If MPs get their way, people could soon be entitled to possess an officially sanctioned app that falsifies their sex. The proposal effectively introduces a form of self-ID in this country, flying in the face of last month’s Supreme Court judgment emphatically stating the primacy of sex over gender.

Today, peers will make a last-ditch attempt to prevent this challenge to the ruling when the Government’s Data (Use and Access) bill returns to the House of Lords. If the bill becomes law in its present form, anyone will be able to apply for a digital ID endorsed with a government “trustmark”. That’s supposed to ensure that the data it contains, including sex, is accurate. But the app will say nothing about the source of the data, which could be based on documents that state someone’s gender identity rather than their sex.

Anyone can get a passport or driving licence that wrongly records their sex — and it won’t be clear that the sex marker on their digital ID is equally inaccurate. It’s estimated that tens of thousands of people in the UK have official documents that reflect their gender identity rather than their biological sex, including passports and driving licences. Last week a Conservative MP, Dr Ben Spencer, proposed an amendment that would have ensured that only reliable documents such as birth certificates could be used to create a digital ID. He pointed out that the Supreme Court has made it clear that public bodies must collect data on biological sex to comply with the 2010 Equality Act. “The new clause ensures that this data is recorded and used correctly in accordance with the law,” he said.

Some MPs responded with the kind of emotive language that’s become a familiar tactic of trans activists. Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Greens, crowed on X that the “transphobic amendment” had been defeated by 363 votes to 93. “It would have forced trans people to out themselves virtually daily, putting people’s safety and dignity at risk,” she claimed. Labour MP Stella Creasy condemned the amendment as “a targeting of the trans community which is deeply regressive”.

It’s hard not to see the outcome as payback for the Supreme Court judgment. The innocent-sounding data bill has provided gender warriors with an opportunity to circumvent the ruling, and they’ve seized it with both hands. Some MPs have even argued that expecting individuals to be honest about their sex would breach their privacy, as though deceiving other people is a human right.

A briefing by the campaign group Sex Matters points out that ministers are planning to give men who claim to be women a government-endorsed “proof” that they’re female “in an app on their phone that the government describes as valid for all purposes” — and expecting us to believe that no one will use it for nefarious reasons.

Following the Supreme Court ruling, some trans-identified men have publicly declared their intention to continue accessing women-only spaces and sports. Sir Chris Bryant, the minister responsible for data protection, has specifically rejected the idea that digital verification services would be used to gain access to single-sex spaces, but hasn’t explained how this would be prevented. It was revealed last month that Bryant was a member of a WhatsApp group of ministers and MPs who fumed about remarks made by Baroness Falkner, head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in support of the judgment.

The House of Lords is likely to prove more sceptical during today’s debate. Lord Arbuthnot, who was one of the earliest to recognise the scale of the Post Office scandal, fears that elderly women who ask for same-sex care will be confronted by a man brandishing an electronic ID that says he’s female. “I fear that we are on track to see another scandal, one that could affect every one of us, with the same tragic mix of personal suffering and public waste,” he observed a couple of months ago.

Ministers aren’t listening. Neither are most MPs, confirming the widely-held suspicion that the House of Commons is packed with true believers in gender identity. The battle to record sex accurately isn’t over, but no one can say they weren’t warned.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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