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 “Reclaiming the web”

Paul Hutchinson

14/10/2015

Thank you for making me think in a different direction just before pausing for lunch. I have never had a blog, so came quite late to Internet social discourse, and have engaged more since joining one major network in 2010 and another in early 2014 – normally using those networks rather than a comment box such as this. Not all of us are natural creators of substantial original content, but like to be thoughtful in brief exchange, and so both those major networks, though cursed with many difficulties, serve those brief exchanges quite well. I do agree that the endless recycling of links (on both of them) can be wearying, and I do wish that some old friends would be a little more self-critical. But the price of any kind of social discourse is that one is vulnerable to the otherness of the other.
I feel I ought to be writing a more substantial comment here, but hope that this is enough. The time is not always there to offer deeper reflection: but sometimes a blogger needs to hear at least a small splash from the stone thrown down the well!

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1. Kelvin
  
  14/10/2015
  
  Thanks for the comment, Paul. I’m aware that not everyone is a content creator, but perhaps what I miss is the sense of discovering different communities online and keeping the comments more or less in one place helps with that.
  
  The glory days of 50 or more comments on a post are probably over. I suspect I mourn the sense of community being created even more than I miss the interesting reflections of others. Retweets and shares are always welcome – but they are the means of amplification. Becoming loud isn’t the same as becoming wise, nor the same as becoming connected.
  
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Seph

14/10/2015

It’s a damnable shame—and mostly the fault of Facebook. Twitter at least has an etiquette of sorts, wherein it is considered impolite not to respond to the original tweet, which is usually made by the blogger in question.

Facebook, in short, is the scourge of the Internet. I have often been in groups which have decided to do all of their organizing on Facebook, despite my protests that I’m not on Facebook and don’t want to be, and really an e-mail list would be just as easy, and would they like me to set one up. This inevitably leads to my marginalization within the group, as no-one bothers to keep me abreast of the discussions to which I am not party.

Can you tell I’m upset about this?

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Daniel Lamont

14/10/2015

I am only an occasional user of Facebook but I know what you mean, Kelvin. And indeed, I never read the comments ‘below the line’ on newspapers like ‘The Guardian’. You offer some useful advice. I read yours and one or two other blogs on a regular basis but don’t always comment. However, I can see that the author of a blog would like some feedback. I would be sad not to have the blogs that I do read because they do give me a sense of what people are thinking and an odd sense of community.

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Father Ron Smith

14/10/2015

My own contribution to the blogopshere is, I’m afraid, Father Kelvin, limited to comments I make on other people’s blogs (such as ‘Thinking Anglicans’ and ‘Anglican Down Under’ – a local NZ forum; plus my own blog ‘kiwianglo’, where i pluck articles that interest me personally from the web and provide my own commentary. This still interests me, personally, and provides my few readers with information they might not otherwise be bothered to glean for themselves. Like you, I am no longer an avid Facebook fan.

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David Campbell

16/10/2015

Hi Kelvin – thoughtful as ever – and yours is invariably the first blog I turn to each day. That you bring pressing issues to a wider audience and to people who know, or used to know, the church you serve is a great thing. I’m still blogging relatively strongly, but it’s certainly a different blogging experience when work is set in a very different context and especially community from previously, writing these days mainly for myself about things that interest me, although not quite at the address you have in your Blog Roll. http://www.limpingtowardsthesunrise.com is where it’s “all” happening.

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1. Kelvin
  
  16/10/2015
  
  Thanks David – nice to hear from you. I’ve amended the link.
  
  I don’t think many people use blogrolls to find blogs these days but whenever I remove it my mother complains…
  
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