A GRC doesn't change your birth certificate... I think that's right.
Bloody hell Zhora that is the point of it. To hide a person's birth sex with a legal fiction (administrationally at least). There are loads of situations where you have to give ID and a birth cert, like to open a bank account or rent a house, and this would show (as if no one knew already) that a man going by the name of Karen and wearing a dress and listick, is in fact a male. Thus a GRC creates a legal fiction to hide the truth - or rather to let no one speak the truth in that person's presence.
No one minds Zhora that you dont know much about it it is a complex area of shitty messed up law and few of us here are experts, but you are really bloody argumentative for someone so poorly informed. When you admit this, I cannot understand why you would repeatedly insist that you are right. It comes across as stupid and arrogant.
A situation such as toilets at work can be policed more easily as anyone without a GRC will not have their sex hidden, so people such as HR know exactly what is what and can say so and challenge men using the ladies (and they stick out like a sore thumb). To claim the protection given under gender ressignment under the EA, one would have to acknowledge that one is trans. With a GRC HR may know of it because of needing to deal with pension info for eg, but cannot disclose this information to lower managers so they can check for toilet infringements etc. But this is about way more than toilets.
A GRC does make things murky as to how to enforce the exceptions when a birth cert says a legal fiction and you suspect ptherwise. But I wonder (and am happy to be put right) if women's groups eg a rape center could work around it by asking women service users to sign a declaration that states that the service applies single sex exemptions under the EA, and so provides services to natal women only, and that service users must declare that they are natal women and have never had gender reassignment. I think (am not a lawyer) this could mean that a transwoman with a GRC who went ahead and lied and obtained services by deception would be committing fraud (so long as they service was paid for).
It is entirely wrong though that the onus is put on women to have to go throught this defensive rigmarole when the law and society should never be creating the expectation that a man is a woman in the first place. Not to mention that the poor women would have to suffer this clearly abusive male in their presence until (and if) they could persuade the police to do something about it.
Everything about this tramples on women already and giving it further credence in law just makes it worse.