Debbie Hayton Debbie Hayton

Labour’s dreadful gender recognition reforms

(Photo: Getty)

Is Keir Starmer trying to snatch an unlikely defeat from the jaws of victory, or is he so confident of winning that he thinks he can ignore sense and reason – certainly on the issue of sex and gender?

When the Labour party manifesto dropped a couple of weeks ago, it included a pledge to ‘modernise, simplify, and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law to a new process’. This morning we learned some of the details.

This might not trouble privileged men like Starmer but it is an issue for vulnerable women reliant on publicly funded services

According to reports, Labour will remove any need for someone to ‘live in their preferred gender’, halve the number of medical reports so that the word of only one doctor is needed, and abolish the panel that checks that applications are legally compliant. If Labour gets its way, someone will be able to change their legal sex without making any changes whatsoever to the way they live their lives, and with the support of just one doctor.

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