Trans Widows, the Liberal Democrats and the Spousal "Veto"

[TinselAngel]

First of all I have @anlaf to thank for drawing my attention to this originally.

Did you know the Liberal Democrats are currently proposing changes to the Gender Recognition Act which could have the effect of trapping trans widows in same sex marriages against their will?

A woman could go from being in a hetrosexual marriage, to being in legally a same sex marriage, without her consent.

A motion was passed at the Liberal Democrat party conference (proposer Layla Moran MP ) to change the clause of the GRA which allows for one party to a marriage to have the marriage annulled / dissolved before the other party is able to be issued with a Gender Recognition Certificate.

Trans Activists inaccurately refer to this section of the GRA as the "Spousal Veto". It is not a veto. It does not prevent transition. At worst it might delay the issue of a GRC.

Never mind, you might think, the Lib Dems aren't going to get into power any time soon? Putting aside the possibility of a hung parliament in an imminent general election, the Lib Dems appear to not be able to wait to get into power to introduce this, as now Baroness Barker has submitted a private members bill in the House of Lords.

Google "spousal veto" and you will see pages of accustions that it can be used by an abusive controlling spouse to maliciously prevent their partner's transition. However no evidence is ever provided that this has ever happened. Those of you who have read the trans widows threads will have your own opinion of how likely this is.

Not all women in this situation will be able to get divorced. Some cannot get divorced for religious or cultural reasons. Maybe they can't afford it, or maybe their husband will refuse to consent to an Unreasonable Behaviour petition and drag the marriage out for 5 years or more.

Please contact the Liberal Democrats (particulary if you have a Liberal Democrat MP) and any prominent feminists you know to get people talking about this. It is a completely unjustified assault on one of the few rights that trans widows have. Any attack on Womens Rights is an attack on all women.

Yes I think "exit clause" or even something like "option" is better, anything with "veto" or even " consent" gives the wrong impression. Or maybe even better, something that reflects that the marriage would be changing (if they stay), such as marriage reaffirmation, marriage continuation clause?

If the non transitioning partner refuses consent for a full GRC, then the transitioner has the option of staying in the marriage with an interim GRC, which has nearly all the same rights.

Alternatively they can divorce (which you'd think both parties would agree to at this point) and the transitioner can then get a full GRC.

It's disgusting that the Lib Dems are talking about getting rid of this.

To think I used to vote for them. No more.

Ffs! Everything other pps have said, forced marriage, coercive control. How can someone who wants to remain married want to force this upon a spouse who they are supposed to love and care for? It beggars belief. There's one word comes to my mind about this - control, it's the only explanation.

Given that it would become a gay marriage rather than an old fashioned heterosexual marriage, what are the rules around gay marriage at the moment? I've kind of lost track - can you now have a gay marriage or do you have to have a civil partnership?

If the latter is the case, is there any leverage in using the tiny different tweaks between the two to say that the marriage has to be converted to a civil partnership - and technically the marriage vows are spoken and the civil partnership is signed to be valid, plus you can't use adultery as a reason to end a civil partnership... (accordign to a couple of articles on google!)

So just wondering if there's something you could do like call it an 'enforced change from marriage to civil partnership' rather than a spousal veto/escape clause that would make a lot of people sit up and say hang on a second... Not least because if you start to use it as an example and make sure you use an example from both a marriage affected by a change to a transman and a change to a transworman, a heck of a lot more men will sit up and think that it's fine for a woman to find themselves in a civil partnership but as soon as they themselves could find themselves in a civil partnership they would view it very differently...

Found this via Google - full of misinformation from Ms Belcher:

www.parliament.scot/S4_EqualOpportunitiesCommittee/Equal%20Marriage%20Submissions_B/BelcherHelen.pdf

The Bill, as currently worded, may well place the fundamental right of gender recognition into the hands of a hostile spouse. If a spouse does not give formal consent then the trans person’s gender recognition is vetoed until the marriage ends. This is fundamentally wrong.

It's mostly nonsense, but if you've never read any trans widows stories and never bloody read the Gender Recognition act.

The law is different in Scotland on this than it is in England and Wales.

Meant to say- if you've never read anything else maybe it sounds convincing.

Helen Belcher and wife's problem could be solved by the wife (who is still with Helen) giving consent.

If a spouse does not give formal consent then the trans person’s gender recognition is vetoed until the marriage ends. This is fundamentally wrong.

Why is that wrong?
Sounds perfectly sensible.

A hostile spouse

If so hostile then why stay? Forcing someone to stay married to you hardly inspires joy in a marriage.

If your husband decides he's a woman then you should have every right to leave the marriage if you want to. It's a material change in the relationship and no longer the one you freely and happily entered into.

It wasn't that long ago that if a married woman became a lesbian she lost custody of her children. The husband suing on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. This happened to Julie Burchill when she left husband Cosmo Landesman for Charlotte Raven in 1995 so really not at all long ago! And I have friends who've fallen in love with a woman but had to live a double life/a lie and pretend they were still straight as they feared losing their children. Not sure if this is still the case or even if unreasonable behaviour is still grounds for divorce. Or adultery for that matter. Got a feeling, IANAL, that a woman having a relationship with another woman doesn't count as adultery? Which is why Landesman went for unreasonable behaviour.

Well it strikes me that your husband deciding he's a woman and is now demanding that your marriage changes to a same-sex one against your will is unreasonable behaviour?

I thought we didn't do forced marriage in the UK? Or forcing people to change sexual orientation ... How does this differ from discriminating against gay people or gay conversion therapy? So many more MtF in later life than FtM means this is forced on mainly women.

LD member here. I'm livid about this. Why is the identity of some males so very important, but no fucks are given about the identities and choices of women?
This looks like an ill thought-out policy to please individual members.

The Bill, as currently worded, may well place the fundamental right of gender recognition into the hands of a hostile spouse. If a spouse does not give formal consent then the trans person’s gender recognition is vetoed until the marriage ends. This is fundamentally wrong.
Bollocks. The spouse has a fundamental right to consent or not consent to the fiction of converting her heterosexual marriage to a same sex one, or vice versa. Without the spousal consent, it could happen without her knowledge.
If Belcher has such a poor grasp of policy, Belcher should stay out of politics. The spousal consent doesn't favour the non-transitioning spouse, it's a mechanism to give equal consideration to both spouses' 'identities'. But yet again trans identity trumps sexual orientation.

Dear Liberal Democrats

'What is domestic abuse'? Please describe what coercive control is under law.

This idea seems to have the nasty side effect of leaving some women vulnerable to both.

Up Yours

Red.

Green member here

They are worse than LDs on trans stuff obviously but is is fitting when these big announcements are made and you know you can't vote for them.

I'm hanging onto my membership but barely. It's on a knife edge.

Anyone know where the WEP is on spousal 'veto' It would be a good issue to test them on to see where they stand (or sit).

I am utterly opposed to the GRC process involving marriage annulment, as opposed to divorce (from the state's point of view, I mean - obviously the various religions and denominations can do what they want in the context of the "religious marriage" element). It is a rewriting of history as mendacious as the GRC's overwriting of birth certificates.

At present - as so many people have already said - this so-called "veto" consists simply of the fact that if an applicant is married or in a civil partnership, the GRC cannot be finalised until the marriage/civil partnership is either ended, or, the spouse/partner dies, or the spouse agrees that the marriage should be converted to a same (or opposite) sex marriage. (I don't think that civil partnerships are available to opposite sex couples yet?) That is, the law recognises that where a contract has been made between two people either they must both agree to it being changed or they must go through the existing legal route (divorce) to dissolve it.

Except. At present though, annulment also is an option when someone "is transitioning to a different gender" (www.gov.uk/how-to-annul-marriage). This option is available to both parties to the marriage. Which means that someone that is "transitioning to a different gender" can legally lie about other people's lives. They can state that their spouse was never married, and that their children were born out of wedlock, and they can do this unilaterally.

I think this should be removed. Divorce (dissolution of civil partnership), yes - yes of course, as the choice of either partner or both jointly. Annulment? Definitely not. It's a lie.

Pre-transition annulment option?
As an alternative name I mean.

Someone asked- who on earth would want to trap someone in a relationship they wanted to leave? Hmm, someone who wanted to avoid a divorce settlement?

I do wonder what the financial implications of this are. I mean, say your husband transitions. Thanks to Layla, you can’t have the marriage annulled. He fights against you when you try to get a divorce on reasonable behaviour grounds. You potentially have to wait 5 years to divorce him. During that period, you can’t bear to live with him, so you move out- how does this affect your final divorce settlement? And do you get any interim payments in the 5 year period? Child support? Maintenance for you? Pension contributions?

I’d really like to see an analysis from a divorce lawyer of the likely effects in terms of financial implications. Men bitterly hate paying out on divorce. I still suspect that’s a big part of what is driving this.

You can still get spousal support payments when you're separated, you don't have to wait until you're divorced.

I wouldn't mind a proper re-examining of this law. I don't think the current law is perfect. But the Lib Dems are not looking at this in the round, they're just offering to hive off the one bit that happens to give the wife some control over her own destiny.

It's sheer male entitlement driving this. The male's wants and needs must come first and the female's wants and needs must be subordinate.

It's horrific.

And not forgetting making a gay man straight of his husband transitions. They need to be reminded exactly how it could effect men.

The spousal consent doesn't favour the non-transitioning spouse, it's a mechanism to give equal consideration to both spouses' 'identities'. But yet again trans identity trumps sexual orientation.

How about 'equal consideration' as a name? Or spousal consideration. Let them flail around trying to spin the concept of consideration.

Yeah but they are more hung up on authoritarian woke compliance than liberal minded consideration of both parties.

That's where the party are utterly failing for me.

How about calling it something like ‘Pre Transition Marriage Termination’.

It would be the default position so that the non-transitioning spouse (NTS) had to ‘opt in’ to the new relationship - hopefully set up so that they could not be bullied into remaining if they didn’t want to.

It would be the legal equivalent of an annulment for those people who wanted to marry again but it wouldn’t mean that the marriage never happened. Maybe more equivalent to being a widow or widower; it being that the the marriage had died rather than the individual as effectively the person that the spouse thought they had now married has now gone. It would mean that children remain legitimate as a start. It would also be that once the transition process has started the non-transitioning spouse could kick the process off and it would still go through, regardless of what the transitioned wants and even if they pull out and stop transitioning. Not sure how you would define the start point as you wouldn’t want people to be able to abuse it and say they had seen their dh wearing a dress and heels once as a quick way to divorce someone. But I’m sure that there will be a point early on once people say they are transitioning and start to live as the other gender publicly (even part time if you end up with someone like Pip Bunce) that means the NTS can be eligible to start the process.

Then it’s like divorce in so far as assets get split, priority to the NTS as this is only happening due to the transitioning spouse. Plus some sort of counselling for all involved. Except no hanging around and waiting - can get going once the transition process is going ahead.

If the couple want to stay together then they can ‘remarry’ - so something to mark the transition of the relationship. Whether it’s a ceremony like a wedding or just documents that get signed, sent in and ratified is TBD - for legal purposes it means that the date of being married stays since the original date (eg for residency purposes) but it just shifts the relationship into one that both have signed up for in their current form rather than one was different, so that it is an active choice on behalf of both parties.

Not perfectly thought through but you get the idea!

If there had been a large number of women suddenly becoming legally male, the very idea that a man should be forced to stay in a same sex marriage he never agreed to would never even have been contemplated.

Once someone notices this I'm not sure how they could keep denying that most of the laws being passed in relations to trans issues are motivated by deep seated though often unconscious misogyny. The people passing these laws see women as the service class, born to facilitate the lives of others.

Yes. The campaigning around this couldn't make it any clearer that male desires are paramount and women must facilitate them.

The last time this matter was discussed in parliament, the government's view was as follows:

It should be noted that spousal consent applies to same-sex marriages where one partner transitions, just as it does to different-sex marriages. Moreover, consent from the non-trans partner is also required where a civil partnership is converted to a same-sex marriage and then to a different-sex marriage.

The GEO explained to us as follows the Government’s position on the spousal consent provision:
[The requirement for consent] does not mean anyone will have a right to prevent their wife or husband obtaining a legal gender change; simply that they will be allowed to decide whether they want their marriage to continue before gender recognition is granted. Marriage is a contract between two individuals and it is right that both spouses should have an equal say in their future when there is a fundamental change […].

The MoJ Minister Ms Dinenage also told us:
If we look at how this system works, nobody has the right to prevent their wife or husband from obtaining a legal gender change [...] This is a really careful balancing act between making sure we understand that any marriage contract is a contract between two people and a spouse’s transition can fundamentally change their relationship. For some people, that will not make any difference. For some people, they married a person; they did not marry a man or a woman [...] For others, that might make a difference, particularly because the law allows the new marriage certificate to show the name of the trans spouse, so it is important that they have given their indication that they are happy for that to go ahead.

publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmwomeq/390/39006.htm

Why do LibDems think that these considerations can now be brushed aside?