Privacy in law and how it relates to women's rights

[Ereshkigalangcleg]

Thread for a spin off discussion about the data protection act and when it is illegal to disclose someone's biological sex. This obviously has ramifications for single sex spaces and services. This is inspired by an ongoing employment tribunal of a rape crisis centre worker in Edinburgh.

She sent an email to colleagues asking if she could disclose to a service user (a female rape survivor who asked if everyone in the team was female) that a colleague was non binary but biologically female (assigned female at birth was the term used). She was put through a disciplinary process on the basis that the non binary person did not consent to the disclosure and was upset by it. This was potentially a breach of the Data Protection Act 2018. How can we speak about the biological sex of trans people without breaching data protection guidelines/law? Interested in responses.

Related and potentially more serious are the criminal sanctions which apply when the sex of someone with a gender recognition certificate is disclosed in an official capacity. This could catch even a doctor speaking to another doctor about a patient. The penalties are heavy fines and even a prison sentence.

I agree it’s completely batshit but that is where we are.

Any one know what pita means by "that"?

How do you mention a persons sex anonymously? Are you saying by ERCC suggesting an appropriate response was "we don't have any male workers" it anonymously implied everyone was female including the NB employee?

Well yes of course it does. Non binary isn't an actual thing. There are two sexes, male/female. If there are no male workers they are all female, by whichever yardstick you are using (biological sex or legal fiction inclusive)

I was responding to Datun

Night all

For example I can confirm all our support workers are female or you will be allocated a female support worker. “

Yes, so if the NB person is included in this female group but you don't mention her as an individual you are disclosing her sex anonymously, which is what I meant.

Sure but you seem to have written post after post of confusing nonsense non of which is remotely accurate so you are agreeing something is batshit when you written the batshit yourself.

Pita I meant.

Night @Sisterpita!

How has it got this far? Why was it not dismissed out of hand? Obviously they are female so how can it be possible to bring a case complaining about a service user who is using an all female service checking that is so? It just doesn't seem to have any weight. Don't these things get some approval first or is it whoever can afford to throw money at it and wild West bring a case on whatever.

@Boomboom22

The case is being brought by an employee of Edinburgh Rape Crisis for discrimination and harassment on the grounds of her gender critical beliefs when she was dragged through a disciplinary and ultimately felt her position there was untenable. The service user emailed her to ask if everyone in the team was female. What happened was that there is a "non binary" identified woman who complained about this question being asked on a staff email account.

Sorry that wasn't clear. Service user asked the question about was everyone female. The claimant in the case emailed a question to two people asking how to word it and asking whether she could reassure the female rape survivor that everyone was female and one was a non binary person "assigned female at birth". This caused great consternation.

If it wasn't lawful to disclose a third party's sex, you could never use sexed pronouns at all, cos you'd be disclosing their sex. You'd have to refer to everyone as they/them. That'd piss off the enbies.

So it’s illegal to disclose a person’s trans status, but only if you come by that knowledge through some sort of official route?

If I have a trans woman colleague, but I don’t realise she’s trans and just think she’s a man, am I in trouble if I refer to her as such?

Why are you using she for a man you don't realise is trans?

If you have a male colleague who is secretly "trans" I don't see how anyone could be expected to know.

I'm somehow reminded of the following.

"These days, it feels as if an identity that, not long ago, felt unique to me in most rooms I entered has gone mass. Yes, part of what I’m personally upset about is the fact that this thing I loved isn’t so alt anymore. But more than that, it feels as if pronoun culture has contributed to nonbinary becoming just the third gender after male and female, more static and concrete than its original fluid intentions. The same nonbinary person who complained about nonbinary stereotypes lamented to me, “I don’t want to be a homogeneous normcore mashing of the two genders.” Ben hoped, “If man or woman can mean so many things, then so can nonbinary.” We all became nonbinary to escape gendered expectations, and now we’re stuck again. I can’t help but think that the walking-on-eggshells battle for pronouns is turning my gender into a human-resources-approved corporate product, more neutered than neutral, and, maybe above all else, profoundly unromantic. Next time, just call me by my name."

https://www.thecut.com/article/brock-colyar-pronouns-nonbinary-essay.html?

Twitter thread about the above: https://twitter.com/NYMag/status/1539585219795324928?

And who can forget Harrington's review of Alabanza's None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary

Alabanza declares that “the initial act of deciding I am not man or woman was to gain autonomy for myself”. But the desire for total control over one’s own self-definition raises the question of whether it’s even possible to have social meaning – after all, if no one else contributes, such meanings are no longer “social” as such. More troubling still, if definition is felt as violence in the context of gender, does the idea of definition-as-violence apply to language too? And what does this mean for our ability to communicate?

https://unherd.com/2022/08/what-does-it-mean-to-be-non-binary/?

tell me you have nothing really to worry about without telling me you have nothing really to worry about...

@RethinkingLife I just said this on the main thread about this court case.

Non binary" identity would die a death in weeks if too many of the wrong sort of people decided to self identify as such.

I think it fits.

I've only read the tweets quickly, but didn't the issue arise because the woman who'd become nonbinary had started to use a male name?

Which of course would be worrying for a female rape victim who wanted support from female staff.

'We do not have male staff' would be a very unsatisfactory answer in those circumstances.

Especially since that's clearly not true, as a second on Google would show that a prominent member of staff is legally and physically male.

I've skim read the more recent posts and not dismissing everything but wonder if it wouldn't be more helpful to discuss outside of the ERCC case, because we know that workplace is politically motivated by a TRA agenda.

One issue is data protection which is about date stored by an employer or membership organisation which should not be attached to a name anyway.

The second, which I think is more important, is how in relation to service provision or say a gym or swimming pool which advertises women only services.

Because it is advertised as such surely the potential client or user can ask that someone is either male or female as per the SSE in the EA, ie can only be biological sex, and explicitly excludes those with a GRC or in the process of applying to a GRC.

And the provider must answer honestly, and if they try to include anyone other than of the relevant biological sex then they are not only lying but opening themselves up to causing distress to the potential user / client.

It comes back to another aspect of what is happening in the world at large (or at least in the UK) which is that the SSE exist, and any number of groups, institutions, companies could use it but choose not to.

So it isn't about who could claim to be the sex they are not, or even that they dont have a sex, but why so many organisations so totally fail to respect women's sex based rights that they dont implement it.

No amount of campaigning that has happened in the past decade or so has changed the mind set that women's rights are of equal importance.

Even though recent court cases have said in relation to employment, that differing beliefs must to equally respected. So if some want women only and some want some hybrid women's provision then the employer or provider has to cater for both. They cant say we will only bother with one.

It is just another area of women's lives that have been eroded.

Many of us (not just oldies) grew up at a time where it was natural to have single sex provision. Not everything from this previous era has no value.

Maybe the Minister for Common Sense could wade in and stop so many people thinking that young people (not forgetting that men aren't thought to have matured until 25) can dictate how everyone else should live.

Has Felix taken up a job in HR now?

Is there a some sort of precedent with disability. Ie you can see someone is in a wheelchair but you don’t explain to everyone all their medical conditions? You don’t keep referring to them as the person in the wheelchair but you can’t expect
ppeople to not notice the wheelchair at all.