title: Competing rights, contested vulnerabilities: analysing policy framing in debates over Scottish and UK Government proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act
Creators: name: Holliday, Kate
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Gender Recognition Act
subject: Policy framing
subject: Transgender rights
subject: Women's rights
subject: Framing conflict

description: The issue of transgender recognition and inclusion has been one fraught with complexity and intractability, taking a place of prominence and significance within a wider context of political, social, and cultural polarisation that has characterised the last decade. The topic has dominated international media headlines, political agendas, and social media feeds across a number of different cases, with debates in the UK centring around proposed reforms from the Scottish and UK Governments to reform the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. These proposals sought to make the process of gender recognition more straightforward for transgender people, introducing a system of ‘self-declaration’ to replace the current process of requiring medical and legal oversight to facilitate a change in legal sex. While these proposals have been strongly advocated for by LGBT groups and some women’s organisations, they have been challenged predominantly by grassroots feminist organisations who have organised against the reforms on the basis that this change in law would be detrimental to women’s rights. The consideration of these proposed reforms has been characterised by contentiousness and volatility, building on long-established disputes within and between LGBT and feminist communities around how to define sex and gender, and particularly how these concepts ought to be considered for the operation of women’s spaces and services. Identifying this subject as a case study for a contentious and intractable ‘policy controversy’, this thesis deploys a combination of frame analysis approaches and feminist and discursive institutionalist perspectives to investigate and explore the way that this complex issue has been debated. The thesis presents an in-depth analysis of 49 policy documents from this case across the Scotland and wider UK contexts, demonstrating through an examination of actors’ frames on the issue how conflicting policy positions are built from and justified by competing underlying perspectives and assumptions. The research finds that these positions are built from multiple frames following a ‘path dependence’ from foundational ontological positions on the nature of sex and gender, which inform and construct conflicting assumptions on the purpose of gender recognition law and what constitutes ‘rights’. The thesis then considers continuity and shifts in these frames over time as an example of ideational resistance and change, tracing the institutionalisation, influence, emergence, and transformation of particular frames on the issue as the proposed reforms moved through the policy process. The thesis narrows in on single-sex spaces and services as the key contention of the case, demonstrating how social movement actors shifted the discourse around gender recognition over time to frame the ‘problem’ as one of women’s rights, creating a discursive struggle with those who were making the case for reform on the basis of upholding and advancing transgender rights, and subsequently effecting change in the approaches and decisions of policymakers. In debating the policy problem of women’s single-sex spaces and services, competing actors’ framings on the issue were informed and justified by their different conceptualisations of marginalisation, with these assumptions of who is vulnerable and why guiding their consideration of which ‘impacts’ are significant, and whose voices and evidence ought to be listened to. This research produces a number of important empirical, conceptual, and methodological contributions, demonstrating the value of frame analysis approaches while providing a timely and detailed analytical examination of an extremely topical case. The thesis explores the construction of policy problems in the context of political controversy and polarisation, generating novel insights on the nature of a framing conflict between two groups seeking to appeal to values of equality, human rights, progressive politics, and protecting those who are vulnerable. In doing so, the findings demonstrate how emphasising marginalisation and lived experience has the potential to generate political influence, and how this is complicated when these claims to rights, vulnerability, and authority conflict between different groups. The research captures novel findings on the role of institutional experts and decision makers, building upon and pushing forward existing literature by demonstrating the significance of ‘testimonial evidence’ and how this is marshalled through framing to give legitimacy to a policy position, again often conflicting when there are clashes of ‘lived experience’. Most significantly, the research offers new insights on how policy controversy and contentious debate is not necessarily about what is happening but whether what is happening matters, with the views of conflicting groups being constructed by and viewed through particular frames of marginalisation, legitimacy, authority, and significance.