I’ve only read the Daily Mail article not the Times so please could someone reassure me if I have misunderstood something relevant. But I don’t think any of us can celebrate or relax until the deeply problematic, outdated and unnecessary GRA is actually repealed. There’s absolutely nothing about that happening in here is there?
This message seems to be only about children. I seem to remember we’ve had statements like this in the press before. The ‘news’ is only that we’ll see this consultation response before the summer. Let’s see.
Whatever happens, we need to keep on raising up our voices to our MPs now as loudly as we can (before this government response is written and signed off by ministers) and we need to point to and hope for a positive resolution of the various ongoing legal cases for the gender critical position, to help to row back on institutional capture.
A key point of the men’s sexual rights lobby campaign led by the TRAs around the 2018 GRA consultation, beyond their demand for dangerous GRC self-ID, was also to extend the GRC so that all under 18 year olds could also be able to change their sex legally via GRC. (I didn’t see any lower age limit suggested in their campaigning- please correct me if anyone knows different).
So that would have meant parents legally consenting to ‘change’ the legal paperwork description of their child’s sex. It is a shocking, anti-safeguarding proposal to make, but cover it in silencing rainbow sparkles and what could possibly go wrong for children?
This Daily Mail article seems to be just the government again testing the water for not allowing children ( actually their parents 
) to change their child’s legal sex.
The government must know the voices of more detransitioned young people will be coming to the fore. So the government want to be able to say they haven’t been supporting the dangerous ‘affirmative‘ model (even though this still is being allowed to continue unchecked.. )
I’ve said it loads of times before but this NHS and private medical ‘treatment’ of children’s emotional distress and dysphoria needs Parliament to actually act to protect children. They need to have a parliamentary select committee inquiry into this whole area, with the evidence looked at from all sides. Then where children are currently not even being experimented on by NHS and private clinicians ( I say these are ‘Not even experiments’ because research studies which harm their participants can be stopped- whereas this just gallops on unchecked..) this ‘treatment’ of anyone under 25 and of vulnerable adults should be regulated by an Act of parliament requiring a government funded independent external body. Parliament needs to bring in laws to do that. These treatments should only ever be available case by case and on individual licence according to strict legal criteria and with the treatment agreed to by named doctors registered centrally and by the same law, the outcomes for anyone under 25 or a vulnerable adult who is given puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and surgical interventions, in the NHS or privately, should be as a group followed up via monitoring of their anonymised healthcare records.
There should also be a government commitment to fund follow up research for children and young people who have been through this, which is voluntary for them to participate in.
But of course all that will cost money to set up. The government haven’t even said they will invest more in CAMHS services to make sure distressed children currently can have somewhere to explore their problems away from the ‘affirmative’ medicalised approach. They could just bring in that tomorrow and make a massive difference.
There’s no new protections for children being offered here by government and already we can all see that children are being completely failed by the current system. I can only hope that the individual legal cases being brought by brave people at the moment will force them to act.
Also- in other ways like around the deliberately mis-described ‘spousal veto’ in the GRA.. this government clearly wants to appear to be socially ‘progressive’ or some shit where it costs them nothing. The government are are definitely not collectively taking a principled stance around upholding or extending women’s rights.
So we have to make sure they are listening to women and what we need, not just being distracted by the government ostentatiously letting us know they will not be indulging some of the most creepy and dangerous demands made by the TRA lobby.
We should all be writing encouraging letters to our MPs to get them to do more and ask for far more, because the government as a whole needs to do way more to change the terrible status quo.