Transgender Good Practice
Equality Monitoring
It is becoming more and more common for employers to collect a range of data about their workforce. Public employers are legally required to monitor their workforce’s gender, disability status and ethnic origin. The aim of such monitoring is to try to see whether gender, disability or ethnic origin are proving barriers to people’s employment, training or progression and whether the steps being taken to remedy this are having the desired effect or not.
So how should an organisation monitor gender in order to be inclusive of transgender people? Should organisations try to monitor the transgender status of its employees and/or service users? This webpage looks at these issues and gives some good practice guidance.
Monitoring Gender:
Some organisations have been changing their gender monitoring question to:
***BAD PRACTICE***
What is your sex?
***BAD PRACTICE***
This is offensive to most transgender people because many transgender people identify either as being male or as being female in addition to being transgender people. Only androgyne or polygender identified transgender people do not identify as male or female. A male-to-female transsexual woman, for example, will want to identify her sex/gender as female/woman on a monitoring form. The above monitoring question implies that the organisation thinks that transgender people cannot be male or female and are not 'real' men or women. This could have the effect of increasing the risk of discrimination and harassment against transgender employees or service users as it unintentionally appears to endorse discriminatory viewpoints.
The Scottish Transgender Alliance recommends that organisations monitor gender by asking people to give their self-identified gender identity, rather than their biological sex or legal gender. This means that regardless of her stage of transition, a male-to-female transsexual woman would be able to state that her gender identity is as a female/women. The question should be clearly optional so that people can avoid declaring themselves as a male/man or as a female/woman. Some organisations (especially LGBT sector organisations) may wish to make the existence of those who are androgyne or polygender explicit by providing a text box labelled Other: where someone would be able to state their own terms for their gender identity. However, for other organisations it may be more appropriate for them to simply ensure that the option is available for people to leave the gender identity question uncompleted. Therefore, possible acceptable ways to monitor gender include:
What is your gender identity?
- Man (including trans man)
- Woman (including trans woman)
- Other (for example, androgyne person): _____________________
- Prefer not to answer
or
What is your gender identity?
- Man
- Woman
- Prefer not to answer
Monitoring Transgender Status:
There is no legal requirement to monitor people’s transgender status or gender history and the Scottish Transgender Alliance advises caution in this area. Many people who have transitioned from male-to-female or from female-to-male can, and do, keep their gender history to themselves. They may not want to reveal their gender history out of fear of discrimination or because they may feel that only th