Non-Binary Equality Working Group: report and recommendations - March 2022

About Us

The Working Group for Non-Binary People's Equality (the working group) was formed by the Scottish Government to make recommendations about things the Government should do to improve non-binary people's lives.

We are individual non-binary community members, workers at charities which support non-binary people, and academics with expertise in non-binary issues. We spent a year meeting to discuss the systemic problems in our lives and how to solve them. This report is the result of our work: thirty-five detailed recommendations about what it will take to make Scotland a place where all non-binary people have the resources, support, and freedom they need to live flourishing lives.

Non-binary people do not fit easily into the categories of "man" and "woman". This means different things to different non-binary people, but overall, it means that our lives, bodies and identities need other ideas to describe them, and that our needs aren't easily categorised as men's or women's. Because so much of our society is based on the idea that there are only men and women, non-binary people face a lot of specific problems and need specific support. Solving these problems would often solve problems for many people who aren't non-binary as well.

We talked about big areas where non-binary people face oppression and exclusion: healthcare, data, law, services, sports, and school. In each area, we worked on practical ideas that could make a real difference to our lives. Sometimes these were small details with big results, like improving the way we're recorded in NHS IT systems, and sometimes these were big social changes that would require a lot of further work, like rethinking how the law applies to us.

In the full document, each recommendation has a headline explaining what we think should happen, and then more detail on why it's important and how it should be done. The report is long and detailed, but this short introduction describes all our main ideas. The numbers in this introduction refer to the full recommendations.

Our work here is the end of one process, but it should be the beginning of something much bigger. Improving life for non-binary people in Scotland is going to take a lot of work, but our recommendations are a good place to start.