Responding to the Scottish Government’s Gender Recognition Act consultation
by Carys Moseley, Christian Concern:
The Scottish Government is currently consulting again on proposals to amend the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland. It has published a draft Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which is printed within the consultation along with Explanatory Notes and impact assessments. We have responded to the consultation, and would encourage you to do the same using our guide printed below. You need to use the online response form linked to from the consultation website. The closing date is Tuesday 17 March.
Below we explain why the format of the consultation questions is a problem and show how to raise relevant objections and queries within that format. Our response can be accessed here.
Problems with the format of the questions
There are five consultation questions. Questions 1, 2, 4 and 5 are all open-ended questions:
‘do you have any comments on x?’
If your answer is ‘Yes’ you are invited to provide comments.
Given that the questions are about the proposals to shorten the time a person may live in their acquired (i.e. chosen) gender and the length of time required for a period of reflection prior to obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate, this is a serious problem; these are serious issues and no clear option to accept or reject them is given.
Draft Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill
Important here is the fact that a draft bill has been published along with the consultation setting out a statutory basis for the proposed changes. This bill is clearly intended to be tabled before the Scottish Parliament during this current session, i.e. before the Scottish elections in May 2021. The SNP government has made it very clear that it wants to pass these reforms before then.
As the consultation does not give clear opportunities to accept or reject the proposals, with the exception of question 3 on whether or not to lower the age of gender recognition from 18 to 16, it seems that the Scottish government is not bound by anything said in the consultation responses. This then means that the real debate will occur once the bill gets tabled in the Scottish Parliament. At that stage, only Members of the Scottish Parliament would be allowed to make changes to the proposals.
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