This is what Shon had to say about proposed changes to the GRA. It's quite long. I've done my best to present Shon's words as they were spoken and I post without comment.
I have comments but they're best left 'til tomorrow.
Your legal sex is a watery concept in Engish law.
In 2004, Stephen Whittle and Christine Burns for Press For Change, through a judgment in the ECHR, got the GRA 2004 permitted, and it allowed trans people to change their legal sex on their birth certificate by a mechanism called a GRC. And that was done because trans people had a fundamental right to privacy, to not be outed about their past. There had been incidents, for example, marriages that trans people had entered and obviously same sex marriage wasn't permissible and marriages were being annulled. There were cases like the trans model April Ashley in the 1960's, her husband knew she was trans when he married her but it wasn't a valid marriage and then when they divorced he just had the marriage annulled, like revealed she was born male.
Things have moved on. It was a very progressive piece of legislation at its time. It's not so much now, very few trans people use it. What it requires is you have to have lived in your acquired gender for 2 years, which again is quite difficult to prove. So they go on stuff like when you changed your name, whether you're in work, to prove that you're living appropriately. Juliet Jakes writes about this. It was quite common, I think it's less so now, to see trans women working in charity shops, because if you've got a volunteer job, that would fulfil your requirements. You have to show payslips, or things like payslips, that show consistently use of mrs or miss or ms. So you have to show life evidence, thenyou also have to have two medical reports. And you have to answer about surgery.
And the trans inquiry launched in 2015 found evidence of trans girls who were 18 or whatever who transitioned at 16, who were being asked really inappropriate questions about whether or not they were planning to have sex reassignment surgery and they hadn't even had sex yet. So it's invasive, it's dehumanising.
It's been a principle of international law. For geeks who care, it's the Yogyakarta Principles, which is an international legal agreement on gender and sexuality, and then European Council resolution 2048 has set the international standard that trans people should be able to have a mechanism for declaring their own gender in a demedicalised process. That there is no panel that you send a pack of evidence to, as happens now, where they decide on the evidence whether or not you are who you say you are, or whether or not you're a man or a woman enough. And there's no form of appeal as well if they say no.
So the principle in international law - it's law in Argentina, Columbia, Malta, Denmark, Norway, it's going to come into force in Sweden, the ROI, and Portugal has just introduced it. That's a total population of 64,000,000 women and I don't believe that womanhood has been radically redefined as it's often alleged in those countries.
All it does is that it provides ... you swear a statutory declaration and then you file that and it allows you to change your documents more quickly. So I already changed my drivers licence on self declaration, I changed my passport, I have a female passport and drivers licence, it would just allow me to do that in a quicker way, because I've had to each time apply to different agencies.
When is the last time you got your birth certificate out? You're not even actually supposed to produce it ... When you say it's just a big fuss about nothing people can't believe that that's true and they think obviously I'm pushing an agenda. But really there are more radical beliefs that I have about gender and about transfeminism than whether we should be able to change our birth certificate. Changing our birth certificate won't affect anything. It literally gives me no more of a right to enter a women's space than I have already, because I don't produce a birth certificate. It's a bit like, the analogy I use is with gay marriage, gay men can get married in this country but can they actually walk down the street holding hands? In a lot of places they wouldn't feel safe to because of social norms, and actually what governs my entry to women's spaces are ... it's kind of a social fabric that determines I have to look a certain way, I have to pass a certain amount, I have to behave in a certain way, all of which I feel forced to adhere to. So the fact that I'm 5'7" is (? an assist) but my voice isn't. When trans women are aiming for feminity a lot of it is about safety and about allowing us access to those spaces.
So it's governed by that, it's not governed by the GRA, and what I'm starting to pick up is that even media is starting to pick up on that and they're starting to talk more about the EA and other provisions because they've realised they're flogging a dead horse with this.
There's a huge breadth of opinion amongst trans people as well (mumble mumble) middle class trans people (mumble mumble) gay politics. There's always beeen this tension between the idea of the bourgeois white middle class gay men pursuing a set of legal rights for himself, and where does that fit with the gay asylum seeker who is at risk of deportation? Where do the politics of those two men meet? Probably nowhere. And the same exists for trans people, so there are fundamentally different priorities, and there is a fundamentally legitimate criticism that when you pursue legal rights, in parliament, in the media, which is itself very white, very middle class, it is already an agenda that benefits some trans people quicker than others, and that's true.
I don't think it's the most urgent priority facing trans people, I think transphobic violence is, I do think ... the state detention of trans asylum seekers ... and healthcare [laughs], because healthcare is one of the biggest things in terms of mental health and therefore physical health, ultimately for trans people.