What do you think should happen to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA)?

[TERFisTHEnewTREND]

Personally, I can't believe this act was ever passed! I know 2004 was a different time, but still!

I believe that the only way of moving past the gender madness in law is to revoke the GRA. "Gender" is about as useful as someone's favorite type of music, so it has no place on a legal document.

As for what should happen to those who already have a GRA... well, I think some of them are owed an apology by those who told them that this piece of paper would change their sex (which it doesn't).

What do others think?

Repeal

Repeal. It is a law which has caused so much grief. It makes the application of the EA2010 ambivalent as well. Should never have been passed. How a person feels about their gender has nothing to do with reality and has no place in rights legislation.

you actually need to look at the definition of a transitioning person as a protected characteristic as well.

Just had a thought on this. When you're engaged to be married, there's no protection there. You've not yet acquired the PC of marriage & civil partnership.

So why are there such vagueries permitted for the PC of GR? It's the only one that allows this. No other PC has anything comparable. Why this one?

I agree

There’s quotes on another thread from Lammy and others pushing for it

Wth were they thinking, not of women that’s for sure

The trouble is they’ll defend it and the EqA to the hilt if they get in

A total of 8,971 applications and 8,266 GRC have been granted. (Including 1,240 and 954 for the first two quarters of this year).

Thats more than the 6,000 projected number that was talked about at the time the GRA was introduced, but less than the number of people identifying themselves as trans on the census.

The problem is that the process is call 'gender recognition ' but then allows an individual to change sex on official identification. If the act was honest and was call what it is - allowing adults to conceal their sex, i believe more people would see the problem.

If its about recognition of gender, give people a gender certificate but dont change the sex on identification.

Its not difficult if the government wants to be honest.

It was presented as being all about a medical condition suffered by a tiny number of individuals and giving them “the rights appropriate to their acquired gender”. And also affording those individuals privacy.

That is my understanding of how it was conceived and discussed at the time of its passing. And I still believe it might have some value if, in the GRA itself and in the Equality Act, some proper clarity was generated to roll back the systematic reinterpretations that have occurred since.
If gender identity had been conceptualised then as it is now, there would have been no grounds for passing this legislation in the first plce. The GRA was intended to help people who were suffering from a severe, disabling, dysphoria - so severe that it amounted to a mental health condition; so severe that they were embarking on material transition - ie comprehensive surgery and hormone treatment.
This medicalised conceptualisation was what justified the provision of special additional rights to affected people - including the right to pretend their sex was other than it was - in exactly the same was that disability justifies the provision of special additional rights to people with disabilities.
Now, lobbyists of various sorts have required us to replace this medicalised framework with a much, much broader framework in which everyone has a gender identity, whose meanings, classifications, criteria are explicitly said to be a matter of personal self-description, on the basis of which some people but not others can claim additional rights (to usurp the sex-based restrictions that would otherwise apply to them).
The disabling psychological condition - gender dysphoria - that the GRA tried to address, has been massaged out of existence. So the GRA no longer makes any sense whatsoever.
Since the Equality Act needs a host of clarifications, perhaps the solution would be to include within it some provisions that would replicate the privacy and paperwork solutions that the GRA was intended to provide for materially transitioned individuals. If that were done effectively, the GRA would be redundant.

If I'm not mistaken, the equivalent of a GRC is not granted in Japan without surgical transition. This is not the case in the UK. It seems to me (IANAL) that the UK PC is worded in this way because transitioning is not clearly defined, unlike in Japan.

Laws based on undefined and undefinable parameters are bad laws.

I assumed the PC of GR incude proposing to undergo and undergoing, rather just completed GR, so that someone couldnt lose their job for taking time off for surgery or appointments before a GRC is granted? Part of the process of gaining a GRC is to prove living as acquired gender - so change of name on work records is needed.

I don't think the state should compel anyone to have surgery. But I also don't think the current situation with the PC of GR is right. Having a GRC would be fine, so long as the GRA has all the secrecies removed, and doesn't permit rewriting of history (no one can hide whether they're married, it's a public record, so why can some people hide the fact of their birth?) and so long as sex means sex at birth.

Repeal.

Bloody awful, stupid law, that should never have been passed in the first place and has caused absolute bloody havoc. It is never going to be workable.

My new years revolution is that, as a newly educated Terf, I want to find a way to coordinate all us warriors on a proper political push back on all this nonsense. There is plenty of us.

there are less of us than you think. It's a joke that there are 6 of us with hundreds or thousands of sock accounts, but still plenty of women and men have no idea what's happening around womens rights. Or they are still at the itll never happen stage. We need the entire country to be made aware of exactly what women will lose/have already lost first. Preferably before any election.

Sorry but you're wrong. You no longer need to have gender reassignment surgery to get a grc in Japan. The Japanese government was sued and the clause (requiring grs) was successfully challenged and removed in 2023

The people who wrote the GRA and PC of GR were bonkers.

To work, it needs the full cooperation of the public, but they purposefully confuse the public about what is required.

We cannot see, and therefore treat, someone as if they are the opposite sex. Maybe legally, or on paper, but not in real life. It's none of my business if harry from accounts has a GRC, anounced he has changed is name and his marriage is seen as between an man and a women, or two women, but it is my business if he wants to use the womens loos, or join a women opportunity group at work. The law cannot force me to see something that isnt real.

If the GRC is private and offers access to womens spaces sometimes, how can harry be barred from womens loos one week then allowed in once he has a GRC, and other people not know he has a GRC?

We either have to let every man in, to protect the privacy of the men with GRC, or not treat the men with GRC any differenly once they have a GRC.

Sued by whom?

Can the democratically elected Japanese government really not make a sovereign decision about the circumstances in which they are willing to grant a GRC?

Repeal.

It's an obsolete, homophobic law that was brought in at a time when same sex marriage was so unthinkable that the government decided it was better to pretend one of the parties had changed sex.

It's an ambitious goal but I am heartened by how much the overton window has shifted on this, just since the late 2010s when GRA reform started to be discussed. Back in 2016-17 it was considered an extreme position, even on this board, to suggest repeal. The more people learn, the more they can see what a terrible law this is.

@MargotBamborough
By a man who wanted a grc but also wanted to keep his penis intact. Apparently demanding that a man remove/invert his penis before letting him falsify all his documents is cruel and unusual punishment/requirement and is against his human rights

Yeah but how on earth did he win??

Who decided that his desire to have his penis cake and eat it trumps the ability of a democratically elected government to make sovereign decisions?

That is insane.

A male judge

I presume by whatever international human rights body Japan is signed up with. The issue is that surgery causes sterility so it's a human rights violation to require it. That has been the position of the ECtHR so I imagine it's the same for Japan.

And I agree, nobody should be getting surgery that destroys healthy organs and causes sterility for the sake of a mental health condition or identity issue. They just shouldn't be able to change their legal sex either.

Good. No matter your opinion on the legitimacy or sanity of 'changing sex', it is barbaric to require people to undergo life-threatening treatments of dubious nature in order to access legal status.

Right, but it's not actually a human rights violation for your intact penis to not be allowed in women's single sex spaces.

Also, Japan still has the death penalty, so if they can ignore the views of the international human rights community in that respect, surely it can't be that difficult to tell them to go fuck themselves over this issue?

I feel we are in very dangerous waters here indeed, because international human rights law only functions by consent. If the international human rights community insists on behaving like absolute lunatics, the populations of countries all over the world are rapidly going to lose support for the concept of human rights and elect right wing governments who want to withdraw from all these treaties and tear the whole framework up.

And then, guess what? Hello death penalty, goodbye freedom of expression, goodbye right to a private and family life, goodbye right to a fair trial and all the rest of it.

That was in response to Hoardasurass. Can't double-quote on the app.

Tbf it is the wrong solution to say you must remove body parts

The solution is to repeal the falsity that humans can change sex

All these countries.. how on earth can we get back to facts

Also removing body parts still does not result in changing sex and women will still be disadvantaged by being forced to accept males with or without those body parts

Repeal. As PencilsInSpace said, it's homophobic legislation. It's also obsolete.

I also want to know why gender reassignment is a PC in the EA2010. If someone does have a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria that affects their day-to-day then it would come under disability along with other similar and equally rare psychiatric conditions like body dysmorphic disorder. It doesn't need a special category of its own, that's really odd. If one disability was picked out to be a separate protected characteristic then it would be logical and rational to choose something like people with Down Syndrome where we see shamefully widespread discrimination, mistreatment and massively increased risk of neglect throughout social, care and NHS sectors.

I suspect more women would be happier if they felt that a man had had surgery/ hormone treatment, the gender recognition process was robust, it was very few men and the acess to spaces was limited.

But the standards are dropping all of the time, when rapist can get a GRC, we know that there is no real process. Politicans are actively trying to increase the number of men gaining access to women and girls spaces by promoting trans awareness and making it easier to get a grc.

Its as if the negotiations are only going one way - to give men more acess to women and girls spaces, and no questioning of why any man is granted such privilege in the first place is allowed.