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Definition of man and woman used in the GRA consultation

127 replies

Elisheva · 09/10/2018 18:09

Apologies if this has been discussed already. I emailed the GRA consultation to ask which definitions of man/woman and male/female the government were using. This is the reply:

*The definitions you asked for are not provided [in the document]. However, to provide some context, the term ‘gender’ is is often the term used in the context of the Gender Recognition Act and the gender transition process. Although many people make a distinction between a person’s sex and their gender, this is not a distinction that is often re-produced in day-to-day usage of the terms, nor in the law, which uses the two terms interchangeably.

Indeed, in the text of the current GRA (section 9) it is stated that a person who changes their gender using the process outlined in the Act is also considered to have changed their sex.

Thank you for taking the time to write to the Government Equalities Office*

I’m not sure what to reply. There is so much wrong with this that I’m not sure it’s even worth engaging with.

OP posts:
horizonglimmer · 09/10/2018 19:19

Surely the confusion of the terms gender and sex are for younger people. I am 45 and I have always been clear on the distinction. I am really surprised, now that I have started filling in application forms again, to find they all ask for gender, not sex. When I was filling in these things 15-20 years ago they always asked for sex.

PaleBlueMoonlight · 09/10/2018 19:14

They are right that for most people sex and gender remain interchangeable as they always used to be. Separating the meanings of sex and gender was originally done by feminists to draw a distinction between biology and performance/stereotypes. That distinction was also capitalised on by the transgender community to help explain their condition, leading to the distinction that we see today. However, that distinction is still only understood by a small proportion of the population; most people when they talk about gender mean sex. It is this lack of understanding of the modern definition that has allowed TRAs to blur the distinction between the two, whilst at the same time using gender in its modern

I do, however, think that they are wrong to say that no distinction is drawn in the GRA; that document is very clear about the modern usage of gender (you can transition from one gender to another, but not from sex to another), hence the need to make it clear that it changes sex for legal purposes.