Write to Peter Kyle – don’t let digital ID be gender self-ID
Write to Peter Kyle MP, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, to get the sex data problem in the Data Bill fixed.
The Sullivan Review has exposed the widespread problem of public bodies collecting inaccurate, unreliable and untrustworthy data about what sex people are.
It has made devastatingly clear that public authorities, ranging from the NHS to police forces to the Passport Office, have stopped recording sex accurately and replaced it with muddled, ambiguous information that includes self-declared gender identity. This puts individuals at risk and makes it impossible to trust the data institutions use for policy-making.
Instead of taking leadership and solving the problem, the government’s plans for digital identity verification will make it worse.
The Data Bill currently going through Parliament will establish an “information gateway” that will enable public authorities to share people’s personal information in order that they can use apps and online identity services to prove facts about themselves.
Information that passes through the information gateway will be marked as endorsed by the government to be of the highest standard of trustworthiness.
But if the government does not make sure that, when information about “sex” is asked for, the information gateway only returns accurate answers (that is, what is sometimes called “biological sex” or “sex at birth”), the result will be a system where the government is explicitly endorsing the use of gender identity in place of sex – for example, when:
- registering a child for a school
- sharing health information
- applying for a job where sex matters, such as in a rape crisis centre or in health or social care
- sharing information, for instance in referrals between voluntary-sector organisations like women’s refuges
- using an online forum to connect with other people
- joining a gym or other service that includes separate-sex facilities.
The government must act urgently and decisively to ensure that where official data is used to enable apps and online services to verify individuals’ sex, this is based on true and reliable information, not on unreliable data sources.
The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, is responsible for the Data Bill. It was his department that published the Sullivan Review and shared it across government, so he knows how bad the problem is.
Will you write to Peter Kyle today and call on him to make sure that his information gateway is not the gateway to gender self-id?
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The letter
Dear Secretary of State
The Sullivan Review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender that your department recently published exposes a serious problem: public bodies such as the NHS and the Passport Office no longer hold accurate, clear data on whether people are male or female. They allow people to change their records based on gender self-identification.
You are now passing a new law to create an “information gateway” that will allow these public bodies to share this data, and which will mark it as trustworthy for all purposes.
Reliable data about people’s sex is crucial in many areas of life, including patient safety, dignity in care, safety in policing, robust safeguarding of children, and fairness and safety in sport. This is sometimes called “biological sex” or “sex at birth”.
When gender identity displaces sex in records it puts people at risk and harms safeguarding, safety, science, fairness and data protection.
I urge you to act decisively, and to commit to ensuring that data on sex from unreliable, unclear sources is not allowed to pass through the information gateway.
Although responsibility to solve the problem of inaccurate sex records is spread across government, the responsibility for ensuring that the information gateway does not create an official system of “gender self-id” is in your hands.
I look forward to hearing from you.