Gender Reassignment In The Workplace And Pension Issues

Gender reassignment in the workplace is a complex issue which requires careful and sensitive handling by employers. Liz Wood and Siobhan Bishop discuss who is protected, examples of discrimination, Gender Recognition certificates and how to calculate pension entitlement.

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Siobhan Bishop: Hello and welcome to our podcast where we're covering gender reassignment in the workplace. I'm Siobhan Bishop a Principal Associate in the Employment, Labour & Equalities team and I am joined by Liz Wood a Principal Associate working across both our Pensions and Employment team in the Combined Human Resources team, who is here to talk about some of practical considerations for employers and the impact of gender reassignment on pension provision, which I know she's had quite a few queries on recently.

So gender reassignment is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act and this protection covers transsexual people. The protection against discrimination is wide and covers from pre-employment situations, such as a job applicant, to employees and workers and even post-employment relating to for example for an appeal against a dismissal or refusing to give somebody a reference. There is also protection in terms of the provision of goods and services but we're not going to concentrate on that today we're looking at the employment rights side. So Liz what does that mean in terms of protection under the Equality Act exactly, how wide is it and who is covered?

Gender reassignment and the Equality Act. Who is covered and how wide is the protection?

Liz Wood: Thanks Siobhan, well the first question to answer is whether people are included in the strict definition under the Equality Act and there is quite a lot of terminology when we're looking at trans inclusion in the workplace.

Strictly, under the Equality Act 2010, it's transsexual people, so people who are experiencing a gender identity which is inconsistent with their assigned sex and want to permanently transition to the gender with which they identify, that's the category (the protected characteristic) we are talking about. Although lots of people tend to talk more nowadays about transgender or trans the Equality Act is, I think, a little bit out of date now so that's talking about transsexual people and specifically under Section 7 of Equality Act, this is talking about people who are proposing to undergo, are undergoing or have undergone a process or part of a process for reassigning a person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.

So actually that's a wide definition and it doesn't mean that somebody has to have had medical procedures so, for example, hormone treatments or surgical...