Gender: a matter of choice?

My friend Dave has “the best beard that I’ve ever seen anybody grow, and has a voice about three degrees shy of Barry White”, said C.J. Atkinson on the Huffington Post. What he doesn’t have is “a couple of hundred quid to throw around”. That’s what it would cost him to get a Gender Recognition Certificate, to show that he has “transitioned” from a woman to a man, and a new passport. He would have to prove to the Gender Recognition Panel that he has been living as a man for at least two years, and would have to produce a certificate from a doctor confirming that he suffers from “gender dysphoria”. For transpeople like Dave and me, changing our official identity is a slow, expensive and often humiliating process. So thank goodness for Justine Greening, who has announced a review of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. The Minister for Women and Equalities wants transpeople to be able to secure a new passport and birth certificate simply by making a statutory declaration that we “intend to live in the acquired gender until death”.

This “seems to me both decent and reasonable”, said Sam Leith in the London Evening Standard. Half a century after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, it’s time we turned our attention to the treatment of transpeople. This measure would, among other things, remove the need to define their identity as a “mental pathology” – an important step forward for LGBTQ rights. As a gay man, I want everyone to be treated with dignity, said Graeme Archer on Conservativehome.com. But “a desire for kindness” cannot overturn “biological fact”. Our sex is determined by our chromosomes. Apart from a tiny minority of intersex people, we’re all born with an XY or XX genotype that maps our trajectory to physical and sexual maturity. While you can argue “gender” is a construct – shaped by social expectations and stereotypes – biological sex is “not a matter of opinion”. You can no more “self-define” your sex than your IQ or your race – which, after all, “has much less genetic basis than gender”.

This “awkward matter of biology” has practical implications too, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. A man will only have to declare himself female to gain access to women’s lavatories, changing rooms and hospital wards – and even women’s sports. Many feminists are aghast at the way this “cultural revolution” is being pursued without proper deliberation. And Conservatives will hate it. “The Government is picking a fight with its own supporters, and for what? To impress its friends at dinner parties.”