Reflections on a Journey to a GRC

The arrival, today, of my updated birth certificate prompts many thoughts. Where should I stash the second copy in case we have to make a run for it? Why is my dad's profession on my birth certificate? How miraculous is it that the post made it to the right flat? These are just for starters. But above all, I reflect, again, on the utter pointlessness of the process. Note, I am not disputing the value of a Gender Recognition Certificate, nor a revised birth certificate; I want to talk about the process. I will, in the end, talk about why I persisted, but that is not my main concern. I claim no particular insight or singular experience, and everything here will be all too familiar to anyone else who has gone through the process, but it may help inform those who get their alleged facts from Twitter or the Telegraph or the Guardian.

I applied for my GRC just before Christmas 2023, and it was approved in April. This was somewhat in advance of the 30 weeks they were flagging as the turnaround time for a decision, and about the only occasion in my entire transition where the time estimated/quoted turns out to be greater than the time actually taken. The logjam for me was trying to extract a letter from the Sandyford. I think I first asked for a letter in September 2021 (that would be over two years since I started living full-time), and was put on a waiting list (shock!) for an appointment with someone who was on the approved list of psychiatrists who could write such a letter. Over two years later, I had still not reached the top of that list.

In the end, I never did see that person: my clinician finally remembered who I was and in an effort to clear the decks before taking a career break cooked up something involving a list of treatments (which I dictated, as this was not readily to hand, surprisingly) and a paragraph from the preceding clinician (since retired) who had at that point been on the list. I was advised that it might not work but that it was worth a punt, and to let them know how it panned out (well, I would if and when I see someone again).

That is a lot of confidential information, but I relate it for three reasons. During the Scottish Parliament's passing of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, there was of course, an avalanche of misinformation about what a GRC was and wasn't, and about what it entitled you to do or not to do. As the proud owner of a GRC, it has sat in its envelope in a pile of papers since its arrival and has literally changed nothing about my day-to-day experience. Second, when the Tories blocked the Bill by the unprecedented use of Section 35 powers, they claimed that self-identification (so-called) would remove all the protections that are the gold standard of the British GIC process. And they said it with a straight face. The GIC process is a shambles, and tests one thing, and one thing alone: how bloody-minded someone is. Third, Labour's craven recanting of their support for reform has led them to a position which will please no-one, but, importantly, will make things worse.

Labour's position, at least according to their manifesto, is that a GRC will require a psychiatrist's letter and a wait of two years. For me, this would mean at least another year from now before I could submit an application. Things would be better if they abandon the approved list, but that seems unlikely. Actually, I don't believe for a second that Labour have any intention of touching gender reform with a fork: the only reason that matters came to a head in the Scottish Parliament was because the Greens made the SNP follow their own policy and bring it to the chamber. Still, I may be wrong: but the issue here is that given it takes so long to see a psychiatrist under the NHS most folk are well into their transition before there is any question of initiating the paperwork. An exception would be if you paid for the psychiatrist, but no public health policy should be built on that.

It would not be the worst thing in the world if Labour left well alone. If they do not have the moral fibre to stick with their GRR vote (and, yes, I am looking at you, Anas Sarwar and you, Pam Duncan-Glancy), the current process is relatively painless provided that you can manage to see a shrink. There was a lot of hand-wringing along the lines of ‘pity the poor trans people’ because of the need to prove that we had been living in the new gender for two years, but these days it is only four pieces of paper that are needed, along with your various statutory declarations. And the one decent thing that Boris Johnson did before going full-on transphobe was to reduce the cost of applications to a nominal sum. The main problem, as it has ever been for trans people over the years, is that it is much harder to tick the boxes if you are living a marginal or chaotic life, and lack the paper trail.

Let me return to the benefits of a GRC. For most ordinary purposes, the simple name-change is enough; the choice of honorific is yours anyway. With that comes bank accounts, register of electors and letters on official notepaper. For some purposes, you need official ID, which is mostly driver's licence or passport. I don't drive; a passport requires a medical letter (and they will check it out). But if you have made it as far as a GIC, they will do you a form letter without any waiting list, and so I have been the happy owner of a correct passport for the past three years. Actually, it doesn't need to be a psychiatrist's letter: the very nice caseworker told me that a GP letter would be fine (we had some back-and-forth because my form letter's signatory retired and I had to ask for another). If the Labour plan for a revised process was something like this, it would be an improvement — provided, of course, that your GP was not a transphobe, one of the number who have been emboldened to block trans healthcare lately.

The GRC, for me, brings three benefits, and one of them is, at the time of writing, hypothetical. It ensures that one can marry and die in one's preferred gender. The latter will be more important for my family than for me, as I will by then be past caring. The third reason is in case the legal warfare by transphobes manage to persuade the courts that the Equality Act means something other than what it plainly says, or even manage to leverage Labour's cowardice into rewriting the Equality Act (despite their manifesto commitment to the contrary).

All of this may be moot, should the Tories in their current configuration come to power. In that case, we will be looking at Texas and Florida, and to what appears to be imminent nationally for our trans siblings in the US. I do not know if it will help, but I want to have all available documentation if we need to make a run for it. It may not help, but I am making sure that my paperwork is in order if I have to negotiate the asylum system of one of our European neighbours. Given what we are doing to refugees here, I am under no illusions about what that might entail.