Emailed HR

[Mumteedum]

I was asked to update personal details this morning.

I had two options regarding sex and gender. What is your gender identity? Options I think were male/female/prefer not to say. And does your gender identity match the sex assigned at birth? Yes/no/prefer not to say.

I sent a very polite email asking them to consider an alternative as this does not represent me accurately. It's a bit nerve wracking. So far our university has been fairly balanced but watch this space 🙈

In which case, do you also agree with :

What is your gender identity / I don't have a gender identity. (Or, I don't believe in gender identity).

Or

What is your gender identity? / I only have a biological sex

If both beliefs are protected, as is the right not to believe in either of them, then it should be symmetrical.

I thought gender reassignment was the protected characteristic along with sex

I had this at work too.

We're encouraged to fill in our personal data but then there is no option for no gender.

I left it blank, I refuse to say I buy into the gender nonsense.

Good luck, you're very brave. My workplace is so unquestioningly Stonewalled I'm too afraid to speak up.

I’m my workplace they know my thoughts on the matter. I have never commented or sniggered at the pronoun badges or pronouns in email footers. I loathe the posters with the Q word, but applaud the ones highlighting menopause which use women throughout.

However I haven’t come across a man in the ladies loos or showers, and god help them if I do.

Well done op!

Also, very few people are ‘assigned’ a gender at birth. Some are, due to physical abnormalities or medical issues. Most simply have their physical sex observed and recorded.

How about

What is your sex? Male/Female/Other
Do you believe in fairy tales? Y/N

Why do you post so much inaccurate information all over MN? Google is your friend!

Has anyone yet had the experience of the computer saying 'no' if you don't fill in the box?

@Maddy70 says you can 'always' leave it blank or whatever, but what will happen when it's a required field and you can't progress until you've told a lie?

The Uni could reply back asking the HESA for the reason the data is being collected. They as a data collector have duties and could request that the case be tested under the Data Protection Act.

You would have a test case too as your other data processing is prevented so that is not fair processing.
Your bank details and so employmemt payments are not dependant on you disclosing any data about sex or gender so your employer is looking for excessive data.

I asked if they could add a question that allows us to state our sex (or gender if they are using the polite euphemism for sex) as well as the gender identity question. It should really be a "what is your gender identity" ...male/female/non-binary/other/not applicable. And what is your sex...male/female/prefer not to say

I just said their question was very black and white and did not represent me and we should make sure it works for everyone.

I don’t have a gender identity either mainly because I have more important things to think about and do which keeps me and my mind busy.
I was conceived to be a boy, I was born a boy so my sex was biologically assigned at the moment of conception not arbitrarily decided by someone at my birth.
I then grew into a man with all the dangly and hairy bits that come with me.
A bloke is simply what I biologically was created to be and there is no way of changing that chromosomal factor whatsoever. I’m not stupid or delusional enough to pretend there is.
Eventually I’ll be an old man and things will stop functioning quite so well. That still won’t change my biological sex.
You can only either be one or the other OP and that is decided the second of your conception.
My identity is not my sex, my identity is my name, my mind, my personality all of which have been shaped by the course my life followed.
It’s becoming a very sad world indeed when people want to be identified not by who they are but by what they are or think they should be.

@Rightsraptor that's what just happened. I had to say my gender identity is female. No other way of updating record. And no way of recording my femaleness in any other question.

I had an annual staff satisfaction survey with a previous employer where I couldn’t get past the first page because there was only a question about gender where the answers were on a drop down list.

I did complain but was told the LGBQWTF+ group had approved it so that was that.

I had this on my children's school form. Luckily it was paper so I crossed out tender and put sex.

Pity you can’t write stupid things like “Sex: Broccoli”, “Gender: Radio”.

I had similar bollocks in a couple of surveys I tried to complete.
"How do you identify?".

Ermm, I don't. I am a woman.
There was no option for that. I complained, it went back and forth a few time and they shut me down with a "well we'll have to agree to disagree".

'prefer not to say' or 'other' suggests that you are TQ+ and your particular choice of exciting label is not presented, can be interpreted as such, and the confusion caused was seen at the census. It makes you compliant with gender ideology. And accidentally inflating the NB/other kinds of TQ stats is incidentally very helpful to the politics that put this pernicious bit of control in.

This is exactly like being told to state your religion, you MUST tick one of the following boxes, options are:

Catholic
Methodist
CofE
I prefer not to specify which school of Christianity I follow.

And everyone from Muslims to atheists being left forced to get into one of the provided boxes to reinforce the political control of the form setters. I am not ticking anything that basically says 'I conform obediently to the One True Faith'.

If you are having issues ask why any of the data for PC's or other data points has to be attached to your personal file.

Is the aim an annual report? This can be achieved by obtaining up-to-date data each year in an anonymous one use staff link to the reporting database.

Why would anybody need to disclose a pregnancy before the legal rights apply or to disclose if they are in a same sex relationship as a part of their personel file.

It's like living in toddler land isn't it? Allegedly intelligent people forcing fantasy identities on employees because being kind or capitulating to those in the grip of a delusion matters more than capturing accurate factual data that matter when running an institution.

The issue was I had no option to leave it blank. I had to answer affirmatively about gender identity and I don't think it applies to me.

Now most staff will roll their eyes and just click male or female but it's not right to say something about yourself on your record that is untrue.

Good luck op. You were right to question it.
I had a similar question on an NHS patient satisfaction feedback form the other day. It was on paper and I scribbled some alternative text next to it. But now I wish I had used the comment field at the end of the form to tell them what my sex was and, more importantly to state how the medically absurd notion of 'sex assigned at birth' discredited the entire questionnaire as well as undermining my trust in the NHS service that was being assessed.

Well, they haven't have they?

Sex is a protected characteristic, but they're not bothering to capture data on that. Or, rather, they are preventing people from answering the question about sex by making it a secondary question to gender and to the assumption that the respondent has a gender identity.

No they haven’t. They have incorrectly assumed that everyone subscribes to gender identity theory. The correct response for me would be “I do not have a GI”

No. They are not appropriate for those of us without a gender identity.