Thread by @LGBTLD

People have approached us and told us they’re confused by this Gender Recognition Act stuff. “What’s all this about self ID?”, they ask us. “We are so confused!”, they say.

With all the misinformation about, who can blame them? So settle in for tve Lib Dem guide to the GRA.

Until the 1970s, when people transitioned they generally wrote off to various places: the passport office, the DVLA, the nice tax people (look, I paid you OK? Please don’t hurt me!) and the register office.

And they would be like, “I have transitioned. Please update my records”.

And the various departments would be like, “You told us you have transitioned and lo, you sent a note from your doctor! Ok, we’ve updated the stuff”.

And milk and honey flowed and all was well

Then famous trans woman model, April Ashley, married Arthur Corbett, who later became Baron Rowallan. The marriage broke down and April wanted maintenance payments.

Arthur, who seems like a bit of an arse frankly (I can say that, he’s long dead) responsed by going legal.

“Ah, we were never married because you’re really a man and two men can’t get married so I don’t owe you a penny”.

And the judge agreed with him, and precedent was established. Trans people could get their gender markers changed on passports, etc, but not birth certificates.

And therefore they couldn’t get married in their identified gender.

Not just April, all of them.

So yeah, thanks for nothing Arthur.

Fast forward 30 years and the government, under pressure from the European Court of Human Rights, introduced the Gender Recognition Act, 2004. This gave trans people back the right to change their birth certificates and therefore get married.

But the process was onerous and relied on being judged by a “gender recognition panel”. They meet only a few times a year and their word is final. They often turn people down for silly reasons, usually relating to something they don’t like on the lengthy form you have to do.

Since 2004 other European countries have passed their own gender recognition acts, based not on a panel but on self declaration, much like we had in the UK prior to the legal mess that started this whole thing.

And we also have same sex marriage in Great Britain (and hopefully soon in NI), which made most of the reason for the GRA to exist go away. The 2010 Equality Act also watered it down somewhat. Now pretty much all it does is reissues your birth certificate.

But that’s important to a lot of trans people, and the government, to its credit, recognises this and wants to bring us in line with more modern legislation in other counties.

So they’re planning to launch a consultation on that later in the spring.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

This stuff about changing rooms and suchlike? A smokescreen. Totally irrelevant.

Used by transphobes to stir up hatred and try to drive trans people underground by denying them their legitimate existence.