Dear GRC Panel, this process is supposed to help

An open letter to the people who decide whether someone's identity is legally valid

It is not their fault that a mistake was made when recording their sex. Your job is to put it right, not to make it harder.

Correcting a mistake

If you are reading this, you sit on the panel that decides whether a trans person is granted legal recognition of their gender. You read through bundles of paperwork, medical reports, statutory declarations, and evidence of living in their acquired gender, and you make a decision. Approved or denied.

I want to ask you to think about what you are actually doing when you make that decision, because I think the framing of this process has gone badly wrong. You are not granting someone an identity. You are not giving them permission to be who they are. You are correcting an administrative error. When a baby is born, their sex is recorded based on a visual assessment of their body. For most people, that record is accurate. For trans people, it is not. That is all a Gender Recognition Certificate does. It corrects a mistake.

It is not their fault