Lord Strasburger (LD)

Thank you. Amendment 407 asks us to make a practical decision about policing and tackling violence against women and girls. It is not—I repeat, not—about taking sides in a culture war. Recording biological sex in every case is about getting the basics right: honest crime figures, sound operational decisions and better protection for victims of violence. If we do not know clearly in our police data who is male and who is female, we cannot properly track male violence, spot patterns and target resources where they are most needed. When police forces blur sex and gender identity, the data starts to go wrong. Hardly any perpetrators of sexual violence are women, so it takes only a small number of male offenders being recorded as women to make it look—wrongly—as if women are suddenly committing many more violent and sexual offences. That distorts our statistics, makes it harder to see the true scale of male violence against women, and risks bad safeguarding decisions. If systems shift between recording sex, gender as perceived or self-identified gender, we lose track of the trends. We can no longer say with confidence whether male violence is rising or falling, or whether policy changes are working. When the public discover that “female” means one thing in one table and something different in another, trust in policing and government data inevitably suffers. Professor Alice Sullivan is one of the UK’s leading experts in quantitative social science. She was appointed by the Government to independently review how public organisations can best collect data on sex and gender. Her review cuts through the confusion that currently exists. It says that, when the state needs sex data, it should ask a simple factual question about biological sex—“What is your sex: male or female?”—and that that must be kept separate from any voluntary questions about gender identity. It strongly recommends that all police forces record biological sex in all relevant systems. Some people worry that this will force trans people to out themselves to the police. It should not and it does not have to. The police already record very sensitive information—religion, disability, sexuality—while respecting confidentiality, human rights and data protection law. The sex question is about biological reality for operational and statistical purposes. Held securely in background systems, it is not a licence to broadcast someone’s history or to deny their gender identity in day-to-day interactions. Where there is a need to understand gender identity, that can be done through a separate, clearly labelled voluntary question with strict safeguards. The choice is stark. If we do not record biological sex, we accept distorted crime figures, poorer operational decisions, broken trend data and growing public mistrust. If we do record biological sex clearly and consistently, we give ourselves honest statistics, better safeguarding and a policing system that can see and therefore tackle the reality of male violence against women and girls.