Jan 18, 2023

The Guardian’s take on Scotland’s Gender Reform Bill: Understand better, condemn less | Editorial Eleon 10 mins ago 172 Jhe provision of identity is at the heart of a modern state. But a person’s sense of who they are is no longer as fixed as it once was. British law has yet to catch up with the idea that people can identify themselves in more than one way. It may be easier to continue with the status quo. Often, reforms fail because legitimate concerns cannot be addressed or they fail to attract public support. Reactionary politicians can also successfully exploit fears of change. All of these reasons, and more, are behind the Westminster government’s repeated failure to update the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA), the law that allows transgender people in Great Britain Britain to have their acquired gender recognised. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon deserves credit for trying to modernize the law by addressing the concerns of a vulnerable and marginalized community through democratic debate. Scottish parties have split over the process, resulting in a bill that liberalizes the rules on legal gender change in Scotland. Holyrood delivered on Theresa May’s promise, as Conservative Prime Minister in 2017, to “streamline[e] and demedicalis[e] the process of gender change”. While Ms May’s parliamentary faction remains influential, it is grassroots favorite right-winger Kemi Badenoch who, as Conservative equality minister, has a stronger legislative voice. The result is that the Conservative government invoked Section 35 of the Scottish Act 1998 to strike down the Scottish Bill. Withholding royal assent from Holyrood law is not good for devolution. Making this a constitutional battle line might suit the Tories and the SNP, but it would be bad for Britain. The government says it is within its rights to exercise the nuclear option – because allowing someone to be legally recognized as the opposite sex through a process akin to self-identification would affect equality legislation, a matter ‘reserved’ for Westminster. The case will likely end up in the UK Supreme Court. The Scottish reforms proposed to raise the age limit for a gender recognition certificate from 18 to 16 and remove the required medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. There are fears, which cannot be dismissed lightly, that the move would expose women-only services to men falsely claiming to be transgender. It seems more of a stretch to suggest that ‘gender tourism’ would result, with people traveling to Scotland for a gender recognition certificate and then moving on to other parts of the UK. The SNP says that 25-35 people a year in Scotland are currently certified under the GRA. The UK government says the Scottish bill could see that increase to 550. Ms Sturgeon counts half that. Ireland has seen the number of ‘self-identification’ cases double to 195 since 2016, after similar laws were introduced. Mrs. Badenoch is battening down the hatches. She wants to make it harder to get legal gender recognition in the UK with certificates from countries she thinks aren’t as “rigorous” as the UK. The minister, filmed denigrating trans people, hardly inspires hope for a sensitive handling of the issue. While knee-jerk judgments and mass layoffs may excite the conservative base, they are likely to push back many voters. Hence the welcome noise from the government about the banning of trans conversion therapies. It is heartening that the Tory education secretary and Labor leader can respectfully disagree, between themselves and their parties, on whether 16 is old enough to change gender. There is room for compromise and generosity in these debates. Politicians must not let them become so toxic that they find it difficult to intervene in any meaningful way. Fr Not all news on the site expresses the point of view of the site, but we transmit this news automatically and translate it through programmatic technology on the site and not from a human editor. Eleon 10 mins ago