Jolyon rejoices in a win.

In a landmark decision for trans rights, the High Court has ruled that a panel acted unlawfully in denying a trans man a gender recognition certificate because he was trying to conceive.

Ooooh they never, did they?! Those fiends! Imagine telling a woman she’s not a man merely because she’s trying to do what only a woman can do?!

In February, a gender recognition panel denied the man, whose identity is protected by an anonymity order and is referred to in the judgment as W, a gender recognition certificate. This was on the basis that he had been trying to conceive a child – concluding that this meant he was not living as a man.

With the support of Good Law Project, W challenged this decision in the High Court in July. The court has now concluded that there was abundant evidence that W was living as a man, and that requiring him to abandon either his male identity, or his desire to have a family, “would be to dismantle and fracture the person he is”. 

Ok but what does “living as a man” mean? She watches enough hours of football per week? She’s perfected the dudely walk? She never ever notices there are dishes to wash?

Given the distress that trans people face when their gender is denied, the judge held that the Gender Recognition Act “leans actively towards the facilitation of gender recognition”. He considered that any approach to determining whether a certificate was awarded should be “permissive” and consider the evidence in the round, rather than relying on any one factor. He emphasised that whether someone was living in their acquired gender was “necessarily a far more subtle and nuanced concept” than allowed for by the panel.

Ahhhhh is that what it is, subtle and nuanced, as opposed to stark raving mad.

Joly modestly concludes with four paragraphs of frenzied flattery of the Bonkers Law Project.