The petition misses some important caveats that are critical to ensuring Trans folk continue to get healthcare and it is not clear if the authors of the petition realised this.
Many people believe that if being homosexual could be removed as a disorder, so can gender dysphoria. But you don’t need a doctor to be gay. I don’t need a doctor to be Trans either, but access to surgery and HRT makes life liveable. If Gender Dysphoria is no longer recognised by the WHO, Health Services will see less need to provide services. In many countries, including the UK, health care for Trans folk is already poor to non-existant in places.
For an example of the details have a look at the European Parliament motion they reference on the same topic: they asked the WHO “to withdraw gender identity disorders from the list of mental and behavioural disorders while ensuring a non-pathologizing re-coding in the 11th version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).”
The latest petition misses the nuance and just calls for “ICD 11…to stop considering transexuality as an illness.“
We love you really. Particularly after “I’m sorry”.
We were good boys and girls and folk of no particular gender and didn’t make noises about unseating you at conference, because we don’t believe that’s a good idea. (Even if the press would love it)
But you really, really need to learn to stop talking sometimes.
At conference during your Question and Answer session, you were asked about the draft Communications Data Bill. As you probably know this does not make headlines in the Guardian every day but is still something that worries many liberals. When Mark Pack asked you a question on it, you initially responded well with some spot on phrases:
“It’s a draft bill“.
“Unprecedented levels of scrutiny“.
“Julian Huppert“. (Julian’s mention being enough for a round of applause)
And finally, you confirmed what’s become known as “the Huppert Veto“. Despite the name, this is not the latest Tom Clancy thriller.
Well done.
But after about three minutes of not particularly intense questioning, it started falling apart. George Potter asked you if you’d taken any advice on the bill, or even read it before initially endorsing it. It’s fine to say the Home Office misled you. Really, we won’t mind. It happens, and we’re there to catch that sort of thing before it makes it into law. That’s the nice thing about the Liberal Democrats: We can do that, when other parties can’t.
Parroting out the lines that the “principles of the bill are extending existing powers” just makes you sound like you’re reading from a Home Office press release. It’s not just about “extending [existing] powers to other forms of communication, particularly Voice, Skype or whatever“. It’s far more than that, and we know it.
At least when the third questioner challenged you, the response was a reference to “Nasty people”. I’m pleased that we’ve dropped the tired old “paedophiles and terrorists” line. But the “Yeah, yeah” as if you understood what a VPN was didn’t make you look clever.
This is really, really technical.
If I was having to defend a highly technical motion related to the safety of nuclear reactors, or use of certain drugs in hospitals, I’d not even try. I’d get people in who understood the stuff, liberals I trusted, and let them get on with it. Please don’t pretend to understand it because we’re completely OK with the idea that it’s really not that easy.
Frankly, you’ve got other things to do. A country to run. We, lead by Julian, can handle this one.
Instead, just remember these simple four words when questioned on the Communications Data Bill:
Last night, I attended a fringe event on Civil Liberties at the Liberal Democrat Conference. Many topics were covered and as a number of prolific tweeters were present (Myself, Sarah Brown and Caron Lindsay) it had a fair bit of coverage on Twitter.
Many topics were discussed, but one in particular attracted the Twitter attentions of Tom Harris, Labour MP for Glasgow South. That was ASBOs, where concern was expressed that they can be used to punish behaviour that would normally not be imprisonable. For example, if you are homeless on the street you can be given an ASBO preventing you from drinking, something that in itself isn’t illegal. Without help, that homeless person is just going to have a drink and this time they’ll go back in front of the Magistrates and get put in jail for 7 days for breach of the ASBO.
The next time, 14 days. Then, 28 days. And so on.
The only people to really benefit from this are private companies running the prisons. There’s certainly little being done in some cases to address the underlying causes.
Enter Tom Harris:
https://twitter.com/TomHarrisMP/status/249933286221180929
But no, society has no responsiblity to help people according to Tom. Instead it’s all about “Personal Responsibility”. He goes on to recount a story (Which he sounds proud of!) where he made someone homeless because they had a drink problem.
But wait! Surely, being a decent MP, Tom Harris tried to help this person? Perhaps he’s just not mentioned all the hard work he did in that regard. No, not at all. He wanted to evict this person without considering the alternatives…
So next time you pass someone homeless on the street in Glasgow, or some other city with a Labour MP, stop and think: What caused them to end up on the street? Is it because the local MP put them there, knowing homeless people don’t vote?
The whole affair pretty neatly illustrates the difference between many Labour supporters draconian and authoritarian approach to crime and punishment, versus the Liberal Democrat view.
Way back in May, four months ago, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to Sussex Police. It is not anything unusual and requests information I have asked other police forces, such as what equalities impact assessments they carried out into party conference accreditation. They duly acknowledged it.
But after 20 working days, no response. This isn’t that unusual in FoI requests, despite 20 working days being the legal limit, so I politely chase them. No response. So I request an internal review. Again, no response. Not even an acknowledgement.
Next, I write to the Information Commissioner. They take their time (about 6 weeks!) but eventually write directly to Sussex Police, telling them they need to reply in 10 working days. Those 10 working days are up and I still haven’t had any response from Sussex Police.
They know they can not ignore a Freedom of Information request forever, which makes me think they are trying to delay publication of something until after conference. What possible correspondence might Sussex Police have that’s so embarrassing they’re willing to ignore the Information Commissioner purely as a delaying tactic?
Last week, in the Home Affairs Select Committee, Dr Julian Huppert quizzed the Metropolitan Police commissioner on what he might spend £1.8bn of cash on. Those familiar with the draft Communications Data Bill will probably recognise that number: It’s the Home Office estimate of the total cost of implementing the Bill.
Q403 Dr Huppert: Commissioner, if for all of policing, including counter-terrorism and all the other things that you do, you found you had an extra £1.8 billion over the next 10 years, what would be your number one priority for how you choose to spend that money?
One would expect Mr Hogan-Howe to be “on message” when it comes to this as he was quite vocal when the draft bill was announced, describing the powers as necessary to wage a draconian-sounding Total War on Crime. This guy is one of the leading voices asking for the bill. Surely he must think it is good value for money?
Surprisingly, Communications Data would not be a priority. He’d rather spend the cash on other things such community policing and general IT.
In fact, Communications Data didn’t even get a mention.
Bernard Hogan-Howe: It is a good question, and I would need a bit of time to think about it, but there are probably two main things. One would be to enhance the neighbourhood and community policing response. I think there is an opportunity there for us to do more. The second thing is I want to invest more in technology, not to replace the people necessarily, but we in the Met spend about £220 million a years on IT. Across the country policing generally spends £1.2 billion on IT. My point would be that it is more green screen than it is iPad, I am afraid, and it does not seem to catch criminals. Lots of lists, but ANPR catches criminals, facial recognition helps, fingerprints, DNA quick turnaround. These are things that I think over time can make a real difference, and of course it links us into the community and the victims in a far better way in which you see business deliver a service. I don’t think we are anywhere near that yet. So that is the two big areas that I would probably invest in. Probably the other one would be training. We have embarked on a quality programme and I think in the past probably the police service has seen training as a cost not an investment. For me it is an investment provided it is done properly and it is invested towards crime-fighting, which I think is vital.
(You can view this exchange on Parliament TV, starting from 11:02:23)
I always try to check and reference primary sources when I blog or tweet, because I like making sure my facts are correct. I have had to bin a blog post more than once when it’s turned out the numbers and figures are not exactly as I thought. WordPress allows me to see who has clicked on links, and although it is depressing to see how few people follow up my sources, I do hope that people would call me out if I cited something wrong.
And a recent example illustrates exactly why I do this, specifically a Twitter image meme about Maria Miller (Now Secretary of State and Minister for, among other things, Equalities) that was doing the rounds a couple of days ago. The content of that image is rebutted pretty well in this blog post, although it confirmed what I already knew from my own research: Whilst neither Miller nor Helen Grant (Who has Lynne Featherstone’s old job as Parliamentary Undersecretary for Equalities) have a positive record on LGBT, they actually have a worryingly blank record rather than a negative one.
I get irritated by such things firstly because that they spread due to the “common sense” view that “All Tories are Evil, so this must be true!” and I don’t believe all Tories are evil. (Misinformed, perhaps…) If you assume, even by implication, that every member of the Conservative Party is evil and anti-equality, people who are on our side will leave in frustration. Eventually, a party that spends a lot of it’s time in government will become even more anti-equality: Not good news for real equality on the ground.
And secondly because “common sense” leads to institutional cases of Trans and other discrimination, especially in large organisations. I’ve recently run across a case where a large public body classes all Trans people as being high risk for mental health and thus need extra evidence to prove sanity, even if there is no other psychiatric history at all. They don’t have any evidence to back this up besides a note in some meeting minutes saying “It’s OK as long as Trans people can prove they’re sane” because doctors all “know” it’s true and don’t bother checking sources. (The British Military did check, and came to the conclusion there is no reason to assume someone with a history of Gender Dysphoria would be high risk, unless there is some other history to indicate otherwise)
P.S. Astute readers will have noticed I even linked to Maria Miller and Helen Grant’s Wikipedia page. Yes, I’m that anal – and in doing so, corrected one of my own errors. I had Maria Miller down as Secretary of State for Equalities, but her official title is Minister for Equalities.
I’ve already put it online as a PDF, but here’s my submission to the committee on the draft Communications Data Bill in a slightly easier to read format.
QUESTION 1: Has the Home Office made it clear what it hopes to achieve through the draft Bill?
Considering the draft bill itself, there is no apparent restriction on the powers that are granted by it, which does not give any way of assessing exactly what the intentions are. The powers could be used for deployment of “black boxes” en mass throughout the UK, could be used to just to target known hotspots, or could just be used to attempt to intercept information to and from non-cooperative web site owners. They may even be no deployment of interception, with the bill just being used to retain. additional information.
In it’s publicity surrounding the bill, the Home Office (HO) stated legislation was needed because “New communications technologies are generating communications data in different ways and communications data is no longer always retained by communications service providers.” (Emphasis added) In oral evidence to the committee, Charles Farr and Richard Alcock also concentrated on the “data retention” aspect of the bill as being primary, rather than obtaining data via interception. (This is discussed further in answer to question 2)
It would therefore seem that the HO are publicly trying to state that the bill is about retention. However, the powers being asked for include obtaining data via interception, and the use of these powers has not been made clear or publicly discussed in any detail by the HO.
The Home Office (HO) has also stated that it has spoken to a number of service providers who do understand their aims here. However, it is certainly not clear to myself or to anyone else I have spoken to in the industry what the aims are. It may be that those who have been spoken to are not themselves technical, but instead managers in effect bidding for a slice of the £1.8bn on offer. As a result, without knowing who the HO have been communicating with, one should be wary of accepting assurance that the concerned service providers are happy (technically or otherwise) with the HO proposals. Even if the HO genuinely believes the assurances given to it by service providers, the assurances it has received may not be entirely have been made in good faith and from a disinterested position.
Multiple Freedom of Information requests have been made to the Home Office on the topic of who they have spoken to, both for the draft bill and existing data retention regimes, and also enquiring as how they arrived at the costs stated. All have been entirely or mostly refused (1,2,3,4,5) so there is no clarification available via that route as to either the value of any assurances apparently given by service providers or the aspirations of the bill in general.
Other potentially useful information on the bill has also been suppressed by the HO. For example, they attended a conference run by the London Internet Exchange (LINX) and presented a half hour slot to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on the bill. The conference attendees were not security cleared and include foreign nationals, but despite this the HO refused permission to allow LINX to release the video for download to members who were not present at the meeting and additionally stated that they would never disclose who in the industry they had talked top in order to stop people simply switching ISPs.
The above facts combined – overly broad content in the bill, concentration on “data retention” in evidence to the committee, refusal to answer Freedom of Information requests and limiting circulation of information would suggest that the HO simply does not want more than vague details of it’s aims to be public knowledge for security reasons. That approach makes any useful, democratic assessment of their request a practical impossibility and also seriously damages any prospect of meaningful oversight.
QUESTION 2: Has the Government made a convincing case for the need for the new powers proposed in the draft Bill?
In evidence given orally to the committee by Charles Farr, Director General of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, states that much of the current problem is down to “ambiguity” in the Data Retention Directive (Q7) and also goes on (Q9) to state that he believes the draft bill will increase the proportion of successful requests for data from 75% to 85%. This concentration on data retention (Versus data acquisition) is further reiterated, including in a response to Question 74 by Richard Alcock (Director of Communications Capability Directorate) in his answer to Q74, who states that the costs are around data retention.
What is not addressed is why simply updating the UK implementation of the data retention directive would not be sufficient to achieve the stated 10% uplift if this is simply a data retention issue.
There is mention in the same session of cooperating with European, not UK, providers in retaining this data and that differences in the implementation of the Data Retention Directive (DRD) across Europe were part of the problem. It is not explained how a bill passed in the United Kingdom could be used to require European providers to retain data: Either the providers somehow fall under UK law by virtue of doing business here (In which case they would be subject to a UK “clarification” or update of the Data Retention Regulations 2009) or they are not subject to UK law, in which case any agreement with them would not be influenced by new legislation.
Although effort has been made to justify retention of additional data, no serious attempt appears to have been made by the Home Office for additional powers of interception and obtaining additional data.
QUESTION 3. How do the proposals in the draft Bill fit within the wider landscape on intrusion into individuals’ privacy?
And:
QUESTION 4. What lessons can be learnt from the approach of other countries to the collection of communications data?
Based on an analysis of data released by Google, the UK has per capita the population most investigated via data communications in the world. Other countries may engage in snooping directly on their citizens, rather than requesting data from companies such as Google, but the UK would be unique amongst western democracies should it engage in such practices and this would largely be uncharted territory.
QUESTION 5. Are there any alternative proposals with regard to the technique and cost of obtaining communications data that the Government could consider?
As discussed previously, updating the Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2009 to cover more data should be considered. However, the HO have been reluctant to release enough information on what they hope to achieve which makes proper consideration of any alternatives difficult.
QUESTION 6. The draft Bill sits alongside the Data Retention Regulations. How will these two pieces of legislation interrelate? Would it be preferable to have one overarching piece of legislation that governs the retention of communications data?
It would appear that, as written, the bill would supersede the Data Retention Regulations in all respects. There would appear to be no circumstances under which it would be worthwhile for the Secretary of State to issue further notices to service providers under section 10 of the regulations should the bill be passed. As a result, the regulations would cease to have any real world effect once all current providers are notified of their new obligations under the proposed bill.
QUESTION 7. If it is concluded that the provisions of the draft Bill are essential, are there any other measures that could be scrapped as a quid pro quo to rebalance civil liberties?
The draft bill gives the potential for near-total omniscience to the state within the communications world. Given that people’s lives are increasingly integrated with electronic devices and the Internet, the scale of any scrapping of existing powers outside of the bill itself to rebalance liberties would have to be staggering in it’s scope.
QUESTION 9. Is the estimated cost of £1.8bn over 10 years realistic?
Despite multiple Freedom of Information requests, as noted in the answer to Question 1, the HO has yet to produce any breakdown of it’s costs beyond simply stating around half the cost is retention. As it has also not been made clear what the aims and objectives of the bill is, it is not possible to determine if this is realistic.
QUESTION 10. The Home Office suggests the benefits that could be delivered by the enactment of the draft Bill could be worth between £5â€6bn. Is this figure realistic?
The HO have not released any breakdown of this benefit, so it is hard to analyse. It would appear some of these benefits, based on evidence given orally by Charles Farr, is based on notional values of human life etc, for which we do not have numbers.
However, a basic sanity check can be performed. There were 414,400 successful requests in 2010 (75% of 552,550) and the HO have stated in oral evidence to the committee that they hope for a 10% increase in successful requests as a result of the bill, meaning an additional 55,255 requests. This would mean that the current Data Retention regime is delivering a value of £3.75bn per year, or £9k per request. That number seems large and I would have expected to see more publicity surrounding the benefits of the existing system, but is a feasible figure given that the HO aims to“prevent revenue loss through tax fraud and facilitating the seizure of criminal assets”.
QUESTION 13. How robust are the plans to place requirements on communications service providers based overseas? How realistic is it that overseas providers could be pursued for breach of duty?
The UK would appear to have no legal recourse against foreign service providers who do not, entirely voluntarily, comply with the proposed bill. If the HO did attempt to find a way to pursue foreign service providers with no UK base, this would set a very unwelcome precedent. UK service providers may then have the burden of complying with laws and regulations in every other country connected to the Internet, in case a user from that country visits their site.
QUESTION 16. Applications for accessing communications data will be subject to a series of safeguards including approval by a designated senior officer within the public authority making the request. How should “designated senior officer” be defined? Is this system satisfactory? Are there concerns about compliance with Article 8 ECHR?
And
QUESTION 17. Would a warrant system be more appropriate? If you favour a warrant system should this apply to all public authorities including law enforcement agencies? Should a warrant be necessary in all circumstances? And what would the resource implications be?
Independent oversight of requests is certainly desirable, but a “warrant” could be granted by the Secretary of State or their nominated representative, which lacks sufficient independence. It would be more appropriate to specify that a judicial warrant is required.
The main objection to requiring warrants by the HO has been time, in critical cases, and cost. On the topic of time, there is no reason why the vast majority of non-time-critical (Priority Grade 3, under the current RIPA system) should not require warrants. Such a system must mandate retrospective judicial approval of any high priority (Grade 1) requests to prevent abuse, with automatic reporting of any failed retrospective requests and investigation by the commissioner. The commissioner has already identified “serious non-compliance” by a number police forces under the current oral approval system which is a major cause for concern if not addressed. (2011 Annual Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Page 35)
For cost, the overall cost of the proposed system amounts to £3,257 per successful request. The cost of applying for a warrant does not appear to constitute a major additional burden in light of this.
QUESTION 18. Is the role of the Interception of Communications Commissioner and the Information Commissioner sensible?
The roles in theory are welcome, but the commissioners have proven themselves to be relatively toothless and do not properly investigate problems. A much stronger system of oversight is required.
QUESTION 19. Are the arrangements for parliamentary oversight of the powers within the draft Bill satisfactory?
As noted previously the HO have been extremely reluctant to provide any information to the committee in evidence to support the bill. There is no reason at this stage to believe they would be any more cooperative when it comes to future oversight. The draft bill should enforce tough, thorough and public reporting by the HO and all organisations granted powers or obligations under the bill.
It is notable that the proposed system of interception involves the secretary of state mandating the equipment and configuration to be used by service providers, meaning it is unlikely that service providers will have any meaningful insight into the operation of the system. This will mean that the only organisations who really know what is going on are the HO and the (So far unidentified) suppliers of the equipment. This potentially means that no independent oversight of the technical implementation of the bill will exist at any level.
QUESTION 21. Are the penalties appropriate for those public authorities that inappropriately request access to communications data? Should failure to adhere to the Code of Practice which is provided for in the draft Bill amount to an offence?
It should be a criminal offence to wilfully disregard any communications data provisions, to prevent managers and staff refusing to take responsibility for the significant powers granted to them, in a similar way to the driver of a vehicle – and not his employer – being liable for offences committed behind the wheel. However, history has shown that prosecutions for such offences rarely take place as they are deemed not to in the public interest and this is as critical a problem as the penalties themselves. Mandating investigation by the commissioner with a strong presumption of prosecution on behalf of the CPS would go some way to solving this issue.
QUESTION 22. Does the technology exist to enable communications service providers to capture communications data reliably, store it safely and separate it from communications content?
On the scale required by the HO, no. No evidence has been presented by the HO to suggest otherwise, or how they would handle non-standard and ever-evolving protocols used by many sites.
As an example, in the 2010 film “Four Lions”, the jihadists converse over a web site that appears to be based on Disney’s “Club Penguin”, an online game for children. The protocol used for communication between such sites and the client software running on the users computer will be completely proprietary and change entirely at the whim of the developers.
QUESTION 23. How safely can communications data be stored?
Security is a trade-off between usability and accessibility of the data versus it’s value and the impact if it is compromised. The value of the data held by Service Providers will be huge, representing a valuable asset in corporate espionage potentially funded by foreign governments.
Such a high-value asset needs to be protected very robustly and although service providers generally have a good track record in keeping critical data secure, breaches do happen. This is a significant risk, the impact of which should be properly and fully investigated and reported on by the HO and accepted as being necessary prior to the bill being passed.
QUESTION 25. How easy will it be for individuals or organisations to circumvent the measures in the draft Bill ?
It would seem to be trivial to circumvent, unless the HO has some mechanism of decrypting all traffic that is not known to the rest of the world. (See discussion in answer to Q26 for more on this)
The government of China, which has thrown significant resources at it’s “Great Firewall of China” project, has been trying to simply block – not even intercept – unapproved internet sites. Despite this, it remains the case today that people are able to bypass this system using technologies such as “tor”. There is no reason to believe the HO would be significantly more successful at interception than other governments would be at the simpler task of blocking.
QUESTION 26. Are there concerns about the consequences of decryption?
Potentially, yes, as we do not know how the HO intends to break decryption other than a simple statement that they can. There is a real danger that “man-in-the-middle” attacks on encryption might expose UK users to additional security risks or generally destabilise the internet in unwelcome ways. To avoid security and stability problems created by interception, it should be a requirement of the bill that interception may only be passive and not alter the contents of the communication in transit.
Worse, in a nightmare scenario, whatever technology is deployed at the service provider level by the HO to decrypt traffic is stolen from a data centre by criminals or members of foreign intelligence agencies, potentially exposing very large number of users to security risks and huge financial implications.
From the 2011 England & Wales Census, it has been revealed that 39,200 relationships were edited/”corrected” due to an apparently invalid combination of relationships that would indicate a Polyamorous household.
Firstly, I’ll note they only did this where there was also a marriage or civil partnership involved – I.e. a triad or V where one side of the relationship has been legally recognised, so the figures will be low. Secondly, the reason the Census office edits these figures is because they believe in the majority of cases this is probably an error by those filling in the form.
Still, the figures are potentially interesting, so lets see how they stack up.
I can not find any data on the number of relationships recorded by the Census, but we know there were 23.4 million households. To get some idea of the kind of proportion of households that have indicated a Poly relationship, lets assume a maximum of one poly family per household: that gives around 0.1%-0.2%.
I am deliberately not going to be any more accurate than that because the data I’m working from is vague at best. As well as not including families without any marriage/civil partnership involved (Pushing the number down) there may be households where a couple have not yet divorced but a new partner has moved in. (Which would push the number up)
How likely is it that much of this is an error in filling in the forms? We have no real way of knowing. But I also asked for the number of marriages/civil partnerships that were edited due to an invalid combination including gender, such as indicating a marriage between a same-sex couple. That gave 50,400 edits. There are just over 100,000 civil partnerships in the UK and I can well believe somewhere around half of respondents would be bloody-minded enough to tick “marriage” and not civil partnership. There will also be Trans issues affecting this figure, but at a low enough rate to not be significant.
The above is, of course, not statistically sound in any sense and shouldn’t be used for the basis of policy or, well, anything really.
However, it’s enough to indicate that there may be a non-trivial number of Poly households out there and that warrants further study. Perhaps the Office for National Statistics can be persuaded to report in more depth on the data – they are far better statisticians than I for starters – or to conduct follow-up surveys. If the number proves to be large enough, it may even justify better investigation in the 2021 census.
Probably not what David Cameron would call “Sport”
It’s called PE. Physical Education – not “Sport”. This is the problem faced by the (And yes, I’m banging my usual drum here) male and pale crowd who probably did well in competitive sports at school – Boris Johnson and John Prescott also waded in on the side of school sport.
But ask on Twitter or elsewhere amongst the type of people in their 30s or older, particularly women, who engage in healthy physical activity and what to you find? Generally people who were put off by being pushed in the mud during school PE and regarded the whole thing as just an excuse for the bigger kids to have a go at the smaller ones. Many people, including myself, only rediscovered physical activity when they were older.
Despite being pretty fit (and I think being able to easily pass British Army fitness tests I can claim that easily) I simply do not like the kind of sports that are taught at school. I run, but I compete only against my own personal best. I climb and do Via Ferratas, but they are not competitive sports at my level. And I ride horses, which is rather more energetic than it sounds. Did you see any overweight riders winning medals in the equestrian events?
My kids are the same. They enjoy outdoor physical activities despite, not because of, school PE.
We need to continue to fund Physical Education at Schools, and make time for it but not on either David Cameron or Boris Johnson’s terms. Indian Dance is exactly the sort of thing we should be getting kids to do. Give people enough of a sampling of different activities that don’t involve having a ball kicked at their head and they’re more likely to find something they like and will carry on with in later life.
But please, not more “Sport”. I hated it, many others did too and we’re putting off the very people that need the most encouragement.
Some rather dry but nevertheless interesting statistics for you: According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), as many as 1% of people may have gender “issues” of some description or another.
The evidence comes in the form of a “technical note” on conducting surveys from the EHRC. (PDF Link) When asking just over 10,000 people various questions about their gender, 0.4% did not identify as binary (I.e. neither male nor female) and 1% had had thoughts about (Or taken actions towards) gender reassignment.
Of course, this new evidence hasn’t stopped the Daily Mail having a pop at previous, lower estimates, labelling them “preposterous” purely because relatively few people actually get as far as dealing with the NHS (…perhaps because it’s so difficult to do, and the likes of the Mail create a negative social stigma around it…) or getting a GRC (…because they’re really not as much help as they should be, thanks to the Equality Act!)
But I am inclined to agree with the Daily Mail (I know, sorry, it happens occasionally) about excessive collection of data. It’s rarely statistically significant for Trans folk unless you’re dealing with a sizeable number of people and can be intrusive. (Data that one person in a group of 100 is Trans is enough to out someone)
Oh, and of course if you collect data, you can accidentally leak it. (It’s not clear in that case if information on gender reassignment was also leaked)
