When I was growing up in the UK there were similar restrictions in place, and due to the oppressive environment I grew up in, I didn’t realise I was bi until my mid-20s, and didn’t know I was trans until my late 30s, even though I could have been aware sooner if I’d just… understood it.
This regressive attitude (coupled with the direct erosion of the already-atrocious trans healthcare provision) is plainly an attempt to make people stay in the closet and not even know where the doors are, or that there even is a closet - and that’s the best case outcome of this (the worst of course being a more direct reduction in numbers of non-cisheteronormative people due to declining mental health).
The one solace we have is that this garbage is the result of the death throes of a government desperate to do as much harm as possible while it still can. At most there’s only 8 months left before there must be an election, and they are widely expected to suffer their worst defeat in history. We just need to demand better of our next administration (I will leave specific details of how up to the reader to infer).
I’m really glad that the likely government supermajority for the next 5 or so years is willing to listen to people and take their opinions on board.
So I’m keenly awaiting my invite to speak with the Labour top brass on this issue, as it’s one that I also have opinions on. I checked my missed calls but they must just be making the appointment for early next week or something, right?
Or is it some other reason, like the status of billionaire, which I am conspicuously about a billion pounds short of?
Maybe they’d like to arrange to speak with Graham Linehan about it to get a more balanced view instead? (/s)
Getting a GRC more easily is the only positive thing we’ve heard relating to trans rights from this group; we’ve heard the biological essentialism from several of the shadow cabinet and yesterday the story about not wanting to teach about trans identities in schools (which amounts to upholding the section 28-like policy from the blue tories).
And even this one positive sounds like it’s a lie. The current GRC process requires two years of ‘proof’ of ‘living as your acquired gender’ but this isn’t actually hard to get - any official documents like bank statements or payslips showing your new name is sufficient (any periodically-produced document is fine and most people will have something). The hard part is the “gender dysphoria” diagnosis, because currently two are required IIRC, and one must be from the list of “approved” doctors. Since the NHS waiting lists are currently alleged to be over a decade in most of the country, this means that you need to get one of these specifically through private means, putting it out of reach of many.
We can already self-id for our driving license and passport. Why does changing our gender so we can get married as a “husband” or “wife”, or be recognised as our gender after our life’s end, matter so much that it requires this much oversight? Wouldn’t it be more cost-effective, produce better outcomes, and simplify processes if we could just take our deed poll to the registry office and say “please update my gender marker, name and title”?
I’m still holding out a faint hope that we elect a strongly left-oriented opposition (at least) or that Kier is playing some kind of 15-dimensional chess to use the right wing to gain a supermajority and then reveal that they were a left-wing party all along. But I’m not naive enough to believe that to be possible.
And if you’re reading this Kier, call me gestures with hand mimicing telephone. I’m free next week for a chat if you want opinions from people who this policy would actually affect, instead of terminally-online billionaires who tweet about one subject constantly.