ECJ: EU law trumps national law on gender change register.

[BruachAbhann]

I can't see a thread on this yet so apologies if there already is one.

From what I can gather, this new EU ruling effectively means that if you have a gender change in one country (in the form of self-id for example), this must be recognised in any other EU country, including perhaps the country you're actually from.. EU law overrides the laws in any individual EU country, even if that country does not recognise a legal sex change.
This highlights just how entrenched trans ideology is in our political systems. It's unbelievable.

gript.ie/breaking-ecj-eu-law-trumps-national-law-on-gender-change/

We've finally found a benefit from Brexit. I hate this timeline.

I'm in the middle of reading a report on the Athena forum website and just got to this part:

'Some states, such as Spain, Switzerland and Germany, permit legal self-ID for minors – sometimes from the age of 12 with parental or guardian consent. In Germany, there is no minimum age at all if the declaration is made by a parent or legal guardian on the child’s behalf. In other countries, access may be conditional on residency requirements or administrative waiting periods. Germany also imposes fines for publicly disclosing an individual’s legal sex change, part of one of the broadest self-ID laws in Europe.'

This, taken in conjunction with the ECJ ruling I just posted about seems to indicate that the most lenient countries when it comes to self-id will basically override other EU countries! This seems like we're in a "race to the bottom" now.

This is absolutely crazy.

It is. I was dead oppsed to Brexit (still am), but all the Remain and Rejoin people on SM never seem prepared to talk about any downsides. Or, indeed, if the EU would even want us. I can see some EU countries not going along with this at all.

I wonder what this would mean for people travelling from the EU to countries like the UK or USA. They could potentially hold a passport where their stated sex was different to their biological sex. Would this mean that they haven't got a valid passport in the eyes of the UK? Or how would the UK view European passports in general considering that the passport could be inaccurate from the UK point of view?

Sorry so Poland can have abortion be illegal and there’s no EU issue but this?

Travel guidance often has sections on this kind of thing.

Things I never thought I’d say

Thank goodness for Brexit

UK citizens can already get passports where their stated sex is not their biological sex. They don't even need a Gender Recognition Certificate to do that, a letter from a doctor is enough.
https://www.gov.uk/changing-passport-information/gender

Since Trump the US insists all passports have sex at birth / biological sex. The UK does not.

What I'm wondering is what if the UK didn't accept EU passports because it thinks they are inaccurate? For example, what if EU passports systematically had the wrong date of birth on them? What's the difference between that and EU passports systematically having the wrong sex on them? How could a foreign country (the UK in this example) rely on such a document as a valid form of identity?

Wow, that's shocking. Does this change with the Supreme Court ruling I wonder?

Since Trump the US insists all passports have sex at birth / biological sex. The UK does not.

Or, "be more like Trump"

This is the EU's known strategy for the legislative situation concerning social issues - the EU encourages more permissive States to get laws on the books that they then use to enforce compliance in States that have more socially conservative societies.

There's always a government (e.g. Ireland, Malta, or Belgium) that is happy to go along with the EU's strategy and get brownie points for being a good little progressive nation (or store up good will for a nice EU sinecure after they're finished in national government).

Not as far as I know, no.

It would come under the GRA 2004, wouldn't it? And that legislation recognises gender recognition certificates and postdated changes to birth registration documents and ID documents.

Trump did not write his own EO. It was written by people who know what they're talking about. The US is much more split along party lines over gender than the UK and this EO could be reversed by a Democrat president if that looked popular.

I don't know what happens to people who travel from outside into the US on a wrong-sex passport. Last I heard Trump's EO specifically excludes people who are travelling to the US for the purpose of sport from entering on a wrong-sex passport but otherwise it doesn't matter. This may have changed.

I'm mostly a Europhile - the coming together of countries that were slaughtering each other just a decade or so before remains an impressive achievement in my opinion, and the standard of living, and the level of women's rights, were improved in many countries by membership of the EEC/EU - it certainly speeded things up for Irish women.

But this wholesale buying-in to gender ideology by the EU is awful.
It corrodes and corrupts wherever it takes hold.

Agree with this.

The EU is not critically examined by the liberal media (and the conservative media always hated it anyway). These polls they commission showing majority support for rejoining: maybe they should ask the question again, but point out that accepting the euro wuold be a pre-condition. How enthusiastic would the GBP be then?

Most UK id documents like passports and driving licences can have either sex on them and no GRC needed. The only documents that require a GRC before you can change the sex are birth, death and marriage certificates.

Now it's clear that the Equality Act 2010 says that a GRC doesn't change sex for the purposes of the Act so a UK GRC is pretty much useless in practice. (I got to ask Michael Foran!) But that's not all good news because we still have gender self-id for the other documents and there's an ongoing fight debate over what should be on a digital id.

The judgment is about the interaction between freedom of movement and Article 8 privacy rights. The minimum obligation laid on individual states is to ensure that their transgender citizens can cross borders without raising eyebrows. Bulgaria could permit its citizens to change the sex marker in their passports, and to change their given names from the masculine to feminine form or vice versa, and that would do the job. The UK already meets the standard, even for non-GRC holders.

I don't think the ruling obliges Bulgaria to change anyone's birth certificate. Although, maybe there are circumstances where an EU state or other party can demand to see the birth certificate of a resident from another EU state?? In which case the privacy issue would come up again.

I really don't understand where this legal concept of having a right to keep your actual sex private comes from - I mean, to be frank, the men who claim transgender status are obviously men and there's no hiding it, irrespective of what their official documents state. Even the men who claim extreme passing privilege, when stood beside actual women, look male in proportions, frame, gait, attitude, mannerisms. So they're not convincingly hiding their actual sex to the point where documentation would give the game away.

And if they were treated legally as men in airports, at border crossings etc, with documentation that reflected their sex, I don't see how that would impede their ability to travel within the EU - if they have valid travel documents, how they're dressed isn't a reason to prevent them entering a country. I'm sure border guards can cope with the concept of a man crossdressing as a women.

So I don't understand why the courts/legal sector want society to lie and say that what we see/know is the opposite of what we see/know. 🤷‍♀️

Article 8(2) means it's a qualified right and can be overridden - and pro-trans legislation doesn't even work on its own terms unless we know, at least some of the time, who the trans people are!

But border control is a practical problem irrespective, because the guards may need to know exactly what they're dealing with, not just to validate identity, but to inform the conduct of strip searches, for instance.

The obvious solution is a birth-sex marker plus an optional trans marker, but of course they'd hate that.

It's insoluble, because the law doesn't have the power to change physical reality give the great big crybabies the moon on a stick.

Thanks for the info. I agree that a lot of trans-related legislation doesn't work unless people can state that they can see what actual sex someone is.

I was wondering how the physical searching goes - if border guards put someone through the scanner and it bleeps with an 'Unexpected item in the bagging area' alert because that traveller's body doesn't match the expected profile for the sex on the ID documentation (which lists the person as female) then it's actually causing problems for the traveller. If the documentation stated male then the item wouldn't be unexpected 🤔

Also, I don't like the idea that falsifying sex markers on ID documentation would result in female staff being compelled to physically search a male traveller who claims to be female. That seems very dubious and unfair to me.

I also agree that stating both sex and trans status on documentation makes the most sense for the rest of the world but I can see the trans lobby fighting that tooth and nail.

There was another thread about this started only a day ago so maybe look for that and see that comments are on that.

But as the UK allows its own citizens to change both their passport and / or their driving licence on nothing more than asking for it, this ruling makes no difference does it?

I think you just complete a form and you aren't charged for doing it.

Not sure about a name change, and if that has to be verfified by a deed poll.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5502740-ecj-ruling-on-bulgaria-trans-law-implications-for-future-uk-cases

There you go.