UK’s EHRC has no working definition of biological sex, FOIA request shows
The Equalities and Human Rights Commission has no internal or policy definitions for “biological male” or “biological female".
A response to The Needle’s FOIA request reveals that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has no internal or policy definitions for “biological male” or “biological female".
Today, Jan. 9, the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission issued a FOIA denial to The Needle’s request for documents pertaining to their upcoming Code of Practice.
The denial, which is part of a typically routine process that has various triggers, such as a request being overly broad in scope, being withheld for public interests reasons, not having responsive documents, or other reasons permissible to deny a FOI request under UK law has revealed something striking.
Among the records The Needle requested as part of this particular inquiry was “The EHRC's current internal, working, or other policy definition of the terms "biological male" and "biological female" as used by the EHRC itself.”
This is relevant because of last year’s UK Supreme Court ruling that rolled back trans rights decades across the UK and the following snafu regarding the EHRC’s Code of Practice for public-facing facilities.
In the EHRC’s FOIA denial, they state specifically that “Following a search of our records, we have determined that the Equality and Human Rights Commission does not hold any recorded information within the scope of this request.”
In other words, the EHRC has no working internal definition of the terms “biological male” and “biological female”.
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These very terms are at issue because of that UK Supreme Court ruling which declared that gender, specifically the legal definition of "woman", is only based on “biological sex”.
This likely means that despite their upcoming Code of Practice, which has been deliberated on for months, and even has been at points leaked to major news outlets in the UK, the EHRC has failed to define the terms at issue, or that they can’t come up with a definition that works for their purposes.
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