The government committed itself to revising the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to further accommodate transsexualism, despite only 24 MPs being present during a backbench debate at the end of November.
Dismissing public safety concerns, government minister Caroline Dinenage welcomed several recommendations in the debate.
The Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, Maria Miller MP, called for ‘self-declaration’ of gender and a new ‘protected characteristic of gender identity’ in law. This means that people can set their own gender, totally independent of their biology. Many would see this as a departure from common sense.
Miller claimed that more than 650,000 people in the UK can ‘identify with being trans’ [fewer than those who signed the Coalition for Marriage petition – editor]. Fewer than 4,500 have had sex-change operations.
Risk to women
Miller’s pro-trans agenda was challenged by Labour MP Caroline Flint, who said we should ‘be wary of creating gender-neutral environments that may prove more of a risk to women’. She cited an incident in a gender-neutral toilet at the University of East Anglia, where it was ‘revealed that a man had been using those facilities to harass women’.
However, several MPs, mainly from the SNP, called for changes to the current law, to make it easier to ‘change sex’.
A milestone in equality?
Proposals included: giving people immediate access to sex-change surgery, using a system of informed consent; legal recognition for ‘young people whose gender identity is less well developed than that of an adult’ and stating ‘Mx’ before a name on a form.
Dinenage said: ‘We are the government who introduced same sex marriage, a defining milestone in equality. We will achieve the same milestone for our trans community’.
