The British Labour Party’s response last month to the report by paediatrician Dr. Hillary Cass, who found that the treatment of children unsure about their gender “is an area of remarkably weak evidence,” suggested the party might have turned a corner on the transgender issue. But campaigners say that its new approach would represent “one of the most dangerous interventions in public life for a generation.”
Sir Keir Starmer’s team is planning on making it easier to change gender by allowing a single family doctor to sign off on the decision, rather than a panel of doctors and lawyers. Such a policy would move Britain closer to adopting what campaigners on both sides call ‘self-ID’, with pro-trans activists often treating gender as a matter of choice (or at least the product of a ‘sexed soul’), typically at odds with a sexual identity cruelly ‘assigned at birth.’
Less than a month after senior Labour figure Wes Streeting accepted that his party had ignored “all sorts of complexities” surrounding so-called transitioning, an opposition source told The Times that Starmer wants to make the process “less medicalised,” possibly by reducing the number of experts needed to approve gender recognition certificates, which allow transgender people to have their adopted gender affirmed and legally recognised.
Helen Joyce of the transgender-critical Sex Matters charity said that upon hearing the news, “my heart skipped a beat.” She wrote in the Mail:
If enacted, Sir Keir Starmer’s plan would represent one of the most dangerous interventions in public life for a generation. … To date, there have been just 6,000 such [gender recognition] certificates handed out across the UK and those who have them probably make up only a few percent of the country’s trans population. However, under Sir Keir Starmer’s proposals, a transition could be signed off by a single GP without any gender dysphoria diagnosis.
In other words, Labour’s plan does not just simplify the process of changing gender, it makes it as easy as getting a prescription. … The party’s plans would essentially allow men to gain the legal status of women with no safeguards.
Tory Women’s Minister Maria Caufield warned more specifically that Labour’s proposals “would lead to more people in prisons self-IDing to get access to vulnerable women, and more males seeking to access women’s-only spaces.” Problems would undoubtedly arise in other areas, too—particularly in women-only spaces beyond the UK prison estate frequented by less vulnerable women.
On a purely practical level, the Royal College of GPs stressed that its doctor members are already working under “considerable pressure,” suggesting that this additional workload could push medical colleagues over the edge.
Caufield’s cabinet ally, Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch, added that “there is no reason whatsoever to relax the safeguards that are in place.”
[Labour] should stop trying to weaponise this issue and allow professionals to do their job properly.
Specific details of Labour’s plans have yet to be unveiled, most likely as the party weighs up the media and public response to these sketchy ideas. Campaigners on this issue will be keeping a close eye on the pronouncements made over the coming months.
