Coming Inside and/or Playing Outside: The (Legal) Futures of LGBTIQ Rights in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Act 2004 (GRA 2004), where an applicant successfully obtains a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), that "person's gender becomes for all purposes the acquired 9 gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person's [legal] sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person's [legal] sex becomes that of a woman)." 10 As Flora Renz notes in Chapter 6, the GRA 2004 was a landmark moment for human rights -both in this jurisdiction and across Europe. In England and Wales, the legislation represented an explicit, statutory repudiation of the (in)famous Corbett 11 case law 12 -under which trans persons had been denied validation of their lived identity. For Europe, and farther afield, the Gender Recognition Act 2004 stood as a key point of departure -a national framework, which showed that self-identified gender could be acknowledged without requiring an applicant to undertake a process of sterilisation. 13