Dear Karin Smyth
I am writing to you today as an ally of the trans community regarding the issues with the planned changes to the Gender Recognition Act. My issues with this act comes in 2 parts, the risky aspect of preventing under-18's from accessing the care they need, and the unsubstantiated reasoning behind the female-only spaces safeguards within the act. Acts like the one planning to be introduced have been introduced in America and have mostly been removed by judges did more harm than good to both trans and cisgender individuals, and many laws in other European nations show that the fears of allow individuals to self-ID are unfounded.
The issue with preventing under-18 from accessing healthcare for their gender dysphoria is that research shows that preventing access to the care causes more harm to the individuals, with many taking to suicide the longer their gender dysphoria goes on when access to transitioning surgery is prevented. Also post transition regret is rare, this this Mermaids press release noting
Still, the NHS’s own statistics show the rate of regret around gender affirmation surgeries is very low indeed. An NHS study (Pg 118 & see pdf below) found that – between 2016/17 – of 3,398 trans patients who’d accessed NHS support at one clinic, 16 expressed regret, and only 3 made a long-term detransition. Regret following any surgery is commonplace but – according to a number of international studies – regret for post-operative gender-transition patients is far lower than for other forms of ‘plastic surgery’.
With post transition regret being this low in the NHS, i see suicide coming from gender dysphoria being a higher load on the NHS than de-transitioning.
The second issue is the female-only spaces safeguards.
While these female-only spaces safeguards seem like they empower women, they actually place a burden on them, there are questions about if this law was introduced, how would it be enforced, and all scenarios put forward do no seem to empower anyone, only take a step backwards.
Another point is that Data from other European nations show no rise in Sexual harassment when people are allowed to self-ID, rather than me talk about it i will quote this blog post from Mermaids
Here’s the thing though: this isn’t a case of stepping into the unknown at all. In fact, we can simply step into Iceland, Portugal, Malta, Norway, Denmark or Belgium to see what happens when trans people are empowered to self-ID. In fact, we might simply hop over the Irish Sea to the Republic of Ireland, where a Gender Recognition Act allowing self-declaration was passed five years ago. None of these countries have reported a rise in attacks on women in single-sex spaces. None seem to have seen a trend towards men sneaking into changing rooms and toilets pretending to be trans. After all, abusive men don’t need to go through such an absurd process to attack women. Any sexual or domestic abuse survivor knows from experience that abusers are more than capable of carrying out attacks at work, in the home and a myriad of other places. Shouldn’t we be focusing on that?
Another point as noted in this blog post by the charity Mermaids, the Gender Recognition act would not affect the current state of things in its initial form as segregated spaces depended on self identification and the protection of this choice was included in the 2010 Equality Act
Firstly, the proposed GRA reforms didn’t threaten to bring about such a scenario, because most gender-segregated spaces already rely on self-identification and those protections have been in place since the Equality Act 2010. Think about it, has anyone ever demanded to verify your gender (however that might be done) before you were allowed use a public toilet? If they have, then they certainly had no right to do so.
Another aspect to note is that similar "safeguards" in America lead to increased harassment of both trans and cisgendered individuals. From reports that the harassment that went on, it seemed that the law that was intended to protect women actually degraded their freedom as cisgendered women that did not dress like one where harassed for using the bathroom.
When reading a lot of the argument for preventing individuals from self-identifying, they seem to be built on the bases of straw-people, that is mostly based on hypothetical ideas of the group in question that do not match to reality.
A lot of stuff came from this article by the trans charity mermaids and is a good read: https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/news/safety-and-dignity/ and this response to J.K. Rowlings recent letter https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/news/dear-jk-rowling/
In summary I would like to know your position on this issue and would like you to push against any act that degraded the rights of trans and non-binary individuals in this country.
From