Trans criminal father of 7 can swap gender despite doctor’s doubts – judge

A VIOLENT and dangerous criminal has been granted the legal right to become a woman despite the doubts of a doctor and the refusal of a tribunal to approve it.

The test case decision involves a 41-year-old criminal, who has married three women and fathered seven children.

It lowers the legal barriers that prevent people altering their gender at will.

Appeal judge Lord Justice Baker ruled that the 14-year-old laws on gender recognition should be considered ‘permissive rather than restrictive’ and that tribunals which decide on applications to change sex should not ‘frustrate the process’.

The criminal used legal aid, funded by the taxpayer, to help her successful appeal to be recognised as a woman. Identified only as Ms Jay, she was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2011 for obtaining explosives with intent to endanger life.

She was released on licence in 2015 but has subsequently twice been recalled to jail. She was still in prison in June at the time Lord Justice Baker heard her appeal, in the High Court, to be recognised as female. The Gender Recognition Panel, a tribunal led by a judge, approves 95 per cent of requests for a legal sex change. But it declined three times to accept Ms Jay’s application.

It took into account a doctor’s report which said Ms Jay’s version of her history was ‘directly at odds with documentary records’ and that he had ‘doubts about the veracity of her whole history.’

In 2014 Ms Jay had given the panel a report by Dr James Barrett, of the London Gender Clinic.

Dr Barrett, who considered her history of psychiatric problems and self-harm, said he had seen no evidence of gender identity disturbance ‘until very recently’. He added that he had ‘grave doubts’ over Ms Jay’s real sexual identity.

The panel was also troubled by Ms Jay’s failure to admit to her three marriages including one contracted as a man in 2010, two years after she claimed to have started living as a woman. It said her reluctance to provide evidence showed she had ‘something to hide’.

But, giving his ruling this week, Lord Justice Baker said the tribunal should have invited Ms Jay to attend a hearing to decide if she was telling the truth, and that its decision to refuse her a gender recognition certificate was ‘deficient’.

The judge reversed the tribunal’s decision and issued Ms Jay with the certificate, which legally recognises her as a woman.

He said in his ruling that Ms Jay’s criminal history had no bearing on her application to switch gender.

‘Ms Jay has had a number of problems in her life, and has been convicted of a number of criminal offences as a result of which she has spent several years in prison,’ he said. ‘This judgment does not deal with any of those matters.’ Under the Gender Recognition Act, introduced in 2004 by Tony Blair’s government to comply with a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, those who want to change their legal gender must have lived in their acquired sex for two years, and must provide evidence that they have gender dysphoria from two doctors.

They must provide evidence about marriages, and husbands, wives or civil partners, and should intend to remain in their acquired sex for life.

Those who apply for a gender recognition certificate do not have to have had medical sex-change treatment to be granted a certificate and a certificate does not give them the right to have such treatment.

At the time of the hearing in June, Ms Jay had sought medical treatment with the aim of undergoing sex-change surgery.

The ruling comes at a time of growing controversy over transgender rights and in particular the threat to the safety of women from men who claim to have switched their sex.

Ministers are shortly to complete a consultation on whether to change the law to make it easier for transgender people to be legally recognised in their new sex, but some feminists say the risks have been ignored and objections silenced.

Concerns have deepened after rapist and paedophile Karen White, who admitted sexually assaulting two inmates at New Hall women’s prison in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, was last week jailed for life.

Leeds Crown Court heard that White, 52, who was born male, used her ‘transgender persona’ to attack vulnerable prisoners in the jail.

‘She has fathered seven children’