Should the GRA be repealed ...

[NotAssigned]

... and if so how would that be achieved?

Yes, it needs to go. We have marriage equality, pension age equality and the Equality Act which gives trans people legal protection from discrimination.

People who already have a GRC should be allowed to keep them, but no more should be issued.

We do not need a legally sanctioned lie.

Yes

I'm hoping that Standing for Women might launch a campaign on this as Posie has mentioned it on her YT channel.

First person who starts one, I'm in. I don't feel compelled to launch this myself, I have fingers in pies.

Yes. As others have said, the reasons for it are obsolete.

And it opens up far more problems (real, concrete, dangerous and damaging problems, particularly around protection of vulnerable children and young people, not to mentions protections for women in law) than it attempted to solve.

Absolutely it should.

A great article here on the way forward.

thecritic.co.uk/has-trench-warfare-on-trans-issues-come-to-an-end/

Frankly I can't think of a better way to undo all the progress that's been made (and to "confirm" the opponents' view that this is all transphobia) than to call for a repeal of the entire act. That would affect a good number of people who've lived quiet lives as women to no ill effect. Maybe it's not the easiest thing in the world to reconcile the needs of trans people with that of women but there really isn't any excuse for not even trying.

That would affect a good number of people who've lived quiet lives as women to no ill effect.

No it would not. Their status would remain unchanged (grandfathered, I think this is called). There simply would be no more falsification of birth certificates, no more legal pretence that woman is anything other than adult human female, no more legal coercion of compelled speech.

Yes of course the GRA should be repealed. Now that we have same-sex marriage the problem it aimed to solve no longer exists.
I think it's simple and have never been convincedby the arguments that it isn't - what do people labelling themselves trans need in law that isn't covered by the illegality of sex discrimination under EA2010? A man wearing clothes typically worn by women must have the same employment, housing, healthcare and consumer rights as a man wearing clothes typically worn by men. If not, he would be penalised for something a woman would not be: it would be sex discrimination.
(I wish more people were more concerned with the women forced to wear makeup, skirts and high heels to keep their jobs with eg banks and airlines. Many women cabin crew develop life-changing back injury).
In addition to outlawing sex discrimination, EA2010 recognises that women's (and men's tbf) privacy, dignity and safety can often only be provided by single sex spaces.
The discussion so often focuses on presentation - clothes, make up, hair etc - when it would be much more useful to look at behaviour and actions and whether or not they conform to gender stereotypes. As has often been noted, many male trans activists behave in a hyper-masculine way, seeking to dominate, control and silence women. I don't understand why if we accept that these men need legal protection because they like to wear lipstick, we don't accept that eg my DP who doesn't wear lipstick (neither do I) but does all the cooking and lets people pass on the pavement doesn't.
The problem has always been tying personal presentation/style to something with nothing to do with it - sex. If people want to argue that presentation does need some legal or social special protection, perhaps something like the subculture hate crime category introduced by Manchester police after the horrific murder of Sophie Lancaster might be more appropriate and useful? There are of course pros and cons to the legal concept of 'hate crime'.
Finally, the actual GRA itself is a fucking mess. Sex and gender swapping about in the same sentence. It doesn't really make sense, and this has of course been exploited by the woowoo merchants. I wish I could remember who said it - a woman on Twitter I think - basically the law isn't a poem, where everyone can come up with their own interpretation. If we don't really know whether someone is breaking a law or not, it's useless by definition.

Yes, and I find what Asteroid suggested in that Tweet really interesting.

Repeal the GRA.
Gender ID protected as freedom of expression/ belief under HRA and EA
Severe gender dysphoria protected as a disability
Hormones and surgery not the criteria for protection

Certainly a place to start a discussion.

Leaving aside marriage & pensions (resolved) - ECHR (Goodwin & I v United Kingdom [2002] 2 FCR 577) ruled that a trans person's inability to change the sex on their birth certificate was a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights (Art. 8 & 12).

Now, 18 years later - when/why are people being required to show their birth certificates? This is probably an ignorant question - I was born abroad and my foreign bc is useless in the UK; I've only ever used it to apply for a passport (to prove my parentage) - otherwise I show my passport and some proof of UK residence.

As I understand it, no birth cert issued by any country of the UK is an identity doc (no pics). For people born in or after 1983, it's not proof of citizenship. So it's proof of age (along with a matching pic ID or equivalent) - and what else?

I can see how in the late '90s/early '00s when Christine Goodwin was having issues, a birth certificate might be required for any number of things like proving right to work in the UK, renting an apartment, opening a bank account, applying for a loan, getting married, etc. Are birth certificates still accepted as de facto proof of UK citizenship/right of abode even after the British Nationality Act 1981 (effective 1983) abolished blanket jus soli/birthright citizenship?

I understand not everyone wants or needs a passport: they're expensive, bulky, difficult to replace, and people have issues re the biometrics, but - couldn't a lot of the "need to change my birth certificate" issues today be solved by making available an optional, non-biometric picture ID card - government-issued and free on request with assistance to gather the required documentation - that proves identity, citizenship, and birthdate, but omits sex altogether?

Gender ID protected as freedom of expression

Freedom of expression won’t work in the many different environments where there needs to be some ‘branding’ or uniforms or health and safety requirements.

The right to wear uniform of the opposite sex could be addressed by sex discrimination.

Yes. With a grandfather clause so that those who already have GRCs aren't affected.

Change it to easily acquired legal recognition on documents of TW, TM, N/B, with protection for gender expression, but recorded in addition to biological sex. It's insane that legal documentation, particularly held records, should reflect anything other than reality. It negates the whole purpose of holding it and the massive expense and performance of gathering and analysing it.

Unless it's a workplace where only one biological sex is employed for specific reason, surely uniforms/branding will exist that are worn by both sexes of employees? It shouldn't make a practical difference who wants to wear what if they're all part of the set uniform? Or am I missing something here? Making uniforms and branding less based on stereotypes would probably help this.

Go ahead, prove every TRA activist "right" by "confirming" that we're all transphobes. Wouldn't want to waste the opportunity of finally being listened to would we?

ECHR (Goodwin & I v United Kingdom [2002] 2 FCR 577) ruled that a trans person's inability to change the sex on their birth certificate was a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights (Art. 8 & 12).

I think the breach was regarding the fact that they weren't able to marry someone of the same sex. The change of birth certificate was a fudge which meant that a man could marry another man as long as one of them changed the sex marker on their birth certificate to female. This is obsolete since two men or two women can now marry.

Yes. Get it gone but leave people with a GRC as they are now.

Go ahead, prove every TRA activist "right" by "confirming" that we're all transphobes. Wouldn't want to waste the opportunity of finally being listened to would we?

What specifically is tranphobic about suggesting it's repealed? There is no part of it that benefits women. Quite the reverse.

That would affect a good number of people who've lived quiet lives as women to no ill effect.

Not true! The only people who've lived lives, quiet or otherwise, as women are ..... WOMEN.

Oh, and ..... yes, it should!

A correction to my earlier post about Goodwin v UK. The breach of article 12 was about the right to marry. Article 8 concerns the right of a person born male, who 'passes' as female to hide their true sex from everyone.

Full details here

Go ahead, prove every TRA activist "right" by "confirming" that we're all transphobes. Wouldn't want to waste the opportunity of finally being listened to would we?

You know what's not helpful? Vague handwringing about 'transphobia'.
The GRA affects women, and we are allowed to discuss it.

Yes, it's obsolete, Orwellian and falsifies legal documents.

The very first line of the GRA is horribly transphobic and exclusionary of non-binary people:

A person of either gender who is aged at least 18 may make an application for a gender recognition certificate on the basis of—(a) living in the other gender,

What about all the other genders? What about people who don’t feel like they have a gender?

TRAs should be railing against such binary language and wanting it changed too.

What is a transphobe???

Define it.

What are the plusses for female people following 16 years of male people being able to gain a legal fiction of being female with access to female spaces? How has that experiment (created solely to avoid gay marriage) gone?

I can tell you about the losses for females. I can tell you pages of losses for females.

This is not always and only about male people . Female people are allowed to talk about things in terms by which they affect female people, the first rule does not have to be keeping people born male happy and catered for and assured that females only want to talk about their needs a very little bit after making sure no male born people have any needs that should be met first.

There are apparently half a million trans people living here, and only 5000 have a GRC. That number has remained static since the beginning. (And they could easily be grandfathered in.)

No one else has seen fit to get a certificate. I suspect that is because they thought they could implement self ID as a protocol, rather than a law. The government has just told them they can't. Does that mean that many more are going to apply for a GRC, in order to gain the access that the government is trying to prevent?

Or are we still happy to have a law that falsifies documents, is underpinned by rank sexism, damages women, and is obsolete on the basis that the reasons it was implemented are gone, just for 5000 people?

None of it makes sense.