Gender Recognition Act

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Monday 21st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Christopher. It is also a pleasure to speak in this debate, and I thank the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) for leading it. I also thank all of those who signed the petition, including 400 of my constituents in Oxford East.

We all have to recognise that these topics are very sensitive and important, and that they need to be discussed with respect and compassion. Solutions will be found through people working together, not through threats or intimidation in any direction. As my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) rightly said, solutions will be found through learning, not lecturing.

I have to say that I do not like describing these topics as a debate, because that suggests to trans people that the fact they are trans is somehow part of a debate, which is not right. It also suggests that there are two sides that are at it hammer and tongs with nothing in common, and that we cannot find those solutions. I do not believe that that is right. I have the optimism of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard). Where there has been disagreement, very often that relates to assumptions around the impact of different measures. My experience is similar to that of my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran): that once those assumptions are unpacked, we can get into the nuts and bolts of the implications of different forms of legislative change. That is surely what we need to be doing in this discussion.

The Labour party is committed to ensuring that trans people, who face persistent and growing discrimination in society as we have heard, can live their lives with equality, dignity and respect, and that everyone can do so. We will resist attempts to roll back hard-won rights. This discussion must take place based on the evidence. I have felt at certain points that we slid a bit away from that evidence in the discussion. There already is accompanying material to the Equality Act. There already is a code of practice produced by the EHRC about how the single-sex exemptions should work. That was produced with the GRA already in existence, so that corpus is already there—it is important that we recognise that.

It is important that we do not conflate gender with sex. We did slide into that quite a number of times during the discussion. We must not conflate gender reassignment with sexuality—it also felt like that took place at certain points. When we have that discussion based on the evidence, the way forward is clear. We need reform of the Gender Recognition Act. It must include a process of self-identification, and we must continue to support the implementation of the Equality Act, including the single-sex exemptions. My party is proud of the Equality Act. It was passed by the last Labour Government. We stand by it, including the provisions on the protected characteristics of gender reassignment and sex, and those single-sex exemptions.

The Equality Act, as is clear from the accompanying material, from the code of practice and so forth, assumes the inclusion of trans people with or without a GRC, as we have been talking about, and protects them from discrimination while allowing for specific circumstances where the single-sex exemption is applied. That is the right approach, and it is the one that my party supports. We believe that the Gender Recognition Act does need reform, and that reform is a narrow issue. I could not agree more with what my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle) said in that regard.

As the Government’s own consultation recognised, the current process is

“too bureaucratic, too expensive and too intrusive”.

That must change, and that is why the Act needs to be updated. It has been more than three years since Ministers said they would make it easier for trans people to achieve legal gender recognition and that they would make that process less intrusive. However, as we have discussed, all we have seen are these very limited changes that do not make that difference. I could not have agreed more with the description provided by my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) about the Government’s approach. They promised that there would be change, but after many years they have simply not delivered on that promise. I ask the Minister directly whether he genuinely believes there is no case for additional reform.

When the Minister for Women and Equalities announced that there would be no further reform of the GRA, she said she believed in

“individual liberty and in the humanity and dignity of every person.”

Can the Minister tell us how leaving a system in place where a trans person still requires the consent of their spouse to obtain a certificate in 2022 is giving that person individual liberty and dignity? The words of the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) about how dehumanising that is were incredibly powerful. I would also like to hear the Minister’s response to the situations described by my hon. Friends the Members for Wallasey and for Brighton, Kemptown—the Kafkaesque situations that people land in when trying to obtain certificates. Can he tell the House how he thinks the minimal changes introduced by the Government will make that transitioning process substantively less intrusive?

In fact, have those minimal changes even begun? Eighteen months on from the promise to digitise this process, it is not clear that anything has actually happened. There does not seem to have been any change. Of course, this is in the context of slow action and even reverses in a number of other areas. When there is cross-party agreement, it is important to acknowledge that. The Government’s LGBT+ action plan included many measures that the Opposition strongly agreed with, but when the Minister for Women and Equalities was asked last May to explain why there had not been any progress updates since it was announced, she suggested that the plan had just been abandoned:

“It is probably because there is a new Government in place under the leadership of Boris Johnson.”

Is that plan still there, or is it not? Of course, the plan covers many of the issues we have been talking about today: healthcare, discrimination, hate crime and conversion therapy, where a huge loophole has been introduced by the Government around consent.

This has been an important discussion, and I thank everybody in the House and beyond it who has entered into it in good faith and in the spirit of trying to find solutions. We believe that there is a clear solution when it comes to reform of the GRA, as I have just set out, but amid all this talk about legislative reform, systems and processes, we should never lose sight of the fact that we are talking about people: their rights, their lives, and their very sense of who they are. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) made that very clear in his comments. We are talking about people who are transitioning to a different gender, and people who have suffered domestic abuse and need somewhere safe to process that. We are always talking about people. As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson) said, we must not pit different groups against each other, but sadly, we are seeing far too much of that when it comes to these critical issues. We need compassion, and we need a Government who put compassion at the heart of their response. That is what my party is determined to do.