Transgender equality – new report echoes feedback shared with Healthwatch

The Committee urged ministers to draw up a new strategy to tackle discrimination. It estimates that as many as 650,000 people in the UK are “gender incongruent to some degree” and the transphobia they experience undermines their careers, incomes, living standards and mental and physical health.

Recommendations

Among more than 30 recommendations, the report calls for:

• A “root-and-branch review” of the NHS’s treatment of transgender people.
• Urgent clarification on the position of transgender prisoners, given the “clear risk of harm” if trans people are held in prisons according to their birth genders. It cites the cases of two transgender women who died in 2015 while serving time in male jails.
• Official recognition of gender should be based on “self-declaration”, rather than a “medicalised” assessment.
• Mandatory training for police officers on transphobic hate crimes, and the extension of hate crime laws to cover gender identity.
• The lowering from 18 to 16 of the age limit for obtaining official recognition of a new gender without parental consent.
• The option to record gender as ‘X’ in a passport, and an end to the need to show a doctor’s letter to alter the gender shown.
• More training for school staff to better support “gender-variant” young people.
• Guidance for sports bodies to make clear that exclusion of transgender players on grounds of safety or fair competition is rarely justified.