Yesterday the Ministry of Justice announced that they will be conducting a proper review of how trans people are housed in UK prisons. This is very welcome. The release of the new guidelines, originally scheduled for just before Christmas, has been shelved and the review will report back early in the New Year. Details of the MoJ statement and the Terms of Reference for the review can be found here.
Naturally I have a few comments. Firstly I am rather disappointed that the MoJ could not manage to find a trans woman to advise them on the review. I’m sure that Jay Stewart will do his best, but this is an issue that specifically affects trans women so we really ought to be consulted.
The ToR says that the review is expected to, “engage widely, openly and transparently at all times”. I trust that will actually be the case.
Mind you, the ToR also says, “the usual practice is for them to be held in a supportive environment away from the main regime of the prison and protected from risk of harm from other prisoners”. What this actually means is, “we keep them in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day”. So just how much transparency we will get is open to question.
However, the key statement in the ToR is the last one. This:
Legal gender is determined by the individual’s birth certificate.
The only way that you can change the gender on your birth certificate is by getting a Gender Recognition Certificate.
It is perfectly possible to live a mostly normal life as a trans person without a GRC. You can change your passport, your driving license, your bank account and any other form of ID that you wish. But you cannot change your legal gender without a GRC. That means that without a GRC the government can, at any time, decide to treat you as having the gender to which you were assigned at birth and claim that this is “the law”. Which prison they put you in is only the tip of the iceberg. Our legal system is riddled with gender-specific clauses.
The latest figures that I have are that around 13,000 people have completed treatment at British gender clinics. A further 13,000 have started treatment but have either not yet been discharged or have elected not to go through the whole process (or have been thrown off the program for some reason, which appears to be distressingly common). An unknown number will be getting treatment privately and/or abroad.
To date only 4,000 people have been granted Gender Recognition Certificates.
That means that at least 9,000 UK citizens have completed gender reassignment but for various reasons have not changed their legal gender. A similar number, possibly more, are likely to be living full time in their preferred gender but, because they have not completed the medical process, are not eligible to apply for a GRC. All of these people are effectively in legal limbo as far as their gender is concerned.
The fine folks who ran the Tara Hudson petition have a new one going about general prison reform for trans people. It is worth signing because it calls for things that the review is only considering. We do need to keep the pressure up.
However, what we really need is a major overhaul of the Gender Recognition Act. If you have a system where less than a third of the people who ought to be eligible for legal gender recognition are actually getting that recognition then something is badly wrong.
