Thursday 18-10-2018 - 14:08

Sally Patterson, Equality, Liberation and Access Officer

The Gender Recognition Act sets out the legal process by which a person can change their gender. The government has opened consultation on the Act and sets out the following information on their website:

Trans people are able to receive legal recognition of their acquired gender through a process set out in the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 2004. Since the GRA came into force, only 4,910 people have legally changed their gender. This is fewer than the number of trans respondents to the government’s LGBT survey, who were clear that they wanted legal recognition but had not applied because they found the current process too bureaucratic, expensive and intrusive. The government therefore seeks your views on how to reform the legal recognition process.

This consultation offers an incredibly important opportunity for our trans students, and we are working to ensure that we can support them to the best of our ability. I have submitted a response to the consultation on behalf of Bristol SU, after taking a number of steps in order to ensure that our response is written in a trans-positive way.

I’ve contacted all members of the Trans Network to ask for their input, both through a form and also offering them the opportunity to meet me in person and discuss the consultation further. Bristol University Intersectional Feminist Society have also held a consultation session earlier this month, on how to fill in the GRA consultation in a trans-positive way, which I attended and took note of feedback received from discussions there. It was really important to me to be as informed as possible, and found NUS’s guidance very thorough and helpful. 

The consultation closes at 11pm on Friday 19 October and I encourage you to complete it using the guidance available to help make the legal recognition process easier for Trans people.