accurate sex based data about children is unacceptable. Imposing unscientific gender identity on children and unconsenting adults is unacceptable.

People are finally starting to speak out about this and the more of us do so, the easier it becomes.

Can you contact the people who made the form and explain that you don't have this information and ask what justification they have for asking these questions?

And that's a much more conciliatory approach from Arabella. 😂
Isn't there something about GDP regulations and only holding relevant information on individuals that applies to this??

Ask them how they are going to meet the Public Sector Equality Duty found in s149 of the Equality Act 2010 if they are not collecting data on the protected characteristic of sex during the provision of their services.

You can't measure discrimination if you don't collect the data.

I've assumed some of these services are public. Otherwise more generally if a service provider is collecting information on the other relevant protected characteristics such as age, race, religion, disability but not sex then it starts to look like discrimination because they are only excluding one PC (which may be very relevant to the child's situation)

Just pmk as also want to challenge something similar

Complain every single time.

I've had forms changed back to sex instead of gender by doing so.

Every time you let it go, you make things worse for normal people who don't subscribe to gender ideology, because then they can respond "but so & so filled it in/didn't mind"

If we don't all stand up for the right to be identified accurately as our natal sex, you'll find you lose it completely & that means we lose womens spaces etc.. if we define ourselves as 'having a gender'.

This

I had to do this recently for a child (under 12), the field wasnt optional, and wrote 'sex based: male.'

This.

If you want to go the lost confrontational route, point out a lot of the children in question aren’t aware enough to express a preference or understand the issues so you need an “n/a” or at least an “unknown” box. Offer helpfully to supply biological sex as that is known from birth records.

Least confrontational^ (not lost!)