What Labour are planning is hardly ground-breaking (Picture: NIKLAS HALLE’N/AFP via Getty Images)
The Labour Party has reiterated its pledge to ‘modernise, simplify and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law’.
On paper, this sounds like a triumph, right?
I confess I felt a small note of hope when I first saw this proposal. After a long dark winter of constant political pressure on my community, the promise of a move – however small – away from medicalisation felt like the beginning of something positive.
But scratch the surface and what Labour are planning to replace the process for a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) with is hardly ground-breaking.
Instead of making trans people like me jump through hoops to recognise our legal gender that currently exist – like providing proof (like utility bills or library cards) that we’ve lived in our ‘acquired gender’ for two years, presenting this evidence to a panel of doctors and lawyers, and even getting permission from spouses – they instead plan to introduce a two-year ‘cooling off’ period after application, according to The Times.
Unfortunately, the little good that could be done here is all but swept away by a lack of serious commitment to trans people. Not to mention another long waiting period for a group of people who have already been waiting so long.
I find myself wondering: If I want a GRC, do I apply now and subject myself to a humiliating process? Or do I risk being forced to wait two years?
In 2018, Theresa May proposed a reform of the Gender Recognition Act (Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
When I first transitioned in 2012, I asked my GP if he could refer me to a gender specialist. Instead, he told me to wait a year to see if my feelings changed.
When I returned a year later, I was referred to a mental health unit where I was interrogated about my sex life in a bare room with ‘secure unit’ signs on the walls. It was a humiliating ordeal – and it discouraged me from seeking medical help for almost a decade.
Since then I’ve become calmer, healthier, more comfortable. After a wait of almost five years I was able to medically transition. I bought a flat, got married – things turned out OK.
But unfortunately my experience is not unique. Trans people are still being told that they are sick; that there is something wrong with them.
Removing the medical requirements (or, in Labour’s case, some of them) helps us move away from the perception of trans identity as a mental illness, and towards acceptance.
But this latest announcement still feels like a huge step back from where we should’ve been.
In 2018, Theresa May proposed a reform of the Gender Recognition Act to simplify the process and – in her words – ‘see a process that is more streamlined and de-medicalised because being trans should never be treated as an illness’.
The announcement was part of an LGBTQ+ action plan brought by a Conservative Party likely still …read more
Source:: Metro
