Proposals to rewrite the law take gender self-identification too far. Here’s the feminist case against
In one sense, old-fashioned feminists like me should be grateful for The Future of Legal Gender, a four-year publicly funded research project. That’s because it makes crystal-clear what is sometimes denied by advocates of the new gender politics: that there are some who aim to reduce the importance of sex (the set of biological characteristics that distinguish male and female people) in law and society, and to replace it with the more slippery concept of gender.
The claim often made of the campaign for “gender self-identification”, already introduced in several countries and on its way into Scottish law, is that this is simply a technical adjustment to make the existing legal framework for transgender people to change their legal sex more humane. Currently, in the UK, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is needed for a person to go through the process set out in the Gender Recognition Act, whereby a transgender person’s legal sex is altered to match their acquired gender. Activists argue that this requirement should be removed, so that the process is demedicalised and becomes a less onerous statutory declaration.
Susanna Rustin is a writer and a Guardian leader writer
