Transgender Equality — House of Commons, 2016-12-01
Topic: Civil Rights
Caroline Julia Dinenage (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a great pleasure to take part in this incredibly important debate on transgender equality—indeed, it is the first debate on transgender equality—and I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) for securing it. I put on record my welcome for the passionate and thoughtful contributions of hon. Members from across the House and add my voice to the praise for the Women and Equalities Committee report, which was a really important milestone in Parliament’s consideration of trans rights. I thank the Committee for its thorough and groundbreaking review, and we welcome its recommendations on how we can further tackle trans inequality The Prime Minister has made it clear that the Government’s mission is to make Britain a country that works for everyone. We want a society where everyone has a fair chance to go as far as their talent and their hard work will allow. That, of course, includes members of the trans population. We want them to be safe, healthy and free from discrimination, and we want a Britain that works for trans citizens I am proud of the UK’s strong legislative framework that protects trans people, but I am aware that progress in the acceptance and recognition of trans people has not kept pace in any way, shape or form with that of the lesbian, gay and bisexual community. I am also aware that transgender people suffer particularly high levels of inequality—from mental health to hate crime, and from bullying in schools to discrimination in employment—and we have heard many hon. Members speak passionately about all those things today. As the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) mentioned, mental health and suicide are big concerns. A young trans person in England today is nearly twice as likely to have attempted suicide, and nearly three times as likely to have self-harmed, as are their non-trans peers. That is utterly unacceptable. It has been said that trans issues are too difficult to tackle and too marginal to take notice of, and that it is too hard to implement change. We say that that is wrong. Trans people deserve dignity, respect and a life without discrimination I welcome the words of the hon. Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore). As he says, we should take this opportunity to celebrate our trans community, especially the brave and inspiring individuals—from within the trans community and outside it—who do so much to fight against the prejudice, discrimination and disadvantage that we have heard about so movingly and passionately from so many hon. Members Tackling transgender inequality is a not a new initiative for us, and we continue to be recognised as one of the most progressive countries in Europe for LGBT rights by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. In 2011 we issued the world’s first transgender action plan to address the real and everyday challenges faced by trans people, and the majority of the commitments in the action plan have been completed. We are in the process of collating progress updates, and we will publish a summary next year. Recently we invested £2.8 million to tackle homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying in schools that have no measures, or ineffective measures, in place to deal with it. We have also published practical and clear guidance for employers and service providers on how to deal fairly and sensitively with transgender employees and service users. We have absolutely no intention of ending our commitment to tackling transgender inequality In July we responded to the Women and Equalities Committee report and set out a further set of ambitious actions. One massive and key commitment was to review the Gender Recognition Act 2004. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Ben Howlett) has said, it was a groundbreaking measure when it was introduced—I think we sometimes forget how groundbreaking it was—but the world has moved on incredibly since then, and it is right that we review how it is working now. We have begun a stakeholder engagement programme to look at how the gender recognition process can be improved, and at the legislative and non-legislative means that we would need to use to do that The Committee recommended that we move towards self-declaration of gender. We recognise that, as the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) rightly pointed out, the gender recognition process needs to be quicker, less bureaucratic and definitely less medicalised. However, we want to see more evidence on the case for change to a self-declaration model. A couple of other jurisdictions have just began to implement such a model. We will continue to monitor the implementation of the alternative gender recognition process in other countries, and we will analyse the very good evidence that the Committee published to inform our work.