To ask the Scottish Government what its position is on how many genders there are. (S6O-03876)

The Scottish Government’s position is that of the law. In law, people are either male or female.

I am pleased to hear that Kaukab Stewart agrees with the First Minister that there are two genders but, in official guidance that was published this month, the Scottish National Party Government claimed that there are dozens of different genders—I repeat, dozens. That does not make sense to people in mainstream Scotland. It seems ridiculous for that issue to be the Scottish Government’s focus. Why is the Scottish Government wasting so much time and resource on fringe obsessions?

The Scottish Government did not claim that. The Scottish Government recently updated its guidance for public bodies on collecting data on sex and gender to include a coding framework for free-text responses. The framework is there to help official statistics producers to categorise people who identify as trans and have completed an open-response question about their trans status. The categories were developed on the basis of the most common responses to the question in the 2022 census. The framework should not be interpreted to mean that there are a particular number of genders; it should be used only as a guide to classify responses to the recommended trans status question in surveys.