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Original poster

It was the Gender Recognition Act that messed everything up

27 replies

jellyfrizz · 15/09/2017 09:06

The ongoing hostilities between 'TERFs' and trans is so sad to see. Feminists and trans people should be natural allies as gender is what is harming everyone involved in this.

Feminists fully encourage, support and engage in gender non-conformity and not being defined by your reproductive system.

The obvious solution would be reduce gender's influence by creating laws that protect people however they present.

Instead an Act was created that enshrines gender. We should be pushing for people to be accepted however they present instead of making them conform to our binary society and encourage people to deny and hide their past by changing birth certificates etc.

We should be pushing for a society where people can be trans and proud, where being trans isn't even a thing, just people going about their lives.

I really think the GRA has pushed the situation to this point and should not just be reformed but scrapped altogether in favour of new laws to protect gender non-conforming people from discrimination. A gender recognition certificate does not protect people from stigma or discrimination despite what MPs might like to believe.

OP posts:
FurryGiraffe · 15/09/2017 16:55

You raise an interesting point. The GRA was a consequence to a large degree of various adverse human rights judgments, which held that the Uk government was discriminating against transsexuals.

However, a lot of that discrimination was essentially incidental to other anomalies/discrimination in the law which have in large part been resolved by other means now. The biggest issue was that transwomen with male partners couldn't marry because they were legally male. This is no longer an issue. There were also issues about the inability of transwomen to access the preferential state pension age (again- not a live issue any more!) and a lack of protection from workplace discrimination (a job now done by the Equalities Act). In short, a lot of the human rights rationale for the GRA no longer stands (though some does).

Unfortunately for critics of the GRA, it would I think be extremely difficult to repeal it in human rights terms because of the extent to which recognition of a new gender is now commonplace in Europe. The European Court of Human Rights would I think take a very dim view of an attempt to repeal.

BetsyM00 · 15/09/2017 16:38

I agree. If I remember correctly the GRA says something about once the Gender Recognition Cert. has been approved the applicant can get a birth certificate stating their new sex - so totally confusing gender and sex.

If only they had said instead, 'Great, call yourself Nancy, wear a floral frock and ask people to call you she - but sex cannot be changed on medical or legal records', we would not be in this mess today.

Recording sex is important for medical treatment, research, criminal statistics, planning for education & other services, recording inequalities in roles, pay, etc, etc. If a person identifies with certain sex role stereotypes, or gender, go for it, but nobody else really cares, and it certainly does not need a legal marker.

The whole idea of legally changing sex is ludicrous and yes, the GRA certainly needs reform, but not in the way the government wants. Just scrap the whole thing!