Pension denial discriminatory

BRITAIN’S rejection of a transgender woman’s claim for a women’s state pension because she was still married to her spouse from before her transition is discriminatory, an EU court adviser said yesterday.

Advocate General Michal Bobek, of the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), stated in a non-binding opinion that marriage status did not play a role in accessing state retirement pensions for people who were not transgender.

“This amounts to direct discrimination on the basis of sex, which is not open to objective justification,” the opinion stated.

The opinion was issued for a case where a transgender woman – who was registered as a boy at birth but has lived as a woman since 1991 and had gender reassignment surgery in 1995 – in the UK applied for a state pension when she turned 60 in 2008.

According to UK law, a woman born before April 6 1950 must be 60 to access the state retirement pension, whereas for a man born before December 6 1953 the age is 65.

Her application was denied because she did not apply for a full gender recognition certificate due to the fact that she remained married to a woman and her marriage would have been annulled at the time as same-sex marriage was not legal in Britain.

The UK Supreme Court had asked the ECJ if the requirement to be unmarried to recognise a change in gender, and thus determine the qualifying age for a state pension, was allowed under EU law.