What is happening with trans rights?

Gscene has talked with Dr Sam Hall, Chair of The Clare Project in Brighton and Hove to learn more about the current concerns around proposed changes to the legal rights of Trans people in the UK. 

Many are asking what is happening with trans rights? Amidst the horror of a pandemic, and the growing awareness of racial injustice, we have another hallmark of bigotry emerging under covid cover. The overwhelmingly positive response to a government consultation on trans rights is being ridden roughshod over whilst people look the other way.

What is the historical context? In 2004 an act of parliament was passed allowing men and women to change gender. The Gender Recognition Act permitted new birth certificates for trans people, a legal advance that was ahead of its time and which put the UK at the forefront of trans rights worldwide. This process is arduous, with years worth of evidence of living in the opposite gender role required, a medical diagnosis (but not necessarily treatment), and letters from clinicians to support the application. It is also expensive, intrusive, and slow.

A lot has changed since then, including increasing acceptance and support for trans lives. Other countries have caught up and gone beyond. Over the last decade in the UK the voices of non-binary people began to rise, and with them a desire to see further change in the law to grant equal rights.

The Equalities Act in 2010 gave some protection, but the reform of the GRA was aspirational; to see an end to the policing of trans lives by a panel of doctors and lawyers who had the last ‘say’ on whether you were a woman or a man. No other citizens have to do this. Furthermore, the proposals for reform would ideally have included the option of non-binary gender identity. The so called ‘X’ marker on a passport. This is not ground-breaking any more. The UK now lags far behind; India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and Malta are just a few countries where such rights to self-identity are enshrined in law.

When the conservative government under May agreed to look at reform of the GRA, it quickly became obvious that we were absolutely not going to see non-binary recognition as a result of this exercise. The government is not obliged to consult publicly on changes to existing laws, and certainly not when the impact would be very narrow, affecting only trans and non-binary people. Evidence for this being the case (little or no impact beyond the minority affected) is in plain sight in the many countries listed above. And yet they chose to consult, widely, even extending the deadline to allow for more responses. 100,000 in total.

It took us by surprise. The counter offensive.

There was a gradual but sustained build up during 2018 of transphobic rhetoric in mainstream media, people emboldened by a rash of new and well funded websites, vicious twitter battles, and our precious consultation was hijacked. In the name of feminism, people who do not believe that trans identities are real, began to talk about how dangerous it would be to let ‘men in dresses’ into female only spaces. This is a familiar trope. The conflation of trans identities with sexual abuse and paedophilia is reminiscent of the same accusations levelled at gay men 40 years ago. There is no connection between being trans and being a sexual abuser. On the contrary, many trans people are victims of sexual abuse all over the world today, and this is especially true of trans women of colour. They are at the epicentre of hate.

It was bad enough to have to endure a public consultation, with the clamour of cis people’s opinions and imposition of their wishes and concerns over a matter which does not affect them, but it was with horror that we watched new feminist groups spring up, screaming all the more loudly about their rights being eroded by the GRA reform. The advertising was wide, vicious and incendiary. Meetings were held in secret venues and closely guarded whilst women spoke about the threat to safety imposed by trans women. The reform of the GRA, they said, would result in women and girls being terrified to use single sex spaces for fear of a predator with a penis using this ‘loophole’ in the law to acquire access to such spaces by pretending to be a woman.

In fact access to female only spaces by trans women (or indeed a would be predator in disguise) does not depend on the GRA, but on the Equalities Act 2010. The anti-trans arguments being put forward do not stand up to scrutiny. If trans women are to be banned from safe female spaces, (toilets, changing rooms, refuges) where exactly are they to go? In men’s toilets? Where we know they are at very high risk of abuse and assault?

If we postulate that all must use a bathroom consistent with their birth sex, what of trans men? They really will be men in women’s spaces. How do we police this? A toilet passport? A genital check on entry? And if we insist on surgical genital reassignment as the line in the sand, what then are we saying about ‘true women’ or ‘real men’? That only a vagina makes a woman and a penis makes a man? When did biology rule so fiercely that we are prepared to hang intersex people out to dry?

Trans people already have the right to legally change their gender without having any form of medical or surgical intervention, and rightly so. It would be nothing short of fascist to suggest that people remove organs or relinquish their fertility (as has previously been the law in some European countries), in what amounts to forcibly sterilising individuals.

It is reported that 70% of the responses to the consultation were in favour of a move to self-identification, removing the necessity for a medical diagnosis. This reflects the recent alteration in the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases published by the WHO in 2018, in which Gender Dysphoria was declassified as a mental illness, much in the same way the homosexuality was in the 1970s. Trans and non-binary people are not mad, we are not paedophiles, we are just people with a different lived experience of gender. We do not need a medical diagnosis to tell us who we are. We just need equal rights. The right to live in peace, the right to exist in the eyes of the law, and the right to be heard.

It’s really not asking that much.