Liz Truss originally planned to remove the requirement of a gender dysphoria diagnosis. (Getty)
Tory equalities chief Liz Truss was planning proper reforms to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) and had Boris Johnson’s support – but changed her mind and scrapped reforms after input from the NHS’s National Advisor for LGBT Health.
The revelation is contained in evidence submitted by the Government Equalities Office (GEO) about the behind-the-scenes wrangling over GRA reform in the first half of 2020 to a judicial review at the Northern Ireland High Court into the need for medical evidence in legal gender recognition.
In the written judgment from the High Court judicial review, it has been revealed that Liz Truss was “minded to remove the requirement for a gender dysphoria diagnosis” from the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) as of 11 June, 2020.
The Royal Courts of Justice where the High Court is located in London. (Getty/ BEN STANSALL/AFP)
A judge has refused permission for a judicial review of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s guidance on the Equality Act 2010.
Throwing out the attempted judicial review today, Mr Justice Henshaw, sitting in London’s High Court, said the case was “unarguable” and that its interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is “wrong in law”.
The failed judicial review was sought by LGB Alliance co-founder Ann Sinnott, who crowdfunded more than £96,000 in legal fees. It concerned the EHRC’s guidance on the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act 2010, which allow women’s single-sex spaces, like prisons or refuges, to only exclude trans women in certain, specific circumstances.
Minister for Women and Equalities Liz Truss. (Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)
The government has reduced the application fee for a Gender Recognition Certificate from £140 to a “nominal fee” of £5.
A Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) is needed for trans men and women in the UK to amend their birth certificate and change their legal sex. Non-binary people are still unable to do so.
The change was announced by equalities minister Liz Truss on Tuesday (4 May), who added that the process will soon be moved online to make it “fairer and simpler”.
“As we build back better, we want transgender people to be free to live and to prosper in modern Britain,” she claimed.
4 May 2021
Equalities Minister Liz Truss evoked Boris Johnson’s and Joe Biden’s globalist-progressive “Build Back Better” slogan when she announced the cost for trans people to legally change gender would be cut from £140 ($195) to just £5 ($7).
The minister for the notionally Conservative British government announced on Tuesday: “As we build back better, we want transgender people to be free to live and to prosper in modern Britain.
“In the National LGBT Survey, 34% of transgender people told us that the cost of applying for a certificate was holding them back from doing so.
“Today we have removed that barrier, and I am proud that we have made the process of getting a certificate fairer, simpler and much more affordable.”