What is in Kelvin's Head?

Gender Recognition Act Reform – It’s Time

24/10/2022

This week the Scottish Government will be considering a piece of legislation which will affect most people’s lives very little but which has great significance for those seeking legal recognition that their gender is different to that which was assigned to them at birth.

People being recognised legally as having a changed gender is nothing particularly new – it has been happening for years. What it means is that people are able to have access to documents that reflect their lived experience in the world. After all, if everyone experiences you as being one gender and yet your passport indicates that you are legally a different gender then that is going to cause you trouble sooner or later.

The proposals being discussed this week are mostly about the simple question of who should make the decision about someone’s changed gender. Up until now, it has been necessary to get a medic to agree, after a long process of living in one’s new gender that one is in fact now legitimately the gender that one already knows oneself to be.

One of the problems with this is that doctors (as represented by their professional bodies) don’t seem to feel that this is an appropriate decision for a medic to make about another individual.

There has been a great deal of debate in recent years about this. Some of it reminds me of the very worst public prejudice about gay people that we used to see in the public realm all the time. Some of it has been barely hidden hatred of trans people.

Now, I’m not trans, so people might wonder whether I’ve got any skin in this game, so to speak. Well, I have been the victim of an anti-trans hate crime. (That’s not just my opinion, that was the determination of a Sheriff Court judgement). Being the target of that hatred was horrible. How much more horrible it must be to be trans and be subject to the current discourse day in, day out.

The question that I always ask people who are worried about changes to the Gender Recognition Act is always the same. “Who do you think should decide whether someone has changed gender?”

I don’t always get an answer to this. It seems to me that the driving force in all of this should be those who are at the heart of these matters – those seeking to be recognised as having a gender expression different to that with which they were born.

The current proposals don’t have any effect on the right to use gendered spaces – access to spaces and services generally was determined with the Equality Act. The current proposals have no effect on anyone’s rights, other than the right of someone to access a passport and other similar official documents that are appropriate to who they are.

I’ve yet to meet anyone objecting to reforming the Gender Recognition Act who has witnessed any crime involving access to gendered spaces that they thought should be reported to the police.

Yes, oddly, they still often claim to be against “self ID” for trans people.

At that point in the conversation I usually say that I can think of no-one other than a trans person who is better qualified to determine their gender and that they should be able to do so, subject to it being a criminal offence to make a fraudulent application to be recognised in a gender that was not assigned to one at birth.

“Yes,” cry those who claim to be against self-ID – “Yes, that’s what we need! We need it to be illegal to make a fraudulent claim that one is a different gender – that’s what the government should do”.

I then find myself having to explain patiently that this is exactly what the government is proposing and what trans people are asking for.

It is time, for reasons of dignity and justice and common sense that the Gender Recognition Act was amended to allow this to be the way that people get access to the documents that they need and which reflect who they are.

The time for Gender Recognition Act reform in Scotland is now. The government should press on ahead confident that they are doing the right thing.

gender, Gender Regognition Act, GRA, trans

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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