Should the Gender Recognition Act be repealed?

If only we were that powerful…

I agree with your friend. It's the register of a birth not the register of an identity.

The fundamental problems the GRC was intended to to solve were the issues raised in the Goodwin case: marriage and privacy. The marriage issue was finally solved once and for all with same-sex marriage.

The privacy issue, however, is fraught. Christine Goodwin is unmistakably a man. No one seeing him would imagine otherwise; so idea that paperwork could inadvertently reveal his transgender status is laughable. (Notably, the court case was conducted without him ever actually appearing in person.) Yet it's quite possible that Goodwin himself truly believed he passed and in fact would be 'stealth' except for the official sex markers.

That's the crux of the problem: the legal premise of the GRC is sound - the ability to treat biological sex as private information to be disclosed only in situations where it matter (e.g. single sex services), and to keep it private otherwise. But it feeds into an expectation that one will be able to go stealth and use single single sex services of the opposite sex once one passed well enough. And for some individuals it feeds into a delusion of changing sex.

That said, I think that repealing the GRC would probably not be a good idea - up until now it really is the case that trans people have lost no rights and privileges. Instead the law has been clarified and activist over-reach and misinformation has been pushed back. But to repeal the GRC really would result in loss of official recognition and would dramatically reframe the debate.

I can understand that.

Idk why the state has legislated on sex in particular, we wouldn’t on age. We wouldn’t say it’s fine to change your birth date to 8 as a 36 year old man. Why this?

I have a friend whose son decided he was trans and wanted her to basically agree that she had given birth to a girl. She didn't want her medical history to be wiped and replaced, so she applied for her own copy of his birth certificate.

Later he got his birth record changed. So they now hold one each for the same person - hers says he was born male, his says he was born female.

My friend maintains that the birth of a baby is an experience shared by both the mother and the child and that's it's not ok to change her records to show that she birthed a female child when she knows full well she birthed a male child. She said it felt sinister and gaslighting for the government to ask her to say 2+2=5

Yes, it should. It’s a lie that has been used to usher in the attempts at self ID.

This. ^^

Yes agree. It was a mistake to legislate.

There may need to be a fourth option:
Retain GRC to avoid legal challenges
Amend it as necessary to make quite clear it is about gender not legally changing sex.
Documents should add gender but not alter sex.
Altered documents already issued should be replaced with a corrected real sex plus chosen gender version.
Lawyers: would that work?

No it shouldn't be repealed because something much worse may replace it.

One reason the gender critical pushback has been successful in UK compared to some countries is because the GRA was very specific and limited on the rights it allowed trans-identifying people.

Other major legislation such as the Equality Act 2010 was left untouched.

Critics of gender ideology should be very grateful for the way it was done.

To stop people taking legal cases to Europe. It also means that people can't cite Goodwin as a legal precedent as that was dealt with by the GRA

I don't actually believe we do need legal recognition of gender but if it cuts off one channel of legal action then the GRA may have some use.

It should. The concept of a 'legal sex' which is not one's biological sex is not just a failed experiment, it has proved to be damaging to society in all sorts of ways, as OP says.

It has brought the law into disrepute - not that the law is anywhere near perfect, but this was intentionally introducing an unnecessary nonsense into legislation, which was thoroughly criticised at the time, and its nonsensical elements revealed.
Wilful beclowning.

Why do we need a “mechanism to recognise gender”?

I've seen various discussions that say having the GRA protects the UK from European Human Rights Court actions as it provides a mechanism for legally recognising gender. If that's the case I'm not sure it should be repealed.

Since the SC judgment it really only affects certificates - birth, marriage and death. I don't like the fact it allows false birth certificates to be issued but retaining it may be the lesser of two evils

Totally agree.