Gender

It is ten months since the then merely aspirant education secretary Bridget Phillipson addressed the important issue of where transgender people should go for a quick slash. Bridget was very much of the opinion that if you had a gender recognition certificate, then you should make for the cubicle which matched with whatever it said on that piece of paper, because it’s the ‘humane approach’. She added: ‘But I would expect that if you were someone that had gone through that formal process of recognition you are, to all intents and purposes, for legal purposes, regarded as being in a different gender, regardless of the sex into which you were

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has finally admitted that the 2021 census figures on the transgender population of England and Wales are irredeemably flawed. They no longer count as ‘accredited official statistics’. This is the first time that data from the decennial census – the backbone of British statistics since 1801 – has been downgraded. This humiliating climb-down came just a week before the Office for Statistics Regulation published its final review on these statistics. This review had been provoked by my critique of the census transgender figures, publicized in the Spectator last year. Until now, the ONS has brushed aside criticism from sociologists such as myself and Alice

In an extraordinary outburst, a government source has described the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, introduced by the Conservatives, as a ‘hate-speech charter’. This is an outrageous distortion of the new laws that aim to guarantee free speech within universities. The best that can be said about that phrase is that, so long as we retain free speech, people are free to describe it that way. But doing so raises worrying doubts about what the new government thinks free speech means.   Universities have a special role in the promotion of free speech. They are, or should be, places where those teaching and those taught can try out ideas,

The UK government’s threat to block Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill took many by surprise. The powers, under Section 35 of the Scotland Act, have never been used before. The assumption from some observers, this one included, was that this was a negotiating tactic ahead of inter-governmental discussions on the Bill’s implementation and cross-border issues that might arise. That assumption appears to be wrong. I understand that raising the spectre of Section 35 is not a negotiating tactic: ministers are seriously contemplating it and legal advice is being sought. Among ministers’ concerns are questions over passports, driving licences and public safety. Michael Foran, a lecturer in public law at

One of the fundamental flaws in the Scottish devolution settlement set up by Labour and radically expanded by the Tories is the ability for policy divergence in Scotland to impact on the rest of the UK. The Gender Recognition Reform Bill, on the cusp of being passed by the Scottish parliament, might prove an object lesson. The Bill overhauls the process by which a person obtains a gender recognition certificate (GRC). This is the document which recognises an applicant’s gender identity in place of their biological sex. For example, a male who identifies as female and acquires a GRC becomes female in the eyes of the law.  The Bill being