What were they thinking? When Tony Blair agreed, in 2004, to legislation allowing transsexuals – as they were then called – to change their legal sex, he probably thought Labour was merely ‘being kind’ to a tiny number of people with the medical condition of gender dysphoria. He never expected thousands of young people to start asking for gender reassignment, puberty blockers, and genital surgery. Yet here we are.
Nor, I’m sure, did the Labour MPs who voted for the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) expect women to be forced to undress in front of natal men in changing rooms, or that male-bodied transgender athletes would be competing in women’s sporting events, or transgender sex offenders would be housed in women’s prisons.
I am certain that no one in 2004 thought that NHS doctors, after changing sex, should have any disciplinary issues and suspensions wiped from the record by the General Medical Council (GMC). Wes Streeting claims to be appalled by this revelation, but it stems from laws passed 20 years ago.
Clauses in the GRA 2004 made it illegal to disclose information relating to the gender reassignment process or even disclose that a trans person has transitioned. The GRA, in effect, allows trans people to be ‘born again’ as legal women, with a new birth certificate and the right to be referred to under their new name. The GMC regulators assumed this meant wiping the records relating to what trans activists call their ‘deadname’.
The road to hell is paved with human rights lawyers. Judicial activists had argued in 2004 that not allowing people to change their legal sex conflicted, in an obscure manner, with the European Convention on Human Rights. Labour was eager to advance its ‘progressive agenda’ and probably thought this was a low-cost exercise in legislative virtue-signalling.
As a result, gender ideology has now been embedded in the UK public sector for two decades and has been pickled into what Neil Kinnock might have called ‘a rigid dogma’. It is why NHS Fife remained adamant in the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal last week that trans women must, under the law, be allowed to use women’s toilets and changing rooms. If they are legally women, how can they be excluded?
The health board had suspended Peggie, a nurse at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, for complaining about the presence of a trans doctor, Beth (aka Theodore) Upton, in the room when she was dealing with excessive menstrual flow. The DEI commissars in Fife insist that it is discriminatory even to refer to trans women as men and last week opened a new disciplinary investigation into Ms Peggie’s alleged ‘misgendering’ of Dr Beth Upton even before the employment tribunal has concluded.
Critics have, of course, pointed out that the 2010 Equality Act recognises the right to single-sex spaces. It says that trans women can be excluded ‘as a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim’, but the original 2004 Act was never amended to recognise this.
Indeed, a High Court judge, Lady Haldane, ruled in 2022 that the Gender Recognition Act 2004 changes a person’s legal sex ‘for all purposes’. It alters the meaning of ‘woman’, even under the Equality Act, to include trans women. The UK Supreme Court is currently considering an appeal against this ruling.
But this is not an issue that can be resolved by lawyers. If Wes Streeting wants to end the absurdity of doctors being reborn, and if Labour politicians like the Scottish leader, Anas Sarwar, want women’s spaces to be sacrosanct, then they must eventually address the source of this legal absurdity.
In 2004, Labour should have thought through the consequences of allowing men to become women. Since then, HR departments throughout the public sector have been schooled by a galaxy of largely state-funded advocacy groups like the Equality Network, Engender, LGBT Youth, and Stonewall to enforce the 2004 Act. It is time to defund DEI and reform the GRA.
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