Research

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Update on the HESA gender statistics affair

Some clarification, new information and new developments have emerged since I posted about HESA’s gender statistic fail yesterday.

Background

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) is currently revising a number of data collection fields. The changes are not yet set in stone. 

Two new fields (student.SEX and student.GENDERID) will effectively replace the one existing field (student.GENDER) which is currently used to collect data on gender within higher education institutes (usually universities) in the United Kingdom.

The existing student.GENDER field has the following categories*:

1 Male
2 Female
9 Indeterminate

In regards to “Indeterminate”, HESA note that:

“Code 9 ‘Indeterminate’ means unable to be classified as either male or female. It should not be used as a substitute or proxy for ‘Not known’. The term ‘indeterminate gender’ is intended to identify those who are ‘intersex’ and is not related in any way to trans-gender.”

However, in practice a number of institutions have effectively mapped answers such as “other” and “prefer not to say” onto this third category within enrolment/re-enrolment forms in order to provide non-binary, genderqueer, intersex and other students to effectively “opt out” of the gender binary.

The new, compulsory student.SEX field has the following categories:

1 Male
2 Female

The new, optional (for institutions) student.GENDERID field has the following categories:

01 Yes
02 No
98 Information refused

A brief analysis of the harm in these changes can be found in my previous post.

Developments

It appears that HESA have received a number of queries and complaints from trans people: it’s uplifting to see so impressive and rapid a response!

The agency initially responded by noting that the changes were the result of “consultation with [the] HE sector and ECU“. Commentators noted that this consultation seemed to at no point involved actual trans students.

However, in the last hour HESA have provided the following statement from their Twitter account:

“Thanks for queries re. sex and gender in next year’s HESA record. Your input will help us get this right.”

The tweet links to correspondence conducted between HESA and trans activist Emma Brownbill – if you have the time, it’s worth a read!

Some key points include the following:

“The phrase ‘legal’ sex is only currently used in the Staff Record. The intention in the Staff Record is to match the data requirements of HMRC, which for tax and pension purposes only accept Female or Male.

The final coding manual and guidance for the Student Record in 2012/13 has not been published. From your own and other queries about the provisional guidance and consultation documents it is clear that the terminology of ‘legal’ sex may not be appropriate for the Student Record.

Similarly the binary choice of Female or Male, originally intended to match the Staff Record, is now the subject of further discussion with regard to the Student Record.”

So let’s keep at this – we’re really getting somewhere!

Also, thanks to everyone who commented on the previous post, your contributions were greatly appreciated.

Edit: the story has now hit Pink News.

 

*The numbers (e.g. 1, 2, 9, 98) are used within statistical analyses.

 

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Gender recognition under threat in UK universities

I read a very disturbing internal email this afternoon. I’m not going to quote the majority of it in order to preserve anonymity, but the central content is of concern to any current or future trans student in Higher Education.

Earlier this year, HESA [Higher Education Statistics Agency] confirmed a series of changes that they would be making to the HESA Student Record for the 2012/13 academic year, which would have an impact on some of the questions that students are asked during the application and enrolment process. A number of these changes relate to equality issues and the 2010 Equality Act and I thought it would be prudent for us to consult […]

The key changes of relevance are as follows:

(1) There is an existing field Student.GENDER which will from 2012/13 be replaced with Student.SEX. The new Student.SEX field will reflect ‘legal’ biological sex at birth and we have been advised that there will be only two valid entries for this field, either Male or Female.

(2) To complement the new Student.SEX field there will also be an additional field, Student.GENDERID, which is intended to reflect the student’s gender identity based on their own self-assessment. A response to this question, should we choose to ask it, would be optional for students. The ‘suggested question’ from the Equality Challenge Unit for eliciting this information is “Is your gender identity the same as the gender you were originally assigned at birth?” and it would be possible for students to respond with ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Information Refused’.

At my university, the current student.GENDER field allows students to identify as “female”, “male”, “other” or “prefer not to say” following intervention from trans activists and past Students’ Union welfare officers. This system, and any similarly progressive approach from other institutions, will be overturned by the new HESA guidelines.

My concerns are as follows:

1) What is “legal” sex? Is it:
(a) my birth sex? (in which case I’m male)
(b) what’s on my passport? (in which case I’m female)
(c) whether or not I have a gender recognition certificate? (in
which case I’m male)

[edit: a skim of the HESA guidelines shows that (a) is not the case, with the university apparently using the phrase “sex at birth” in error]

2) If (a) or (c), then the University is going to revert my “sex” on its forms. This will disclose I am trans to anyone using their records.

3) If (b), then anyone wishing to update their gender will have to out themselves by walking into the university administrative building and presenting their passport. I had to do this in 2005 and it caused all kinds of weird issues with the Students’ Union and my records. We changed the system in two stages (the last one is referred to in the letter) in order to prevent this from happening to anyone else.

4) The new system erases intersex people.

5) The new system erases people with a non-binary identity.

6) This whole approach has an extremely flawed methodology that will only invalidate the desired data!

I suspect my university doesn’t have much of a choice about how this is carried about, and neither will others. We urgently need to lobby HESA to reverse their policy on this.

I’ll aim to write a more coherent analysis of the situation (inc. the complex role of the Gender Recognition Act) when I’m feeling more coherent.

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EDIT: HESA notes changes to the student.GENDER field here. Information on the new (binary) gender identity code can be found here.

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There is never enough research

This morning I’ve found myself reading a new Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) research review about “identity-based” bullying in schools (as you do!) The report summarises statistics and qualitative data from research into racist, sexist, disabilist, homophobic and transphobic bullying in British schools. Yep, you read that right: the “T” word is very much in there. I suppose all that hot air from government departments and quangos about “equality strands” has to be good for something.

To my dismay, the section on transphobic bullying was tiny. Not because the EHRC didn’t put any effort into it – I’m pretty certain they were giving it their best shot – but because there was so little for them to write about. My heart sank when I came across that that classic phrase…

“there is little existing literature”

As in:

“Transphobia is an understudied area and there are very few UK-based studies which have explored this, especially in relation to transgender young people”

…and:

“In terms of preventing and responding to transphobic bullying, there is little existing literature highlighting particular issues for transphobic individuals”

…meaning that:

further research is needed to help identify young people who may be most at risk of experiencing transphobic bullying and the specific support needs they may have.

This is how it always goes. It doesn’t matter if the research is about bullying in school, access to health care, access to employment and/or benefits, experiences in the street or in the home: it almost always boils down to “further research is needed”. This is the case in pretty much any field (how else would academics gain gainful employment, after all?) but so much more the case with particularly marginalised groups, including travellers and asylum seekers as well as trans people.

There are a few utterly fantastic pieces of research out there dealing with trans experiences of discrimination and harassment, but in the broad scheme of things there’s very little for activists and public sector bodies to draw upon when trying to get a realist picture of what’s going on.

The thing is, there’s very few people doing trans research, and even less people prepared to fund it. With government-backed research councils being massively scaled down because of the cuts, this is only going to get worse. This is pretty disastrous if you’re trying to get public bodies to tackle transphobia, and even more disastrous if you’re trying to get the government to pass trans-friendly legislation. For instance, the Labour government refused to budge on the exclusion of non-binary gender identities from the Equality Act because there was “no evidence” of such people even existing.

Research reviews are all very well and good, but we’re being told over and over again that there isn’t much to say about transphobia: not because it doesn’t happen, but because not enough people have looked at it. It’s time for organisations such as the EHRC and NHS to put their money where their mouth is and actually back some thoughtful, in-depth trans research projects.