I haven’t read what they’ve asked for yet but I will stay hopeful for now. I think it’s excellent news if MPs don’t kick this question of reviewing the GRA into the long grass. GRA is outdated, redundant in its own terms (now we have same sex marriage and equal pension age) and is now purely a personal emotional validation mechanism which is absolutely not the role of the state to provide.
Everyone is already free to wear and call themselves whatever they want. As a society we already support everyone’s rights via the Equality Act. The GRA fails on its own requirements as a public marker of a new status of ‘living as the opposite sex’- where people act in ways entirely inconsistent with their GRC which naively requires them to live in the acquired gender ‘until death’.. then there are no mechanism to revoke GRC.
It’s an inevitable problem, of course people will change their minds or act post-GRC in ways Parliament never envisaged. So people with the GRC, who are going through normal life course stages like parenthood which GRA does not really fit with, are perhaps understandably launching court battles to try to make the rest of the legislative world match up with their GRA, regardless of reality or other problems that could cause for others.
GRA also, in a Kafkaesque way, doesn’t allow detransitioned people to legally reverse their GRC and revert back to the truth of their unchanged biologically sexed body. (unless they admit to ‘fraud’ or something which is ludicrous). Even if they are quite open about not being whatever legal sex is written on their GRC.
The common factor problem here is not people- we are all entitled to live the lives we want and to change our minds about things over our lifetimes, the common factor problem is the GRA.
I will be happy if GRA is finally of concern to MPs because it is problematic legislation already impacting very negatively on several groups such as women, mothers, and young people. GRA’s particular legal fiction effectively allows self-ID already because you can’t know whether anyone has it. The arguments against self ID also apply against the GRA in its current form.
And as gender dysphoria and other struggles of adolescence have been turbocharged by a identity politics in recent years, GRC may be something that increasingly more and also younger people may be thinking about acquiring. As GRA was written with the situation of late, male transitioners in mind (you can tell because it doesn’t even mention childbirth while in possession of a GRC as an option etc) and in anticipation of very few individuals actually ever taking it up.
So if GRA is left as it is, Parliament and the courts can expect to hear of plenty of cases from unhappy people with GRC who find GRC possession does not fit in with their legal interactions in other settings over their lifetime, or who just want to release themselves from having a GRC but bizarrely legally can’t do so. Which latter situation is surely a huge breach of their human rights.
So GRA needs democratic parliamentary review, but it most definitely needs scrapping in its current form. The Science and Technology or the Health and Social Care Commons select committees also need to look at the evidence for invasive ‘transition’ of children and young people and vulnerable adults. Parliament should bring in statutory regulation of this, because the decisions of individual doctors working usher pressure from a powerful lobby in professional silos at GIDS, mean that the inappropriately politicised affirmation model of ‘healthcare’ will continue to damage more and more patients. I also hope MPs will also take this chance to insist that mental health services for all young people are boosted.