Alastair Gilbert

Legal Sex (Again)

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Following the UK Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 - has anyone established how we are now meant to interpret legal sex in the ILR? If the learner has a gender recognition certificate, do we use their birth sex or the one on the certificate? (My entirely non-expert interpretation is that we should accept the one from the GRC in this instance.)

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Steve Hewitt

There's STILL no such thing as "legal sex", put whatever the learner says they are.

(the most obviously "me" post here ever I think...)

(Edited)

Alastair Gilbert

The issue I have with that advice is I have to put male or female, those being the only options in the ILR. 'Whatever the learner says' opens a much wider field of options. When we ask the learner to pick one of two binary options (and it causes offence) our approach has been to quote the ILR definition of legal sex. This usually works reasonably well, if only in the sense of shifting the blame to the DfE. It does help if our staff are consistent in how they interpret legal sex, however.