Member

The Passport Office has allowed people to replace their sex with self-identified gender on passports since the 1960s and, until recently, kept no central records of this. I declare an interest in that my late wife altered her date of birth on her passport in the days when you could do such things, but sex is rather more serious. Doing that officially—to have a passport that shows your sex as something that it is not and to then use that as the basis for a digital verification system—starts to corrupt the whole system. The system is becoming unreliable; it is really important that what gets in there is correct. If you are dealing with use of facilities in clubs and relying on the digital verification system to apply quite reasonably, say, a rule that you have to be female to use the female changing rooms, which are communal, then you need to have a system that is accurate. That means we must take care, as we go into this AI world, to make sure that the data sources we feed in are accurate.