How does 'gender recognition' legislation work in Britain?

[Emotionalsupportviper]

Just reading a Times article re: gender recognition in Scotland
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/2c48bf6c-7749-11ed-be91-363346a310de?shareToken=c4871e95f221d14dd2d3b78c4696db51&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

It contains this paragraph:
"Currently anyone wanting to change their sex in the UK needs to apply for a gender recognition certificate. To be successful applicants need to have been medically diagnosed with gender dysphoria and been living in their affirmed gender for at least two years."

If this is so how are all of these sex offenders who suddenly realise they're trans when they are standing in the dock able to demand incarceration in the women's estate? Is the law just routinely ignored in favour of these vile men?

That's if you want to change your sex.
Changing your gender doesn't really require anything.

For starters, they will consider incarceration with women without a GRC. It's not a requirement.

And in part I think they've used the following logic to justify that:

"If you're in a man's prison, there's no way to 'live as a woman', so the prisoner can't meet the 'live in their affirmed gender' criterion, so can't obtain a GRC, so the prison can't require a GRC, as that would be discriminatory on the basis of gender reassignment (which covers people merely having the intention)".

Changing your legal sex is not changing your biological sex. That's why the Equality Act still allows single sex spaces. This will continue to apply across the UK no matter how simplified the process becomes in Scotland.
Changing gender is whatever you fancy on a given day but it has no legal basis anywhere.

If this is so how are all of these sex offenders who suddenly realise they're trans when they are standing in the dock able to demand incarceration in the women's estate? Is the law just routinely ignored in favour of these vile men?

Essentially, yes. Many women's services haven't been properly defined and defended as being single sex I suppose.

Yes, there's no legal requirement in general that services have to be single-sex - it's just permitted, and the laws permitting that do extend to the ability to exclude GRC holders based on their real sex.

Prisons do have a single-sex requirement under the Geneva conventions, but you'd have to be a prisoner-of-war for that to apply.

(It was apparently felt worth getting that in writing so other countries would be compelled to follow it for your citizens, but it apparently never occurred to anyone it would be necessary to make a written law to ensure it locally).

Sarah's Brighton case against the support centre is an attempt to argue that to refuse to provide single-sex services where permitted can amount to sex discrimination. That's not previously been attempted yet as a discrimination case.

There was a judicial review against the government w.r.t. prisons, but it was not successful. I forget the details of the reasoning though.

kpssinfo.org/whats-the-problem/

'A male who has a GRC stating that he is legally a woman is initially placed in a women’s prison. Conviction, offending history and anatomy are not taken into consideration. If he poses a risk to or is at risk from the female prisoners and the risk is too high to manage in a women’s prison, his case is referred to a Transgender Complex Case Board.

Theoretically, a decision may be to transfer him to a men’s prison. However, in assessing this risk he is still ‘treated as a woman’. This means he can only be transferred to a men’s prison if that same decision would be made for a female prisoner. In practice, however, women are never held in the male estate: the risk to their safety would be too great to manage.

Treating a male prisoner with a GRC as a woman extends to risk assessment. We are repeatedly told that male prisoners are thoroughly risk assessed to ensure the safety of female offenders. However, this is not the case.

The OASys Sexual Reoffending Predictor Score, OSP for short, is used for adult men who have been convicted of sexual or sexually motivated offences. It is not for use with female sexual offenders. Neither is it used for male sexual offenders with a GRC, because these prisoners are assessed as women. There is no alternative risk assessment tool for use with women who have been convicted of sexual offences.'

I forget the details of the reasoning though.

Wasn't it, in part, that the law did not identify / define sex, nor mention single sex. Gender Ideology had not been considered (why would it have been?) when the regulations were written and so saying no, no matter how logical, would not necessarily be legal. And, as yet, nobody has had the bottle, time, money to rewrite, define the law as written - though Suella Braverman et al have started.

There was a judicial review against the government w.r.t. prisons, but it was not successful. I forget the details of the reasoning though.

The judge said that although it was harmful to the women prisoners, it wasn't illegal for the prison services not to segregate prisons by sex.

And the judge can only make judgements on whether the law has been broken.

There was a judicial review against the government w.r.t. prisons, but it was not successful. I forget the details of the reasoning though.

Unbelievably, it was accepted that it disadvantaged the women prisoners, but that this was trumped by the hurt feelings of men.

Thanks @ArabellaScott that word salad was what I was thinking of.
It's more weird than I remember, worse! Utterly bobbins!

The press release from the claimant's solicitors in the FDJ v Secretary of State for Justice prisons decision is here: fairplayforwomen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/FDJ-Press-Release-Final.pdf

There have been some good answers already, but what it boils down to is that a number of services, including the NHS, the judiciary, the police and many others, are behaving as if gender self-ID is already law, when it isn't.

One of the reasons campaigning on this is so hard is that it's impossible to know who to complain to, when all the relevant institutions who have the power to do anything about it have themselves been ideologically captured.

There was a judicial review against the government w.r.t. prisons, but it was not successful. I forget the details of the reasoning though.

I'm not sure if it was the prisons JR or another one, but the reasoning was that although the EA permits single sex spaces, there is nothing in there that requires anyone to provide single sex spaces.

The problem is, the EA was written at a time when everyone assumed that there may be situations in which people needed single sex spaces, and the EA would outlaw these unless they wrote into the legislation that exceptions could be made for situations in which this is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. They assumed that service providers would wish to make such services single sex, so there was no need to put a requirement of single sex spaces in certain circumstances into the Act. They didn't predict that the service providers themselves might want to refuse to allow single sex spaces.

They didn't predict that the service providers themselves might want to refuse to allow single sex spaces.

And to compound this, they evidently didn't predict that despite the GRA, the incursions of males into 'women's spaces' would not just be those who'd 'legally changed sex' but also - without consultation with or assent from women - include anyone who 'self identified' as one

I'm not sure if it was the prisons JR or another one, but the reasoning was that although the EA permits single sex spaces, there is nothing in there that requires anyone to provide single sex spaces.

This is true, but it is still a tricky situation legally. As I understand it, under the Act providers can either offer single-sex spaces or mixed-sex spaces.

However, what a lot of them are doing is offering mixed-gender spaces, ie women plus men who identify as women - but not other men or trans men. That seems to me to be against the law, as there is no provision in the Equality Act to offer single-gender spaces, particularly in cases where the trans person doesn't even have a GRA.

It would be very useful to see this tested in court.

Agree, I'd like to see a test case of this, too.

I seem to recall them (the court/tribunal) saying someone needs to sue the MoJ to create the relevant case law. It sounded like them practically begging someone to take them to court.