Comment: It's beyond time to reform the Gender Recognition Act

I began living my life as a woman over half a decade ago. I changed my name, got a new driving licence and passport with an F on it (which I’ve travelled the world on), and began using women’s facilities every day at work and everywhere else.

Everyone I meet sees me as any other woman, and most of my friends have never known me as anything else. But I, like most trans people in the country, do not have a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) because the process is broken.

Having a GRC allows you to update the sex on your birth certificate, which helps in a handful of legal situations, most notably marriage, death and taxes. Importantly though, a GRC isn’t required to update your legal ID documents or to use sex segregated spaces, such as toilets and changing rooms.

The reason I don’t have a GRC isn’t through lack of trying, however. I’ve submitted the forty five pages (yes, 45) of evidence required, including a very detailed description of my genitals, an opinion on how “convincing” my fashion choices are, and many other irrelevant, sexist and demeaning reports.

I applied at pretty much the earliest point in my transition that I could, but the process is horribly slow and my first attempt was denied because a doctor got some grammar wrong on one of the many doctors’ reports I included.

The difficulty and personal humiliation required to get a GRC, along with the lack of immediate benefits, means most trans people don’t even bother trying to apply, but this leads to unnecessary roadblocks in their lives.

One of my friends had to marry as a man and now her marriage certificate doesn’t match her other documents. Another of my friends passed away and was forced to be recorded as a man in death, a sadistically cruel and pointless requirement that was distressing for her loved ones.

Given the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (the law governing GRCs) is clearly in need of reform, why haven’t we done it yet? Feminists and LGBT activists have been campaigning for reform for years; we’ve had three public consultations across the country all with majority support for reform, and agreement from all the major human rights organisations (apart from notably the EHRC which recently changed position after a new commissioner was installed by Liz Truss), but time and time again we are told that it can’t go ahead because of “concerns”.

If you can ever pin someone down to say what their “concerns” actually are, you will hear the phrase “self-ID” and a lot of talk about women’s spaces from toilets to prisons. But the GRA simply doesn’t determine who can use women’s spaces.

We already have “self-ID” (which means no formal medical diagnosis is required) for using women’s spaces. Today this is encoded by the Equality Act 2010, but has been protected in some form for longer than I’ve been alive. For certain spaces, such as prisons, there is already a case-by-case risk assessment that can place trans women in men’s prisons regardless of them having a GRC. We already have “self-ID” for all legal ID documents too.

So if the only arguments against GRA reform are demonstrably unrelated to it, why are we even having this “debate” at all? Because the GRA is being used as a proxy war for the trans panic – the general pushback against trans rights that has come with increased visibility of trans people.

Often you will see people fully acknowledging that there isn’t an actual legal reason to oppose reform, such as in the Holyrood article on the 19th of January, and simply claiming that reform will “send a bad message”, presumably that trans people are equal members of society, as if that justifies opposing reform.

Encouraging eternal “debate” about GRA reform falsely in the name of women’s rights, distracts people from real issues that are affecting women. It lets the government hide how it cut funding for women’s services and how it failed to address the issues that lead to the tragic Sarah Everard case. It also lets it hide the abysmal state of public trans healthcare and rising anti-LGBT hate crimes.

We have had the debate and addressed the concerns. We have seen seventeen other countries already successfully pass their version of GRA reform over the last decade without issue. Reform already has public and expert support, especially from women and women’s groups. It’s beyond time to reform the GRA.