Govt working group: the waiting game
The government’s inter-departmental working group has done its work, and now it’s up to ministers
4th May 2000
Just over a year ago, on 14th April 1999, Home Secretary Jack Straw announced the establishment of an inter-departmental working group with the following remit:
“To consider, with particular reference to birth certificates, the need for appropriate legal measures to address the problems experienced by transsexuals, having due regard to scientific and societal developments, and measures undertaken in other countries to deal with this issue.”
The group was due to report to ministers by Easter 2000, and we have received confirmation that it completed its work on schedule.
The Working Group has done its work: now it’s over to the politicians. As with any such internal report, ministers will assess it privately and may seek amendments before publishing it. That will all take time, and we don’t know how much — it’s entirely a matter for the ministers themselves. Ministers are not obliged to publish reports such as these, but we have received indications that in view of the attention focused on this issue, this one is likely to be published.
We could spend a lot of time trying to figure out what we know of the political make-up of the Home Office, assessing the trends in ministerial speeches and the sub-texts of the spin doctors, trying to read the runes, trying to guess what might happen. In the last few months, I’ve spent some amusing evenings doing so around the table with friends … and every time we find that we can come up with conclusive arguments to justify almost any imaginable scenario! I’m sure many of you will also have tried the same game.
So I’m not going to speculate here about what the report might contain, or what might happen when it is published. There will be plenty of time for that once we have it in our hands … and we will then publish it on the PFC website as soon as possible.
Of course, the report is no use if it simply gathers dust on ministers’ shelves. So if it hasn’t been published within a month or so, we’ll start asking what’s happened … and if it appears to be at risk of sliding away into the departmental archives, I know that Press For Change campaigners will need no encouragement to press hard for its publication!
But let’s give the ministers a chance first. The working group took a lot of evidence and did very thorough research, and it is in all our interests that Jack Straw and his colleagues in the Home Office study the report very thoroughly before placing themselves in a position of having to comment publicly on it.
Meanwhile, we do have more reading for you. The campaigning and support organisations which worked together in presenting the trans community’s case to the working group made a joint presentation in January — see “Government starts talking”. The text of that presentation has been on the PFC website since March — see “Meeting the needs of transsexual people”.
Following that meeting, we supplied the government with a further set of briefing papers on specific issues where we thought that further detailed analysis would assist the civil servants. Under the heading “The Problems of Gender Re-Registration”, we offered guidance on four issues:
- A recommended two-stage procedure for re-registration
- The requirement of sterility?
- Protecting stable families: issues regarding a change in civil status for trans people who are already married
- Implications for sport and the provision of changing facilities
You will find these briefings in this website’s section on the government working group.
They are long and complex documents, and represented a lot of work for the people involved … which is why many of us were rather hard to contact in February! But the groups involved in producing them (and I must stress that they are very much a joint effort) hope that by providing ministers with such rigorous analysis of the detailed steps required to implement the changes we seek, that their task will be made much easier.
For you, this is your chance to see how the work we have all done over the last decade in developing this campaign from its tentative beginnings in 1992 has allowed us to bring to government not just an articulate plea for change which reflect our published principles and our Mission Statement … but a detailed map of how to achieve that change. We hope that our work may help those in other countries too.
We hope that the government will take full advantage of all the help we have given them. Ministers now have a historic chance to bring to a long-overdue end to our status as non-persons … and to enact legislation and administrative changes that will solve the problem properly, for all of us.
Meantime, enjoy the summer. We may all be very busy later in the year!
Claire McNab
(Vice-President, Press for Change)