Why so many applications for GRCs?
Despite uncertainty about the legal rights conferred by a gender-recognition certificate, the number being issued is rising sharply
Tomorrow I’m off to the Genspect conference in Lisbon. It’s an incredibly beautiful city, and I’m looking forward to dusting off my Portuguese, learned in Brazil. I still have fond memories of a taxi driver from a previous visit to Lisbon describing the way I speak as “com açucar” – with sugar, a reminder that there are many colonial histories, not just one. A slight complication this time is that I have started learning Spanish for fun, and will probably find I’m now not just Brazilian-inflected, but speaking Portunhol…
I’ll be speaking on the Saturday, and will share my speaking notes here afterwards. In the meantime, here’s a piece I was commissioned a couple of weeks ago to write for a newspaper that will remain nameless, which never ran it. Irritating, but these things happen.
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When the Gender Recognition Act became law in 2004, it was thought that around 5,000 people would want a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), a piece of paper that allows you to get your birth certificate reissued with the sex changed. What a difference two decades make. Figures published this week [not this week any more...] show that the number of applications has hit a new record. In 2023-24 there were just under 1,400, of which 1,088 were granted – 75 percent higher than two years ago.
The type of person applying is changing too. At first, most were middle-aged biological men; now millennials and Gen Z predominate, and the majority are biological women. During the election campaign Labour vowed to make getting a GRC simpler. If this happens, applications may rise further.
In 2004, legislators expected that GRCs would follow rigorous medical assessment. They were intended to make life easier for a tiny minority who were taking cross-sex hormones, had undergone genital surgery and “passed” as the sex they identified as. Now, for many young people, being trans is simply a matter of self-declaration. Passing is passé, and using “preferred pronouns” – “she” and “her” for male people who identify as female, and “he” and “him” for female people who identify as male – is practically obligatory.
A poll carried out in 2022 for the human-rights charity where I work, Sex Matters, found that most secondary teachers know of at least one pupil in their school who identifies as trans or non-binary (neither male nor female). We have heard of classes where as many as a tenth of the pupils identify as trans – often without their parents knowing.
The trans lobby would have you believe that this is a story of progress, as young people feel increasingly accepted in their chosen identities. I couldn’t disagree more. This is a social contagion spread in the media, online and in schools, as being trans has been rebranded as a fashionable, high-status identity rather than a rare and tragic medical condition.
In 2014 the American magazine Time declared a “transgender tipping point”, putting Laverne Cox, the trans star of the Netflix hit show “Orange is the New Black”, on its cover. Two years later National Geographic declared a “gender revolution” with a cover story about a nine-year-old boy who identified as a girl. Actors and musicians jumped on the trend, gushing about their trans or non-binary offspring: Warren Beatty, Jamie Lee Curtis, David Tennant, Charlize Theron, Sigourney Weaver, Cher, Sade, Sting and many more.
Teenage girls shared gender-affirming slogans on Tumblr and fan-fiction websites, such as “if you think you’re trans, you probably are”. Photogenic trans influencers on YouTube presented cross-sex hormones and “gender affirming” surgery as life-changing and risk-free.
Local authorities started using a “Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit” published by Brighton-based charity Allsorts in 2014. This claimed sex is not a fixed biological reality but “assigned at birth”, and that a boy who identifies as a girl becomes literally female and vice versa. Teachers were told that being a boy or girl is a matter of conforming to sex stereotypes. In a leaked recording in 2018, a trainer from trans charity Mermaids can be heard saying that children’s identities depend on where they lie on a “gender spectrum” with Barbie at one end and G.I. Joe at the other.
Meanwhile trans lobby groups were pushing the idea that gender identity trumps biological sex in all aspects of public life. Since 2015, when Stonewall added the “T” (transgender) to its founding remit of “LGB” (lesbian, gay and bisexual), they have insisted that identifying as trans confers the right to use whichever single sex spaces you prefer. Known as “gender self-ID”, this was never the law of the land. But everyone from politicians and civil servants to employers and service-providers obediently rewrote sex-based policies to centre gender identity.
To give just one example, UK Active, which represents more than 4,000 fitness centres, gyms and swimming pools, tells its members that they must allow trans people to use whichever changing rooms they want. Any woman who complains about someone she perceives to be a man stripping and showering alongside her may be told she is a bigot whose membership may be revoked.
During the past couple of years the harms done by gender self-ID have started to come to public notice. Take the NHS nurses in Durham suing their hospital for forcing them to share their changing room with a trans-identifying male colleague who, they allege, watches them undress and makes suggestive remarks. Or the scandal of Paralympian Valentina Petrillo, a 51-year-old Italian father of two who started identifying as a woman five years ago and raced this week [again, no longer this week...] against women in their 20s. Or Isla Bryson, the Scottish double rapist who started identifying as a woman after being charged in late 2022, and who would now be held in a women’s jail if it had not been for the public uproar.
As such cases have sparked widespread outrage, politicians and regulators are belatedly taking notice. The previous government wrote draft guidance for schools rowing back on gender self-ID, and warning teachers not to present gender identity as fact. Under Kishwer Falkner, its chair since 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has started to withdraw flawed guidance it produced before her arrival under the influence of Stonewall. It remains to be seen how much of this will be undone by the new Labour government, but the spread of disinformation is finally being halted.
And therein lies a paradoxical reason for rising applications for GRCs: the trans lobby’s overreach. The more people learn about the harms of gender self-ID, the more they realise that even if someone identifies as the opposite sex, other people are not obliged to play along. And that makes official recognition of trans identities look more appealing.
That is despite a lack of clarity about the impact of a GRC on a person’s legal status. The big question is whether it changes a person’s sex for the purposes of the Equality Act. Recent court judgments in a case taken by grassroots campaign group For Women Scotland suggest that it does, but they have appealed to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case later this year.
Obviously, a piece of paper saying that a man is female makes no difference to a woman who interacts with him in any situation where privacy, dignity or safety matter. But as things stand, a man with a GRC stating his “acquired gender” as female may apply for women-only jobs like bra-fitter or rape crisis counsellor, and use the women’s toilets and changing rooms at work. The NHS regards him as suitable to carry out intimate exams on female patients who have requested same-sex care. Police forces will allow him to strip-search female suspects; if he commits a crime he is likely to be held in a women’s prison. In all these cases a complicated exception in the Equality Act allows GRCs to be ignored, but it’s legally risky and rarely used.
What the Supreme Court must decide, in essence, is whether a GRC is simply paperwork that grants trans people personal validation, or a legal cudgel they can use to enforce the legal fiction that they have changed sex. If the latter, the number of applications is likely to rise further – and the harms will get worse.
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