Nonbinary citizen to take gender recognition legal challenge to the European Court of Human Rights

[IwantToRetire]

The Gender Recognition Panel, responsible for assessing applications under the GRA, determined that Ryan had met the criteria required, but refused to issue Ryan with a GRC stating their gender was nonbinary. Since then, they have fought their case through a judicial review, challenged the decision in the Court of Appeal in January this year, and applied for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court in April, just two months later.

Permission to appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected in July on the grounds that the application did not raise an arguable point of law.

Now, Ryan and their legal team are looking to file an application to the ECtHR invoking the right to gender recognition under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to respect for private and family life. This article has been applied to similar cases where other applicants brought a case for legal recognition of their gender.

If the ECtHR finds a violation of the law, it would then file to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, which reviews the execution of the Court’s judgments. This could include ensuring that Ryan achieves legal recognition of their gender in the UK by way of a GRC.

Ryan and their legal team claim that a successful outcome could set a precedent in Europe for legal gender recognition for nonbinary individuals.

https://www.leighday.co.uk/news/news/2025-news/nonbinary-citizen-to-take-gender-recognition-legal-challenge-to-the-european-court-of-human-rights/

(I think there may have been threads about this person before!)

Yeah, Lord Denning is hardly the epitome of jurisprudence. "Appalling vista" and all that.

And my point stands. There are precedents for the UK telling the ECHR "Thanks for that" and ignoring it. With absolutely zero comeback. Those who have been paying attention at the back will note that successive governments of all parties have continued that tradition.

I'm happy to repeat it wherever, whenever and however it arises. The UK Parliament is supreme. It cannot be fettered. It has no boundaries other than those it chooses to abide by itself.

Lose their jobs : of course not.

Insist on being in the woman’s ward, prison cell, refuge or changing room when you are a man : of course not.

Sex is not a ‘belief’ or an ‘opinion’, it is a hard physical fact. People like Ryan (who is at a glance a male person) can deny their sex to themselves, but they cannot and should not expect anyone else to deny it, and to ignore the clear differences which it entails.

... (recent UK) legislation diverges from the notion that human rights are universal and apply to everyone regardless of conduct or status.
It also increases the likelihood that the European Court of Human Rights will find the UK to be in violation of its human rights obligations in the future.

If the Court did find that the UK had violated the Convention, the UK would be obliged under international law to comply with the judgment, take action to rectify the incompatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights and provide any victims with a remedy. If it no longer wishes to comply with these treaty obligations, the UK will have to confront the possible consequences of withdrawal. ...

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9958/

and https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/75th-anniversary-of-the-european-convention-on-human-rights/#heading-10

I agree.

If the Court did find that the UK had violated the Convention, the UK would be obliged under international law to comply with the judgment, take action to rectify the incompatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights and provide any victims with a remedy. If it no longer wishes to comply with these treaty obligations, the UK will have to confront the possible consequences of withdrawal. ...

Or not, as the case may be.

We could decline to withdraw and invite the treaty to expel us.

I used to be in favour of a written constitution for the UK. But then again I was also in favour of the clusterfuck the FTPA turned out to be. However following recent shenanigans I'm swinging back in favour again.

What a load of navel gazing cobblers!

Edited to add: reading Judith Butler makes me lose the will to live. I feel like I'm being gaslit by aliens or something.

And yet, people take her seriously.

I have never understand how legally validating a personal belief is anything to do with the right to respect for private and family life.

Wanting to be legally defined as the opposite sex in order to marry someone of the same sex as you is a bonkers way to get around the restriction of marriage. And completely irrelevant now that the UK has equal marriage.

In what other circumstance does a citizen demand that the government give him special status for his belief, legally document that status, and require that society then bend itself around affirming that belief?

How is it any different from me, a non-Muslim:
I demand that I be legally recognised as a Muslim.
I demand a government document stating that I am a Muslim.
I demand that Muslims welcome me into their mosques, where I will behave according to my interpretation of Muslim-ness and claim Islamophobia should anyone object.
I demand that there should never be pork in my presence, nor may my colleagues wear sleeveless tops.

Bonkers. And offensive to Muslims.

🤔

Will acceptance of a separate category for NB’s be creating a third identity?
Male, Female and NB’s ?
If so, will they get to pick and choose which changing rooms/public toilet facilities/sports teams takes their fancy?
What rights will they demand?

I mean if they consider themselves to be neither male nor female they must currently be suffering such mental torture (🙄) every time they need to use a public changing room or public toilets.

I think in fact it is to do with a very special self regarding ego.

As NB you are for ever in control. What yesterday was acceptable can then become unacceptable.

People will be endlessly looking for clues as to how to react.

And what pronouns to use.

If he wins and non-binary gets legal recognition alongside female and male, what about the plight of the non-trinary who are now left behind? I bet he hasn't thought of that, the bigot.

Are you non binary gender or are you non bianry sex, or is that also fluid?

Surprisingly, given the manifold reifications of gender identity properties, it seems there isn't a single term for nonbinary gender and nonbinary sex -- each one separately or both, combined, can be denoted as nonbinary or genderqueer.

We're gonna need a bigger dictionary.

For some reason I remember ...

🤣 The whole thing teeters on the verge of being a parody of a gender creationism idea.

If only it were all simply a parody. Or a bad dream we can wake up from.

The problem there is #bekind has allowed nonsense to fester.

One of the worst aspects of social media - and whether it is in surmountable is a debate for the wider world is that it's removed the deep deep deep foundations of peoples cultures in a dangerously superficial manner.

Whilst it's undeniably true we are all human (scientific fact 😀) we all "do human" in ways that have taken millennia to develop.

Yes, your TikTok nonsense shows us the human bit. But the 99% that is under the surface isn't conveyed. This leads to some people confusing "human" and "human made". With (as the voiceover says) hilarious consequences. And that is how you end up with people telling you that you "have" to behave a certain way. Because someone on DikTik does and they're human and you're human so it must be. It just must.

It's hard to feel that if there were a bit more having to hunt for every meal or starve, there would be a lot less culture bollocks.going on. We know for certain that 10,000 years ago two cavemen staking a bison were not discussing their gender roles and pronouns.

I'm a bit of an outlier because I don't have a problem with the concept of 'gender' or 'gender identity', I take it as being the manifestation of outward signs like clothing, mannerism, interests, employment etc etc which are in most? all? societies expected to be distinct for males and females.
It's a purely social thing, not an inevitable consequence of having XX or XY chromosomes.

There have always been people who rejected the accepted norms of 'masculinity' or 'femininity' as laid down by society at the time and in their culture - 👋to all the posters who say 'look at me - boots, jeans, DH's old shirt, in the process of stripping down a motorbike engine - feck femininity, but I'm 100% female'.

The recent thing is people insisting that they not only reject the gender stereotype that goes with their natal sex, they also reject their biological sex too and expect the law to recognise this impossibility.

In other words, Gender Critics reject the gender binary as
a regulatory fiction, maintained by social norms that seek coherence between sex, gender, and desire, as JB puts it.

But we disagree with her when she says the 'male/female binary' is a regulatory fiction, the male/female binary is a scientific fact, it is the masculine/feminine binary which is a socially constructed regulatory fiction, which GCs oppose.

So arguably, GC= NB😁

If the argument is that Ryan wants to keep his sex secret, then the logical conclusion is that that applies to everyone and nobody should be forced to reveal their sex on any official document and birth certificates should not record sex.

If on the other hand sex is relevant and should be recorded, then Ryan is no more being deprived of his article 8 rights than anyone else.

The ECHR ruled against the UK because we didn't allow prisoners to vote. That was over a decade ago.

Yes, but I don't think Ryan really wants to keep his sex secret. What he's doing here is 'Me, me, me, look at me, I'm special'. He wants to be a special celebrity with a special identity that everyone should admire as he's so special. He's a fantasist and narcissist.

The alternative explanation is that, like Judith Butler, he's obsessed with the idea of the 'queering' of society which means that all social norms should be questioned and if possible dismantled in pursuit of some sort of anarchist utopia (or dystopia) where everyone acts out their own fantasies regardless of the effect on everyone else (who obviously should be acting out their own fantasies as well). In their tiny deluded brains these people think that this means everyone can live their 'best lives' and there will be no harm to anyone else. They're really not living in the real world.

It's really difficult to know what's really going on in the heads of these deluded fantasists and what their ultimate aim is (if indeed there is one).

I'm a bit of an outlier because I don't have a problem with the concept of 'gender' or 'gender identity',

Respectfully they are hardly contentious concepts. In fact people not getting them are the outliers.

However they are simply artificial constructs of human (or homid ?) society. Their relation to the real world of chromosomes and biology simply isn't. And by that I mean isn't anything. You know this because you can change the sex of a subject and that can alter their gender. However no amount of changing a subjects gender is going to change their sex. In much the same way as no amount of pressing coloured ping pong balls into each other is going to create nuclear fusion.

If the case does go to the court, it will be interesting to see which way it goes. I know transactivists are forever quoting Goodwin, but the social changes since then have been enormous.

Even in the UK courts, (I think the case was Croft and quoted in the Supreme Court judgment) there was apparently a conviction/an assumption that it was appropriate, at some point in the medical “SRS” process, that a man would start to use women’s spaces at some point. The recent judgment doesn’t leave much space for that under the EA2010.

I think the changing landscape will affect the way the judges view these demanding men, given enough time. Obviously that would require the absence of activism within the judiciary, which can’t be guaranteed, but I don’t think such a case would inevitably be a foregone conclusion.

I struggle to understand the requirement to live as a woman (or a man) for 2 years to get a GRC, but at least women and men exist so there is something to attempt to copy. I would struggle to understand how someone lives as Non - Binary. Add to that, the case where a woman was denied a GRC to live as if she were a man, because of her wish to conceive, there seems to be some link between sex and gender in the process no matter how small.

If the case does go to the court,

Well it will have to wait for the private school VAT case first. Another slam dunk, apparently.