This month, right-wing Italian MP and Berlusconi groupie Michaela Biancofiore hit the headlines with a ministerial career that was short, even by Italian standards. Appointed on a Friday, critics took instant exception to a junior equalities minister who opposed gay marriage, refused to make physical contact with a lesbian and suggested that “anyone who goes with a trans has serious issues of sexual identity”.
A spirited rearguard action, in which she accused “gays” of “ghettoising themselves”, only confirmed her unsuitability. She was dismissed in time for the Sunday breakfast news.
That, of course, is Italy and nothing like the UK, where a right-of-centre administration is presently preening itself on its recent equalities achievements. On Wednesday morning, the LGB community was, mostly, celebrating the fact that gay marriage – Lords permitting – was now several steps closer to reality. A few diehards, Peter Tatchell amongst them, bemoaned the fact that civil partnership had not been opened up to all. Mostly the mood was positive.
Not so in the trans community, which sat and watched in utter despair as junior equalities minister Helen Grant swatted away amendments designed to sort out problems facing trans individuals in, or seeking to be in, a state-sanctioned married relationship.
Historically, the gender-reassigned trans person has faced three serious obstacles to a happy married life. To begin with, if already married, the holy grail of a gender recognition certificate (GRC) – which adjusts birth certificate to an individual’s actual gender identity – was beyond their reach. Divorce first – and then jump through a series of bureaucratic hurdles to “prove” to a disbelieving state that one really, really is the gender one claims.
That has proven heart-breaking for many. Hold on to a marriage into which you have invested a great deal of love and life: or let go, possibly replacing it with a civil partnership. Except there has always been a second obstacle, which is that “survivor’s benefits” – the bit of pension that a spouse would get if they survived you into old age – would be counted only from the date of the NEW civil partnership. Potentially, that single piece of paper could cost your partner tens of thousands of pounds in pension.
Thankfully, that particular iniquity is gone. You may now continue in your marriage, which will seamlessly translate from opposite to same sex on acquisition of the GRC. Before obtaining your GRC, however, you must show that your partner actively consents to it. Not that they are aware, or have been informed: but that they consent. This is a seriously odd requirement, seeing as how their consent has not previously been required for other changes, including name, hormones, or surgery. Or even a second mortgage on the home!
Its been a while since one partner to a marriage was required to ask their spouse’s permission for significant decisions: decades since women were forced, humiliatingly, to go cap in hand to husband for such permission. Basic equality, it seems, is not for the trans spouse.
Meanwhile, the government has held on to an even stranger anomaly. It’s offensive, and, in conjunction with other recent legal developments may yet end up killing someone. No matter!
A marriage is voidable on the grounds that either party did not validly consent to it, “whether in consequence of duress, mistake, unsoundness of mind or otherwise”. That’s fair, and covers most eventualities – including the possibility that one party was trans and had not mentioned that fact to the other.
Should they? In practice, that’s an issue that rarely arises. In a close relationship, gender history, along with fertility, religion and views on having children is discussed, is disclosed. Times, however, are changing. Some men, some women of trans history are now transitioning very early. They assert their gender as young as five or six, will never undergo a puberty reflecting their birth gender: by the time they are “of marriageable age”, they will have spent three-quarters of their life living the gender they understand themselves to be.
Should they really be obliged, by law, to disclose? Particularly when no similar obligation is imposed on those who just happen not to have mentioned a past that includes any number of crimes – from child abuse to rape to murder.
Definitely odd. Doubly odd, that marriage law should contain a special clause identifying just one ground for voiding a marriage, over and above any other possible ground. Can you guess? Yes: its non-disclosure of a GRC. And while that might have made sense in an era when same sex marriage was verboten, once this new legislation passes, it ceases to.
Could this get people killed? Not exactly: but it sits uneasily alongside recent police and CPS decisions to prosecute trans persons for not disclosing birth gender when it comes to having intimate relations. Let’s remind ourselves of the fundamental message here: it is OK not to disclose past criminal status.
Every attempt to force sex offenders and perpetrators of domestic violence to reveal themselves to prospective partners is dogged with squeals from the civil liberties lobby. How could you possibly insist? Do you not trust men?
No comment.
I observe only that an establishment that keeps putting gender history over and above every other issue when it comes to validating intimate consent is sending a message loud and clear: that trans is a form of deception; and deception must be controlled and ultimately punished.
And while junior equalities minister, Helen Grant came nowhere close to the odiousness of Biancofiore in her response to the Commons this week, her failure to understand, her failure to get to grips with current policy suggests a deeper truth: that while Conservatives may have made their peace with the gay community, the world of T remains, for now, a step too far, just a little too “icky” for personal comfort.
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