Gender Recognition Bill: The Parliamentary Process
An update on what’s happened so far with Gender Recognition Bill
July 2003
What’s Happened So Far
In December 2002 the government announced its intention to change the law, to allow us to change our birth certificates … and, crucially, the government promised that the change on paper would amount to a change of sex for all legal purposes.
Once that decision had been made by ministers, the wheels of government then began to turn.
For several years, trans issues had been largely the responsibility of two or three people in the Lord Chancellors Department (LCD), who co-ordinated the Interdepartmental Working Group on Transsexual People. After December’s decision to legislate, a new Gender Registration Division was set up, with several new staff brought in to work full-time on trans rights. They are currently structured as a “Bill Team” — people whose job is to produce a Bill, and help ministers ensure that it is passed by Parliament.
The Bill team started by reading all the mountains of paper-work which had been generated over the last few years, and making sure that they fully understood all the issues involved in turning the minister’s decision into a workable law. I can’t stress enough how much detail they have gone into, or how thoroughly and how quickly they worked to ensure that they had the full picture. These are experienced people, who have worked on many other pieces of legislation, and they are highly skilled.
As you know, for several years Press For Change vice-presidents have been in constant contact with the Lord Chancellors Department (now renamed the Department of Constitutional Affairs, or DCA). This has involved some meetings, but mostly a lot of liaison by phone and email, often taking up several hours a day.
The process of drafting a Bill is not easy. Many of the issues affect other government departments, and for every item involved, the approval of those other departments has to be sought and obtained … with the reasoning explained, and objections overcome or accepted. This Bill will be a relatively short one by most standards, but even so it has been a revelation to me to find just how much detailed liaison work is required, and how many people are involved. It would be easy to dismiss this as nit-picking or excessive bureaucracy, but that would be wrong — it’s a matter of being absolutely sure that everything works, and will continue to work for all the years that the law will be in effect.
One of the most impressive things about the work of the Bill Team has been their sheer attention to detail. We have spent years repeatedly helping to explain to the officials all the variety of circumstances which trans people have faced, and how diverse our community is … and now, as they have been working to turn that information into clauses of a law, we have been responding to a seemingly endless stream of questions about how particular approaches might affect real people, as well raising all the points which we need to stress.
I wish we could explain to everyone more of the detail of the issues which have been examined so carefully, but I will just take one area as an example … and even then, I can’t do much more than hint at all that has been discussed.
A simplistic understanding of how people go through gender transition would assume that trans people go to a gender identity clinic, spend a few years being assessed and then have surgery arranged by the clinic (GIC). Of course, that’s only the case for some people. Others may use only private medicine, and never set foot in a GIC; others may attend a GIC for a while, and then go private … or they may switch from the private sector to a GIC. Some people will have surgery arranged by a GIC, others may have it privately, and many have surgery overseas; others have some surgery, but not all they would want … and plenty may have no surgery at all. The process may take as little as twelve months, it usually takes several years, it’s not unusual for it to take a decade … and for some people it has taken as much as thirty years. People may have started their transition in the last few years, or they may have completed it forty years ago.
The re-registration process requires some evidence of how people transitioned, and what medical treatment they had … but as you can see from the paragraph above, it would be frighteningly easy for the law to make incorrect assumptions about what documents people might have available, or whether the doctors involved would still be alive, let alone available to write a letter confirming that they had provided treatment. We have been concerned to ensure that this new law will be one which works for all of us … and that’s why both PFC and the civil servants have spent hundreds of hours examining all these details.
Unfortunately, civil servants can’t do this sort of exploratory work in public: they have to be free to consider the options and ask questions and explore solutions without each step of their work being waved around as if it was the end-result. It’s in all our interest to make sure that this work is done … not just in considering the pathways through transition, but in dozens of other areas.
I know that many of you are very frustrated by the apparent lack of progress, and the abysmally low level of feedback which we have been able to give you. Those of us who have been talking to government all share that frustration, but unfortunately it is an inevitable part of the process.
Thankfully, we are now about to enter a new phase.
What Will Happen Next
Now the draft bill has been published, you can all see for yourselves how well we have done in helping government to get it right. We certainly don’t have everything the way we would want it, and I’m sure there are some things that could be better … but we hope that most crucial issues are covered fairly, in a way that will be workable for all of our diverse community.
We’ll need feedback on it from all of you, so that we can respond to the short consultation process which the govt has promised on the draft. (Obviously, everyone is also free to respond individually).
As well as that public consultation, the bill will be sent for scrutiny to a parliamentary committee … and PFC will also make a submission to that committee.
Once the committee has reported, the government will amend the Bill as necessary … and then it will be ready to table the final bill before parliament. That’s the point at which it becomes a parliamentary document … and then the debates start, the committees consider amendments … and eventually, if all goes right, the bill is passed and receives the royal assent. At that point, it becomes law … and then, as soon as the people and procedures are in place, we can start applying for our new birth certificates.
From all the discussions we’ve had, my best guess is that if the Bill is included in The Queen’s Speech in November 2003, it could receive the royal assent as early as April or May 2004 … and the first corrected birth certificates would be issued in late 2004 or early 2005. I believe that it is very unlikely that that we would have to wait until 2006.
However … it ain’t all over till the fat lady sings.
After this frustrating period of everything happening in private, the process is about to become very public again.
We will need to have a concerted push to lobby MPs, and to ask them for a specific commitment to support the bill. We will all need to explain the bill to our local news media, who may well be curious about what this actually means … and we will also need to win the support of the Lords.
We need to make sure that every one of the thousand or so Lords and MPs who get to vote on our future has actually met us. We have to be sure that they know us as real people, not as media stereotypes … and we need to make sure that they understand why we want the law to take a certain shape, and why some ideas are unworkable.
That work will involve ALL of us, and we will all have a lot to do. Right now, the vice-presidents are preparing for the launch of the bill … but once that is over, we’ll be concentrating to ensuring that everone knows what they can do … and on listening carefully to what you all want.