THE Scottish Parliament has asked MSPs to declare their sex and transgender status following a row about Holyrood’s website’s gender search function.
Following the 2026 Holyrood election, the Scottish Parliament removed the ability for MSPs to be filtered by gender, stating that this was part of an ongoing review.
The Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB) has now asked MSPs to disclose their sex and trans status as part of a diversity survey.
In an email to MSPs, the Scottish Parliament’s director of people, communications and inclusion, Lorna Hunter, said that the SPCB is “committed to ensuring that information published about the diversity of MSPs is handled with care and sensitivity, and presented as accurately and transparently as possible”.
“Following the election, some information was made available online before it had been confirmed directly by individual MSPs. Once identified, it was removed from the Parliament’s website,” she wrote.
“To address this, an additional confirmation step has been introduced for the current parliamentary session to ensure relevant diversity information is confirmed directly with individual MSPs before use.”
For Women Scotland, the gender critical campaign group who took the issue of the definition of a woman under the Equality Act 2010 to the Supreme Court, had argued that removing the search function erased “the record of women’s current and historical representation in parliament”.
The UK’s highest court ruled that under equality law male and female relate to sex, not gender.
Hunter referred to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Statutory Code of Practice and said that the survey saint to MSPs was “in line with language” used within the guidance.
“The survey will also support implementation of recommendations arising from the Parliament’s Gender Sensitive Audit,” Hunter added.
Following the Scottish Parliament election, two transgender MSPs were sworn in to Holyrood. Scottish Greens MSPs Iris Duane, representing the Glasgow region, and Q Manivannan, representing Edinburgh and Lothians East. Manivannan also identifies as non-binary.
The memo sent to MSPs states that the “public has a legitimate interest in understanding the sex and, as appropriate, trans status of their elected representatives”.
“I am therefore writing to you to seek your consent to hold and process this data in relation to other systems which are used to facilitate website publication and demographical reporting at the Parliament,” it reads.
“While the SPCB holds data in relation to sex, it does not currently hold personal data on the trans status of Members. We are therefore additionally inviting any MSP to confirm their trans status by completing the question below, which uses terminology aligned with Scotland’s census: Do you consider yourself to be trans?”
It adds that trans is a term used to describe people whose gender is not the same as the sex they were registered at birth.
It comes as a Labour minister has been slammed for giving an “extraordinarily inflammatory and dangerous” statement on guidance for single-sex spaces and the impact on transgender people.
On Monday, parliamentary under-secretary of state for equalities Seema Malhotra gave a statement in the House of Commons, on the draft EHRC code.
Bridget Phillipson, the Women’s and Equalities minister who laid the code of practice from the UK’s equalities watchdog, was absent.
