Gender Recognition Bill 2004 - Hansard records

But when it comes to voting on the legislation, nobody will vote with O’Caithain. They won’t want to be associated with someone who opposed same sex marriage, sex education covering homosexuality etc. They won’t have an open mind listening to her arguments because they are used to her bat shit crazy bigotry. The cause needs a reasonable champion in the House of Lords where the legislation could easily be defeated if the right people lead the charge.

Right wing and against gay rights she may be, but she's got some good points on this.

Let us not forget that some of the people who will receive, as they want, gender recognition certificates, rendering their original birth certificates null and void except in the case of the police and criminal prosecution bodies—they have the right to use the original documents—need not have had gender reassignment surgery. It is rather feeble to say that if a male transsexual becomes a woman, he may use the ladies' lavatory and not cause distress. I put it at its simplest.

www.theyworkforyou.com/lords/?id=2004-02-10a.1060.0&s=gender+speaker%3A13165#g1076.2

And here's Norman Tebbit

On secular grounds, I objected to a law that requires a public servant to certify as true that which is not true. That is not that a person may have changed sex.

This thread is a really good idea OP, if nothing else to give us an idea of how the arguments can be made (successfully or otherwise)

Yes, the person making the point can really ruin the position. Tebbit brings up the v. important point of sex and gender being distinct things and then ruins it by going on about how people could then use it to !!be married to a person of the same sex!! oh no.

It seems lots of consideration was given to religion and how a GRC could lead to gay marrriage but nothing except in v. brief passing about how it would affect women.

Baroness O’Caithaij is still a member. She is also a right wing bigot who has dedicated her life to campaigning again gay rights, gay adoption, section 28. You may like her position on this issue but she won’t do the cause any favours by associating herself with it.

Oooops. Sorry, it's not Baroness Caithness it's Baroness O'Cathain.

Imagine how different things would be if Ammendment No 1 had gone through: Page 1, line 3, leave out "gender" and insert "sex"

Discussion at 2GC (Official Report of the Grand Committee).

Is Baroness Caithness still in the House of Lords? I hope so, and that she has applied her critical thinking skills to lots of other legislation.

Sorry, yes 64GC (Official Report of the Grand Committee).

Response was basically - v. small and vunerable number of people - must protect them. Stop offending people. Here's a little bit (65GC):

Essentially, the Bill recognises a change of gender and gives it legal effect in certain circumstances and after a proper process. A person in law cannot be more than one gender: they are either male or female, and that is a fact of law. Therefore, although I know what the noble Baroness is getting at, the use of the words, "as if it were", is a way of signalling her distaste for the Bill—and, perhaps, that of others. It adds nothing in the law, except perhaps to convey some gratuitous offence to other people. Therefore, I very much hope that she will not think it necessary to press for those words here and now, having well registered the areas in which she is out of harmony or sympathy with the Bill. They add nothing in law, but they do cause offence.

(Note relevant bit about only two gender in law and only being able to be one on them at a time.)

She withdrew because of process (66GC):

..I know that I cannot press the amendment because we are in Grand Committee, but I want to place my feelings on record and I cannot promise that I will not return to the matter on Report. In the light of that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

It's brilliant that these are being looked at. Well done.

Also Baroness Caithness:

...I have a horrible feeling that, if this Bill as it stands becomes law, the law of unintended consequences will come in in spades.

Baroness Caithness was looking ahead (my bold):

^At the moment there is an example in the news of a BBC programme in which a transsexual man was referred to as a man. Press for Change, the transsexual rights group is campaigning for the BBC always to refer to transsexuals in their chosen gender. That is indicative of the Orwellian nightmare that the Bill encourages. Will people who refuse to call a transsexual man a woman routinely face that kind of hostility? Given what we established yesterday, which is that the Government believe that many people change their minds and revert to their real gender, or oscillate between the two, how are people to know which gender a person wants to be known as at any particular time? I say again that it is absurd to say that a man can become for all purposes a woman or vice versa.

§ Let us take the example of a woman who obtains a gender recognition certificate, but who does not undergo the surgery. She may be married and, under the Government's proposals, may convert her marriage to a civil partnership. After she receives a certificate declaring that she is for all purposes a man, she and her husband may decide to have a baby; she becomes pregnant; she is booked into a hospital as Mr Smith—the first man to have a baby—and the hospital in all its dealings with her must treat her as a man. Are there not privacy issues for other women in a maternity ward having to share with a man? What about her employers? Presumably, they are not obliged to give her maternity leave as she 1s, for all purposes, a man. Men do not get maternity leave.

§ This is really lurid tabloid headline stuff, I agree, but the Government are leaving themselves wide open to that because they are so much in thrall to transsexual rights advocacy groups. The Government are taking into account their views, and theirs alone, in proposing the Bill. I hope that we shall begin to see some willingness on the part of the Government to think again. I beg to move.^

So, Alan Finch was one of the people. He got his case to the Supreme Court in 2009 but I haven't been able to find any records of the hearing.

It is mentioned many times that the Bill was to help transexuals and that gender dysphoria is a medical condition (also how this is such a small number of people).

Official Report of the Grand Committee; 4GC, Lord Filkin:

"The Bill will give legal recognition to transsexual people in their acquired gender. A person's gender will, subject to the issue of a full gender recognition certificate, become the acquired gender.

The Government's understanding of transsexualism is rightly founded on the Chief Medical Officer's recognition of gender dysphoria as a medical condition that may require treatment. Treatment has been available within the NHS for a considerable time.

The Government have discussed the aims, objectives and impact of the Bill with, among others, the British Medical Association, the General Medical Council, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Psychological Society.

The principle of legal recognition in the acquired gender is that a person's gender will, subsequent to the issue of a gender recognition certificate, become the acquired gender. That will ensure, on the whole, the continuing effect of gender-specific terms in legislative enactments. The Government have always intended that once a full gender recognition certificate is issued to an applicant, the person's gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender. If the acquired gender is the male gender, the person's sex becomes that of a man, and, if it is the female gender, the person's sex becomes that of a woman.

Where under any legislation it is necessary to decide the sex of a person who has an acquired gender, or to say whether that person is man or woman, or male or female, the question must be answered in accordance with the person's acquired gender.

The Government, and the European Court of Human Rights, have always acknowledged that opinion is divided in some parts of the medical profession on the nature and cause of transsexualism. However, the Government support the position of the European Court of Human rights that the remaining controversy over the nature and aetiology of transsexualism must no longer stand in the way of transsexual people enjoying their basic human rights. That is the central and essential position that we take."

IIRC the 2004 act was based on a not unreasonable ECHR case to do with a trans person's right to marry. This predated civil partnerships and now of course we have equal marriage, which makes much of the original intention of the GRA redundant.

Really? So because same sex marriage was not legal, the answer was to add the 2004 act so same sex people could amrry if one declared themselves the opposite sex, rather than you know..just making same sex marriage legal?! Is this a joke?

Official Report of the Grand Committee
Reversal of Application Process

Baroness O'Cathain: "There are two cases in Australia at the moment in which people who have had gender recognition or gender change are actually suing the state for wrongful advice."

I wonder what the outcome of this was?

From what I can see, it was indeed passed to give people marriage rights, and hasn't really been discussed since.

First legislation was Sex Discrimination (Gender Reassignment) Regulations 1999. Expanded and replaced by Equality Act 2010. www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1999/1102/regulation/2/made

I'm not sure the extent to which the Act expanded the law or how much it is a result of activism on existing law.

Seems like it was rushed through:

"The timetable for the Gender Recognition Bill, which had its Second Reading yesterday, was drafted in response to the need to protect the British taxpayer against liabilities as a result of the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights."

one seems (to me) to be about freedom to associate, and form relationships with, those people one fancies - the other seems to be about the entitlement to be treated as someone that one's biologically not, without any action on one's own part to change physical state in any way at all.

Yes this has always confused me. It seems to me like - unless you're a massive homophobe - a man who wants to have sex with other men and a man who wants to wear a dress are very different things.

Interesting...so it looks as if it's the Yogykarta Principles that might in part be driving the proposed legislative shift here from protection of those actually transitioning, or transitioned, to anyone who "identifies" as the other sex.

But these principles haven't actually been made into any kind of treaty that anyone has signed up to, nor have they been adopted by the UN.

The principles also deal with sexual preference and gender identity within the same bracket - as if they're the same type of thing. I find that tricky - one seems (to me) to be about freedom to associate, and form relationships with, those people one fancies - the other seems to be about the entitlement to be treated as someone that one's biologically not, without any action on one's own part to change physical state in any way at all. Those feel like qualitatively different issues to me.

Yes, that's just it pencils!! The way the current "debate" is going you'd be forgiven for thinking there hadn't been a 2004 Act!