Britain is becoming sick over the trans debate. Only facts can cure it
by Nick Timothy, Telegraph:
Women’s rights are under attack and until common sense is restored, things will only get worse.
Imagine the outrage if, after the discovery that yet another rapist had been found amid the ranks of the Metropolitan Police, the Commissioner had told women to calm down. “The vast majority of officers,” he might have told protesters, “are likely to be safe.”
The thought is preposterous. Yet it is the very argument made by those defending Scottish legislation that would allow people to change their gender in law without existing safeguards. Lord Falconer, Lord Chancellor under Tony Blair, dismissed the complaints of those concerned about the privacy and safety of women, saying, “The vast majority of [applicants] are likely to be genuine.”
How large a minority Lord Falconer believes might not be genuine was left unsaid. He was, after all, just guessing. But this is not an issue about which we can be blithe. For the consequences for the privacy and safety of women – and indeed the very sense of self felt by women as women – is at stake.
The details are complicated, but worth dwelling upon. At present, the Gender Recognition Act 2004 means, across the United Kingdom, transgender people can achieve legal recognition of their changed gender. To do that, they apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), and to receive one they must be over 18, be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, show they have lived in their “acquired” gender for two years, and make a statutory declaration that they will live this way permanently. They are not required to undergo gender reassignment surgery or hormone treatment.
The Act involves an obvious dishonesty. For while its title refers to gender, those in receipt of a GRC are allowed to change their recorded sex on their birth certificate – and changing sex is a biological impossibility. Still, only around 5,000 people have changed their gender status this way, and that small number has limited the social consequences of the lawful lie.
But now the Scottish parliament – thwarted so far by the Government in Westminster, which is blocking the legislation – wants to remove existing legal safeguards. Sixteen-year-olds will be permitted to change gender in law after six months of living in their acquired gender, and 18-year-olds after only three months. There will be no requirement for a medical diagnosis, or indeed any verification at all.
It is not difficult to see the risks. Already, a Scottish judge has ruled that “the meaning of sex for the purposes of the [Equality] Act … is not limited to biological or birth sex, but includes those in possession of a GRC…stating their acquired gender, and thus their sex”.
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