After a number of delays, the Scottish Parliament have now presented their revised version of the Gender Recognition Act. We spoke to members of the local LGBTQ+ community to get their reaction.

Trans rights campaigners at Pride 2019 | Photo by Rhiannon J Davies

By Jack Howse

On 5 March, Shona Robison MSP introduced a reformed Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to Holyrood. The Social Justice Secretary said that the bill, which still needs to be voted on, would put an end to the “invasive and intrusive” current system for applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC).

Currently, for a person to apply for a GRC they have to have been living as their chosen gender for two years and provide medical reports that they have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Now, a person can self-declare that they are transgender and only need to provide evidence that they have been living as their chosen gender for three months. The age that someone can obtain a GRC has also been lowered to 16.

A GRC allows for a person to legally change their gender on their birth certificate and formal documents of identification. It is expected that the change will allow for the number of applications for a GRC to rise from 30 to 300 per year.

Shona Robison also alluded to the current culture wars surrounding transgender rights when she commented:

“All the evidence shows that the threat to the safety of women and comes from predatory and abusive men, not the trans community… abusive men have never had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour.”

Whilst there is much to admire around the bill, what has been left out has proved telling for some. Proposed legislation aimed at non-binary people has been quietly dropped. The initially posited bill would have seen more legal rights for the use of they/them pronouns.

What’s more, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) (the national advisory board for the promotion of equality and anti-discrimination laws) advised Holyrood to pause the implementation of the GRA. They also advised that the proposed conversion therapy ban should not extend to anti-trans conversion practices. This has created a significant amount of controversy and opened the debate on how independent and integral the EHRC is under Tory rule.

The current Gender Recognition process is deeply invasive, traumatising, unnecessary, and dehumanising. It’s time to get reform done. pic.twitter.com/A70kFJWMT2
— Mhairi Black MP🏳️‍🌈 (@MhairiBlack) February 21, 2022

Considering all these minefields, we wanted to know how the trans residents of Govanhill have reacted to the GRA bill. We asked three trans-identifying residents to detail their thoughts:

Eden – visual artist

“As a transfeminine person, it is difficult to hear an ongoing debate in the media of which people like myself are often excluded. To have to validate and argue for my own existence can be a tiring experience. Hopefully, with these reforms, people such as myself will feel a stronger sense of recognition from governmental and infrastructural systems. It provides a sense of cautious optimism, which is all one can have in strange and troubling times as the ones we find ourselves in.”

Spyro – seamstress

“Honestly, I'm disappointed but not surprised. Giving the option to gender queer people to self-identify is an empowering move for many people, but on some level, my non-binary identity thrives in being beyond the gender norms the state considers legitimate. My main hope at the moment is that the EHRC are able to withstand the Tory pushback on their proposed trans-policies, which will have huge material and emotional benefits for my trans siblings. Yet again, the UK government have weaponised feminism against the trans community in their self-serving culture war. Sad.”

Anon

“I welcome this new bill as it appreciates that trans lives there are bigger issues for us than toilets. It means we can self-identify and cut waiting times which is still a huge problem. However the bill has also exposed the ugly culture wars that is seeping throughout British politics at the moment – like the amount of TERF backlash there has been to the bill and how the bill has been opposed by EHRC. The TERF backlash also seems to eradicate the experiences of trans men.”