Can you help me phrase something about gender very carefully for a work document

[AttillaThePlum]

I have been asked to comment on a colleague's thoughts about gender and EDI from my own (non legal) expert perspective.

Most of it I can do, because my advice is that as a company we should keep our heads down and stay out of it, not least because everything is going to go batshit around the election.

HOWEVER. I need to address this sentence. "we’ve included a simple sentence in our recent report: “while the language in this report speaks of young women and young men, these categories refer to gender identities and we recognise that gender is not binary.”].

I need to say that a) this is disputed and not everyone believes this and the right to say so is protected and b) I need to say this to someone who was once an equalities expert but has not worked as such for five years and so may not be across Maya Forstater etc but c) if I get one single thing wrong this person will jump on me like a lion that hasn't seen a gazelle in weeks and d) has recently shafted me massively over another project.

Which would be something like that this is an opinion, not a fact and it is an opinion which is protected - and then I run out of sensible words. Can you bring your collective expertise to bear and help me get it right?

Thank you.

Who is the “we” and who is the audience?

I would point out that many women and men don't consider themselves to have genders. Some women identify as agender and so saying "a woman is a gender identity" excludes such people.

I would also ask them to clarify how they have distinguished between young women and young men, and to state clearly that they are not using male/female but to give the criteria they have actually used to determine whether a person is a woman or a man.

I think it depends on the rest of it too - if it's an EDI document is this the only reference to gender?

Could the report just refer to "young people" rather than making the distinction between men and women?

If the report needs to make that distinction, then how was the data collected? What was the wording of the question where responders were able to choose whether they were either a young man or a young woman? Or even "young" at all.

"We" is the team who have written the report, but this may be taken as representing the organisation as a whole which is part of the issue. It's a relatively technical report which will be on a website but which it will be my job to bury if it contains that sentence (half joking, but only half)

It's a report on a piece of work done, ironically with girls and young women as part of an attempt to create inclusiveness in our industry. So we can't get away from it.

I have been asked to comment, for the Board, on a) the inclusion of the sentence and b) our broader approach but not from an EDI perspective. I do comms, and I am arguing very strongly that we don't to say anything out loud.

I think that if they are using these terms to refer to gender identity only they risk potential discrimination against the protected characteristics of sex, belief, religion and possibly also disability under the Equality Act 2010.

And yes, if they're not using these terms in the generally accepted way (which is still sex based) then they need to provide clear definitions.

Forstater vs CGD Europe established in law that a belief in the material reality of biological sex binary in humans (and indeed all mammals) is protected. Therefore only doing any analysis or communication relating to gender identity, given many people do not believe in gender identity, risks discriminating against such people. It may also provide false analysis / commentary that does not address sex based differences, which could be discrimination on the protected characteristic of sex. Many religions require sex segregation so any policies that result in practice which results in only unisex facilities being available could discriminate on the basis of religion. And using the terms 'young women' and 'young men' to only relate to gender identity and not sex may be extremely confusing to those who believe these terms relate to sex only, and particularly for those with any learning difficulties (pc of disability) or non-native English speakers.

It depends how much money there is for this project and how high profile it is but getting a lawyer to check it over and address the question of whether it is acceptable in the context of this report to use the terms 'young women' and 'young men' which are still universally understood to relate to sex categories to relate only to gender identity categories. If they are relating to gender not sex, why the binary? Why not including at the very least nonbinary but possibly also the many other gender identities? Possibly a bit transphobic there.

If it's anything to do with children, there are safeguarding risks to obscuring language around sex.

So what I am looking for is a way of telling the person who wrote that sentence that gender identities and recognising that gender is not binary are opinions not facts.

But I need to do this factually.

@dimorphism This is good. Thank you. What I may do is phrase this as questions for them to address, going, oh dear this is not my area of expertise but my understanding is this, do we want to comment.

Any more thoughts v much welcomed. And if I told you the actual background to this, you'd be furious. But I can't.

Yes, good idea to phrase as questions.

'Isn't there the potential that this could be discriminatory to (list characteristics and reasons)?'

Ultimately it seems a pointless and stupid exercise in virtue signalling which gets even the virtual signalling tragically wrong and open to accusations of transphobia (if you're basing everything on gender identity, there aren't just two gender identities there are many...).

But mostly will just render the report completely meaningless if no-one knows the sex of any of the people spoken about. Maybe just ditch 'young woman' and 'young man' and just use 'young person' if sex isn't relevant. Or go for 400 gender identities, can't imagine that's a good use of time.

Gender isn't binary (it's socially constructed so can mean anything) but sex is binary.

Maybe ask why they'd chosen to use the term 'gender identities' instead of 'sex' to refer to the categories of participants. They mean different things, plus 'sex' is a protected characteristic so might be more relevant to the purpose of the report.

Are they REALLY wanting their report to be all about the extent to which each given person conforms to sexist sex role stereotypes? That's what they're saying if they're saying it's all about gender identity but there are only two gender identities.

The main issue I have with the sentence is that it says that “young women and young men” are gender identities. Obviously I don’t believe they are - I would say that they were sex based. But is this report based on people “self reporting their gender identities”? Or is it based on eg HR male/female sex data? If the info used to create this report came from an initial question like “what is your self considered gender identity” then maybe I’d say something like:
”young men and young women, as categorised in this report, are based on respondents self identifying their gender identity from a choice of a b and c”.

This would be a factual way of saying how the report was compiled.
If you’re trying to address further beliefs, you could suggest something like:

and we recognise that some people consider there to be a wider range of gender identities than this, and also that the categories of man and woman are also believed by many to be sex based rather than gender identity” But this might be massively flammable. However I think if you’re going to have a bit about “further gender identity stuff” you need to include “and some people think it’s bollocks/irrelevant “

I agree with PP. The first question has to be whether they actually mean gender, or whether they are in fact referring to data/legislation/needs etc that are sex based.

If they mean sex, they need to say sex because otherwise it is impossible to tie up.with the relevant legislation.

If they mean gender, then why gender at all why have they tried to apply binary categorisation to something they have acknowledged is not binary? How will that work? Who are they leaving out? Can they justify those exclusions?

Thank you. Your sanity is keeping me going as I write this

I would recommend replace with:
”we’ve included a simple sentence in our recent report: “while the language in this report speaks of young women and young men, these categories refer to gender identities and we recognise that for many gender is not binary.”

Just adding “for many” acknowledges that some think of gender as binary, while others do not. It covers your (a) by showing that “gender is not binary” is not a universally held belief while ensuring that both those who think gender is binary and those who think gender is not binary are equally respected in their beliefs.

I don't think it's acceptable to state that 'young women' and 'young men' refer to gender identity because for most people they don't. The current statement is actually incredibly transphobic: it's saying we're forcing people with gender identities into two boxes (clearly based on sex not gender) and not allowing free expression along a spectrum, which is what GI is all about.

It's saying 'we recognise for many gender is non binary but we're going to force everyone into binary boxes anyway' rendering any analysis of the data completely meaningless on grounds of sex or gender and discriminating against protected characteristics of belief (Forstater vs CGD), sex, possibly religion and possibly disability.

For anyone who does believe in gender identity this report is insanely transphobic - not even having a category of non binary.

For anyone who doesn't, they are entirely excluded from this report.

I don’t think you can contest that young men and young women refer to gender categories in the report because it is the writers of the report saying that that is the usage they employed and the meaning they wished to convey when they wrote the report.

Yes young men and young women can be used as sex categories instead of gender identities, but presumably the report was written about a population that was analysed on the basis of young men and young women as gender identities, not sex.

There is no point contesting this because no author who has done all the analysis and written a report based on gender identities is going to agree to a language change that means the entire analysis would have to be redone and the report would have to be rewritten.

You’d be leapt on like a gazelle.

I'd shorten it:
“for brevity, the language in this report speaks of young women and young men, but we recognise that gender is not binary.”

This is a good point but not one that I would raise as it is a mine field unless you are the diversity and inclusion person in the company.

You were asked to comment, just give one small tweak that is innocuous and not going to explode in your face.

Agree with PP - did they ask everyone their gender identity or are they assuming it based on HR data where people don't have a choice? That's shaky at best.

It's all just incredibly stupid and I'm guessing based on substituting 'gender' for 'sex' with no real thought about the fact this is going to render any conclusions completely unreliable if it's the authors assigning people a gender identity (based on what? their sex? their HR data?). It does remain exclusionary of the rather large group of people who don't have a gender identity as well.

In the spirit of attempting to keep your company's head down and not poke any hornet nests, could that whole sentence just be removed? Skate over it completely?

I think that @TrailingLoellia has the answer in putting in that 'for many'.

And thanks to everyone who has been saying 'don't go there' but I have been asked to comment on the wider implications of the sentence. And so far our organisation has very cannily managed to stay on the right side of everyone, so why rock the boat when the sands are shifting and it's all about to become culture war fodder?

But yes, I'm waffling. I think my response would be:

'Are we stating that although the report is based on gender identities, we have only allowed two binary identities? What are these based on? We possibly need to provide a definition to make the report comprehensible and it may also be helpful to provide an estimate of the number of non-binary gender identities or people without a gender identity excluded by only having two gender identity categories'.

And then possibly also:

'In terms of those without a gender identity, the belief in the material reality of biological sex and not believing everyone has a gender identity is I understand protected in law under the protected characteristic of belief in the EA 2010 ( as established in Forstater v CGD). I think it would be useful to seek a legal opinion on whether this report would constitute discrimination against those without a gender identity as in the Forstater case'.

Personally I would add ‘for some’ rather than for many’.

@Justme56 Nice

Yes, I agree with some rather than many. I think that many can be read as most which gives the wrong impression