In 2004, with the passing of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) the UK became the first country in the world to legally recognise trans people as the opposite sex without medical treatment. The Act passed without controversy, and with little media coverage. The law was framed thus: a transsexual person (the terminology used at the time by legislators and most trans people) must acquire a gender recognition certificate from a new gender recognition panel made up of lawyers and doctors.
In most cases, to get a certificate a person will need confirmation from a specialist doctor that they have gender dysphoria, have been living in the acquired sex for two years, and that they intend to continue doing so. It is not necessary to have undergone surgery. Anyone issued with a certificate is entitled to a new birth certificate in their acquired sex and to marry someone of the opposite gender to the acquired gender (equal marriage had not yet become law). There are caveats, such as sport. The Act allows sports bodies to exclude those with a certificate if the sport is “gender-affected”: that is, where strength, stamina or physique provides an unfair advantage.
How quaint this all sounds today. The now defunct proposed amendment to the GRA, which would have dispensed with the need for any medical intervention in order to legally change sex, sparked a culture war between feminists seeking to hold on to women-only services, and trans activists who insist “trans women are women” based on an inner “feeling”.
What few people know is the influence the Act had on the international stage in the early 2000s.Two years after the GRA was passed, a set of 29 guiding rules on recognition and treatment of LGBT people were laid down at a meeting in Indonesia. The “Yogyakarta Principles” demanded that a person’s self-defined gender identity be legally recognised without the need for medical treatment, transforming the GRA from obscure British legislation to a minimum standard for the entire world.
The Principles were drafted and signed by a group of lawyers, human rights experts and trans rights activists, including Robert Wintemute, professor of human rights law at King’s College London. Since then Wintemute has had second thoughts. He says women’s rights were not considered during the meeting and that he should have challenged some aspects of the Principles. Admitting he “failed to consider” that trans women still in possession of their male genitals would seek to access female-only spaces, Wintemute, who is gay, says: “A key factor in my change of opinion has been listening to women.”
The majority of the 2006 Yogyakarta signatories were men and trans men. “The issue of access to single-sex spaces largely affects women and not men. So it was easy for the men in the group to be swept along by concern for LGBT rights and ignore this issue,” says Wintemute. Of the women present, some had been asked to focus on particular angles, such as health, and limited their contributions to these areas. So far as Wintemute recalls, the other female signatories did not raise questions about potential conflicts between women’s rights and transgender rights.
In 2017, some of the Yogyakarta signatories reassembled, and, together with additional experts signed ten additional Principles. These went much further than the original Principles. Principle 31 asserts that all countries must “end the registration of the sex and gender of the person in identity documents such as birth certificates”. If registration of sex or gender continues, it must be done on the basis that there are no restrictions on self- identification, such as “a psycho-medical diagnosis, minimum . . . age . . . marital . . . status, or any other third party opinion”.
Wintemute was not invited to participate in drafting the new set of Principles. He says of Principle 31: “It’s outrageous! There is no country in the world that has ended the registration of sex on birth certificates.”
Wintemute has travelled so far from his original position that he now wonders whether the GRA and prior laws in Europe should have been passed.
In the UK, the NHS has issued guidance that female patients who object to trans women sharing their wards should be treated as racists, ignoring the patients’ rights to privacy and dignity.
Gender and sex are being conflated during official data collection exercises, meaning that statistics on women as a distinct sex class, such as crime figures, risk being undermined.
Whether the Yogyakarta Principles will attract more scrutiny may depend on the bravery of other signatories to stand beside Wintemute and admit they may have been wrong.
Source: Robert Wintemute – Julie Bindel’s writing and podcasts
He is misrepresenting the facts. He drafted, the only lawyer to do so, the Declaration of Montreal, in July 2006, so before the Yogyakarta Principles, demanding, amongst other things, self ID to become the law. He enginereed these changes, was not an outside observer of them. He is lying.