matthewwardlgbtqo
28th December 2009
8:42 am

The issue of adding a sex­u­al­ity cen­sus option has received mixed responses from the LGBTQ com­mu­nity, and as you’ve said it’s a hugely con­tro­ver­sial issue.

Last year, the Uni­ver­sity Equal­ity and Diver­sity attempted to imple­ment such an option on accom­mo­da­tion appli­ca­tion forms and it was very poorly received by stu­dents, being inva­sive and all. How­ever a sober­ing fact that I’m con­stantly reminded of in my work as the Guild’s LGBTQ Offi­cer is that sex­u­al­ity car­ries a stigma. For this rea­son, the LGBTQ does not ask it’s mem­bers to com­plete mem­ber­ship forms or give us any details — short of email addresses for a mail­ing list — in order to respect their right to pri­vacy. My col­leagues and coun­ter­parts at other Uni­ver­si­ties tell me that the reac­tion is some­what sim­i­lar for them too.

How­ever, sex­u­al­ity in the work­place is an entirely dif­fer­ent mat­ter. Dur­ing my meet-and-greet with the Birm­ing­ham LGBT Com­mu­nity Trust in Sep­tem­ber they were adamant that mon­i­tor­ing the diver­sity of sex­u­al­ity in the work­place is cru­cial for the sake of nor­mal­is­ing sex­u­al­ity. In their exact words, “it stops it from being seen as ‘pri­vate’ or ‘dirty’ and not to be dis­cussed; the more com­fort­able peo­ple are with the ques­tion the more com­fort­able they will be answer­ing — gay and straight”. The biggest prob­lem is an inescapable fear that an employee’s sex­u­al­ity made known to co-workers influ­ences the deci­sions of their supe­ri­ors (as with gen­der, race and reli­gion). The Birm­ing­ham LGBT Com­mu­nity Trust take issue with the fact that sex­u­al­ity is seen as “less impor­tant” in respect to the civil duties bill and are very adamant that this should change.

Per­son­ally, I’ve never been par­tic­u­larly keen on the Labour atti­tude that we can solve these prob­lems by over­com­pen­sat­ing with pos­i­tive dis­crim­i­na­tion. How­ever I’m also not quck to com­plain about cer­tain instances in cases where it actu­ally solves a prob­lem despite being ethically/morally “wrong”. The way I see it, we’re aim­ing for “equal­ity” and pos­i­tive dis­crim­i­na­tion is — at best — a short term solu­tion which pre­sup­poses that a minor­ity is neg­a­tively dis­crim­i­nated against to a cer­tain degree. For exam­ple, the LGBTQ Com­mit­tee pro­vides four open places, two of which are reserved strictly for women; one of the first things I ques­tioned when I came into office in August. This approach seems to solve the prob­lem of hav­ing an all-gay-male com­mit­tee with over­whelm­ingly anti-female atti­tudes which has caused us prob­lems in the past. How­ever I fre­quently reeval­u­ate it to ensure that it pro­vides equal­ity — not dom­i­nance — for our women mem­bers, which is a gen­uine con­cern. Hence, I don’t believe it’s a viable long-term solution.

The Com­mu­nity Trust also added that “data col­lected from the cen­sus and any other mon­i­tor­ing helps shape pub­lic ser­vices and other gov­ern­ment func­tions — which speaks for itself — if we are invis­i­ble how can we be served effec­tively?”. From my work back­ground I can appre­ci­ate the need to address issues that a minor­ity group faces in the work­place but no one should be forced to expose them­selves for the pur­poses of “the grander scheme of things” as peo­ple have a right to their pri­vacy. The same goes for Uni­ver­sity; I’ve always had a prob­lem with the need to “come out” in this day and age as if it’s some kind of unex­pected abnormality…but that’s my take on it; I can’t speak for everyone.

The final con­cern is that of data pro­tec­tion. While every pre­cau­tion can be taken to pro­tect data, there is always a risk of a secu­rity breach. No mat­ter what any organ­i­sa­tion claims, there is no such thing as “com­pletely secure” in the infor­ma­tion age, there are only deter­rents against secu­rity breaches. What’s worse, if an organ­i­sa­tion like the BNP — through some cat­a­stro­phy — ever did come to power, they’d be able to act on this data in the same way the Nazi’s did when they invaded France.

Over­all I can’t deny the use­ful­ness of such data in our soci­ety but can’t dis­miss the risks. I think sex­u­al­ity should be added to the cen­sus as an “optional” ques­tion — and they most cer­tainly should not include a “pre­fer not to say” option as a means of imple­ment­ing this. Given that het­ero­sex­u­al­ity is often assumed by default, being forced to “refuse to answer” rather than sim­ply abstain­ing is just as inva­sive as a blunt “straight/gay/bi” ques­tion. Any­one asked to answer this ques­tion should also be explic­itly aware of how their data is going to be used, the leg­is­la­tion man­dat­ing it’s pro­tec­tion and the secu­rity mea­sures being used to imple­ment such leg­is­la­tion.(Report com­ment)