Is Keir Starmer trying to snatch an unlikely defeat from the jaws of victory, or is he so confident of winning that he thinks he can ignore sense and reason – certainly on the issue of sex and gender?
When the Labour party manifesto dropped a couple of weeks ago, it included a pledge to ‘modernise, simplify, and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law to a new process’. This morning we learned some of the details.
This might not trouble privileged men like Starmer but it is an issue for vulnerable women reliant on publicly funded services
According to reports, Labour will remove any need for someone to ‘live in their preferred gender’, halve the number of medical reports so that the word of only one doctor is needed, and abolish the panel that checks that applications are legally compliant. If Labour gets its way, someone will be able to change their legal sex without making any changes whatsoever to the way they live their lives, and with the support of just one doctor. With no prospect of a second opinion or legal scrutiny, that could be a nice little earner for psychiatrists happy to write what the patient wants them to write.
Make no mistake, this is self-ID in all but name. Actually, it might be even worse. Under Starmer’s watch, the concept of gender transition would be optional. James would not need to become Jenny in order to apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate. A certificate that would allow him to change all his legal documents, including his birth certificate, to show that his sex is the same as a woman.
Starmer might talk about protecting women’s spaces, and expand on his recent conversion to the truth that ‘a woman has a vagina and a man has a penis’, but if a person with a penis has a GRC then according to the law he is a woman with a penis, and providers of female services are going to have a very hard time trying to keep him out. That might not trouble privileged men like Starmer but it is an issue for vulnerable women reliant on publicly funded services.
As well as overlooking the very reasonable concerns of service providers, Labour also plan to ignore spouses. At present, husbands and wives – though it is most usually wives – have a voice when their partner applies for a GRC. If they are content for their relationship to be changed from an opposite-sex marriage to a same-sex marriage they can sign a form that goes off in the bundle to the panel. If not, the panel will issue an ‘interim GRC’ that can be used to end the marriage. Crucially, nobody in an existing marriage gets to change the nature of that marriage without the consent of the other person in that marriage. It seems that Labour plans to throw those protections out of the window as well.
Elsewhere in the news this weekend, Labour’s shadow education secretary refused to clarify whether a Labour government would uphold school’s guidance that would prevent schools from teaching that everyone has a gender identity, and presenting a smorgasbord of options to children, including non-binary, genderqueer, agender and pacman gender (I made that last one up, but it has as much validity as the rest). Asked three times whether she would keep the guidelines or bin them, Bridget Phillipson said, ‘There are trans people within society and their existence should be recognised’.
Yes, we exist, but it is not in our interest for pupils to be taught nonsense, or parents to be kept in the dark when their children change their name and pronouns in school. Neither is it in our interest for the Gender Recognition Act to be brought into disrepute by opening up loopholes that can be exploited by bad actors.
If, as Labour suggests, the GRA is outdated then there is a good argument to simply repeal it. Why should anyone need to change the record of their birth in order to live in the present. I don’t and nor do many other transsexuals. If a transition is not good enough without a GRC then it’s unlikely to be good enough with one.
With manifesto pledges, the devil is often in the detail, but we only find out these details after the election when we are stuck with the results for five years. Remarkably, this time we know the likely horrors ten days before the election. Starmer must be very confident.
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