Jay Hulme

But wait! Getting a Gender Recognition Certificate means explaining and justifying your existence, and the current state of your genitals to a panel of judges who will never meet you and who (uniquely) you have no right to know the identities of. How dignified and not horrifying.

I will never forget the look on my ex's face when I said to him "did I ever tell you about the time I had to explain my genitals to a panel of judges in order to get a piece of paperwork." That's literally a thing that happened as part of a bureaucratic process in the UK.

Trans people in the UK struggle to participate fully in public life, because 50% of us are afraid to use public toilets due to the danger of hate crimes (I myself have had my head kicked in in a public toilet). It's very hard to go out and do things when you cannot go to the loo.

Trans people face higher rates of domestic abuse than the average UK citizen - this is compounded by the housing issues I mentioned upthread which make it harder for us to leave those situations.

The high levels of domestic abuse trans people face are even more troubling when you consider that the spouses of married trans people have a "spousal veto" and can block us getting a Gender Recognition Certificate.

Trans people in the UK aren't necessarily safe in LGBT spaces either, with 40% of respondents to a recent study by GALOP stating that the hate crimes they were a victim of were perpetrated by other LGBT people.

Though getting a Gender Recognition Certificate seems to be the answer to many of the problems trans people face, most of us don't have one because the process of obtaining one is both complex, expensive, and dehumanising.

Also, if you do manage to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate it means you're on an official government list of trans people. Which isn't at all worrying.