It's not just our problem
21st July 1998
Adapted from an original posting to the UKPFC-News mailing list
When confronted with an absurdity such as the UK’s refusal to issue a trans person with a corrected birth certificate stating his or her true gender, it’s very easy to focus on the difficulties it causes for us.
Want a mortgage? Taking out life insurance? Setting up a pension? Claiming Housing Benefit? Applying for a job for which employers require a birth certificate? Getting your name put on a friend or employer’s car insurance? In every one of those circumstances, a trans person has to reveal that the details recorded decades ago in the “sex” column of the births register are wrong, and don’t reflect the reality. A historic mistake is elevated by officialdom to the status of unchangeable “historical fact” (a phrase which any history student learns early on to be a bit of an oxymoron — much of a historians’s purpose in life is in revealing that what we thought were facts turn out to be long-standing misconceptions).
One of the most important demands of the Press For Change campaign is to get that single “M” or “F” letter changed, to ensure that this critical document reflects the reality of our lives. That on its own isn’t enough to secure our rights, but the alteration is an essential prerequisite to ensure that our privacy is protected.
Of course, we know that it is already possible for trans people to get corrected driving licences and passports: the DVLA is quite quick to issue a corrected driving licence, and notwithstanding a few hiccups such as those discussed on UKPFC-Forum last autumn passports are normally changed without undue difficulty.
A recent episode of the popular soap Coronation Street showed what happened when a trans woman with an uncorrected passport was stopped by immigration officials. The result, of course, was embarrassment and humiliation for both Hayley Patterson and her boyfriend Roy: outraged viewers apparently wrote to their MPs to complain at the indignities inflicted on the nation’s best-known trans woman.
As trans people, our sympathies lie of course with another trans person subjected to a session of unnecessary humiliation. It’s also impossible not to empathise with the powerless frustration of Roy, left outside to worry while his girlfriend was taken away to suffer untold indignities.
But it occurred to me to stop and think too, about the indignity inflicted on the official. The clash between the truth of Hayley’s life and the “M” in a column which should really say “F” didn’t just inconvenience Coronation Street’s young couple: it caused unnecessary and wholly avoidable confusion and embarrassment for the official concerned.
I’m sure that customs and immigration officers (both real and fictional) will be much relieved if Hayley applies for a new, corrected passport before Coronation Street’s script-writers next send her overseas. The procedures are in place to let her do so, and as long as she doesn’t encounter a passport office bureaucrat on a bad day, she’ll get a corrected documented quite quickly. That way, the customs man and his supervisor won’t end up making fools of themselves again.
We know that it is possible for the corrected passport to be issued before the surgeon performs the other correction, and that someone more closely in touch with the trans community than Hayley would have been aware of that. Hopefully she will send off the forms and get that corrected passport; if she drives, she should change her licence too — that way, traffic cops will be spared any of the rigmarole which their counterparts in customs were forced into just by doing their jobs properly.
It really is unfair for someone in such a position to be confronted with papers which clearly don’t match the reality they see. If they are doing their job properly, they must check it out — and in the end, unless they are utterly boorish, they’ll have to apologise. It’s a humiliating time-waster.
So Her Majesty’s Government has allowed us to change the two key documents which govern our interactions with their uniformed officials. Not just to make life easier for us, though I hope that was at least part of the motive — but, I suspect, because it also makes life easier for them. No sensible government wants its officials subjected to the sort of rigmarole which Coronation Street viewers witnessed in Manchester airport: it wastes valuable time and it’s bad for staff morale. A two-hour session spent interrogating a trans woman with an “M” on her passport leaves two hours less for the real task of catching smugglers and other miscreants.
In refusing to alter birth certs, the government insists that that they are NOT an identity document. True, up to a point: most government departments don’t use them as such.
But other bodies do: academic institutions, employers, and myriad other bureaucracies insist on seeing a birth cert. And as long as the document is uncorrected, the staff in those places will all have to go through the same mutually humiliating pantomime played out by the customs officer. They’ll have to question and query; to get further documentation; to offend and upset a prospective or existing client or student or employee. It mucks up their day and it wastes their time — and staff time costs the employers money.
It’s not just trans people who are paying a price for the theological obsession with “historical fact” which has blighted us ever since Justice Ormerod undid April Ashley’s marriage in the 1971 Corbett v Corbett case.
On the contrary, every time we lose, so does someone else. The blight on trans people is a blight on everyone who deals with us: on our lovers who we can’t marry, on our insurers whose files are fattened and administrative costs bloated, on the solicitors and executors who are obliged after our deaths to deal with death certificates repeating the mistaken sex indicator from the uncorrected birth certificate. It’s a long list, and it would be an interesting exercise to see how comprehensive we can make it. Who else can YOU think of who is being mucked around by this absurdity? (Please write and let us know: the list would be a sobering catalogue of the true cost of human rights violations).
On July 30th, we are due to hear the judgement from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on the cases of Rachel Horsham and Kristina Sheffield. Those two trans women hope that the court will rule in favour of their demand that the UK government stop violating their rights and ours.
The ECHR is a notoriously cautious and conservative body. All too often in the past, it has left trans people bitterly disappointed by its apparent determination to give the benefit of any possible doubt to the government. We can only hope that this time, they do better.
If the judges find more legal niceties to keep the another two plaintiffs in legal limbo, they won’t just let down Rachel and Kristina; they won’t just let down all of us. Human Rights are indivisible, and as millions of Coronation Street viewers saw quite clearly, curtailing our rights makes trouble for more than just the direct victims.
Will the court act, and use its powers to right an injustice? It’s not just trans people who will be waiting eagerly for a judicial thumbs-up.
Copyright © Claire McNab