This would make transitioning as easy as getting a prescription...

THE word ‘simplify’ is a popular one in politics. But yesterday when the Labour Party announced plans to ‘simplify’ the Gender Recognition Act, my heart skipped a beat. If enacted, Sir Keir Starmer’s plan would represent one of the most dangerous interventions in public life for a generation. Introduced in 2004, the

Act allows adults to change their legally recorded sex for some purposes.

Currently, this requires a certificate which can only be awarded by an expert panel based on a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

To date, there have been just 6,000 such certificates handed out across the UK and those who have them probably make up only a few per cent 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.

My view is that this amounts to gender self-ID: the principle of people being allowed to pick their legal gender with no medical diagnosis, something Labour has repeatedly said it no longer supports.

The party’s plans would essentially allow men to gain the legal status of women with no safeguards. There are several reasons this policy is dangerous. Firstly, our GP services are already at breaking point. In the second half of last year, more than 21 million people waited more than 22 days to see their GP. It is ludicrous to further burden this flailing frontline service. Secondly, what if a GP decided not to hand out a gender recognition certificate? Would they, like so many others before them, be labelled a ‘transphobe’ and hounded out of their job or become the victim of a social media pile-on? Last month’s landmark Cass Review found evidence of GPs being ‘pressurised to prescribe hormones’ to their patients. Why do we expect the fanatical trans lobby to behave any better this time? And then there’s the question of public safety. If you’re about to hand a man a piece of paper that will make it easier for him to claim he has the right to access women’s toilets, changing rooms and rape crisis centres, you must, at the very least, have undertaken the most stringent of background checks.

Can a GP realistically be expected to do this?

PRoFESSoR Kamila Hawthorne, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, doesn’t think so. She said: ‘Detailed management of gender dysphoria is outside our area of expertise.’

There is also another side to Labour’s proposal which I fear has been overlooked: it could remove a spouse’s right of consent if their partner elects to change gender.

Under Labour’s plan, spouses wouldn’t even be warned their partner was seeking to transition. This can’t be right.

For my book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, I interviewed a number of so-called ‘trans-widows’. These are the women whose husbands have transitioned, leaving their marriage and family in tatters.

The tales I heard of men spending the family wealth on wigs, breast enhancements and dresses with seemingly no concern for their wives or children were heartbreaking.

Labour sees this policy as a cost-free way to peacock their inclusivity credentials.

They would be wise to remember that Theresa May tried the same thing in 2018 before the Tories realised how dangerous the policy was and binned it in 2020.

Women have fought for centuries for the right to feel safe. Labour’s new ploy to ‘simplify’ the Gender Recognition Act will undo all that work, with potentially thousands of men given a piece of paper that makes them think they have licence to roam femaleonly spaces.

Sir Keir’s plan isn’t just naive, it’s downright dangerous.