Gender Self-identification

Pippa Heylings Excerpts

Monday 19th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Pippa Heylings (South Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) for moving the motion and for her powerful speech. I also thank all the signatories to the petition. I want to add my voice to the calls for transgender people to be able to change their legal gender through self-identification and, in particular, without the need for recourse to a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

The petition reflects a long-standing call for dignity, simplicity and fairness in how we treat some of the most marginalised people in our society. We seem to be going backwards rather than forwards. The Women and Equalities Committee spent years scrutinising the Gender Recognition Act. As early as 2016, and again in a 2022 report, the Committee recommended a move to a more streamlined, de-medicalised process, recognising that being trans should never be treated as an illness. Yet that is exactly what the current process continues to do. The requirement to obtain a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria from an NHS gender clinic doctor is not only dehumanising and daunting for those involved, but these days is practically almost impossible, and inaccessible.

As other Members have done, I would like to bring into the debate the voice of trans people, particularly from my South Cambridgeshire constituency. Let me share the very human story of what it is like in practice—the story of a trans woman who embodies the struggle that the petition seeks to address. Yannifer is a trans woman, a close friend and a colleague of mine. She happily changed her gender in her passport and driving licence back in 2023, after a visit to her GP—self-declaration in practice. I remember the joy of that day, and her joy and pride in what she said was her most life-affirming moment. But that was short-lived, because she then realised that that did not entitle her to the next steps towards a gender recognition certificate, nor to hormone treatment. For that, she needs a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from an NHS gender clinic.

With the NHS in crisis and the reality of the current provision, Yannifer is now two years into what is likely to be at least a six-year wait—a cruel and unnecessary delay for a basic recognition of her identity. She has been able to form the most special of relationships, but she is not able to marry her partner in her own acquired gender without a gender recognition certificate. More dangerously, she has had to turn to private treatment, at huge personal cost, because her GP still refuses to prescribe the hormones that she needs, citing loopholes that discredit private diagnoses.

We have heard today about the mental health impact of this process, and the stress and uncertainty that it causes are not hypothetical. The situation in which Yannifer finds herself is dangerous. She has told me that to procure medication informally is just to survive, because the alternative of not being able to live in her acquired gender and to change and transition, as she puts it, would be “practically suicide-inducing”. So she lives in limbo, denied the basic dignity of legal recognition. There are huge questions over the need for this medical diagnosis. As the Women and Equalities Committee concluded, the diagnosis is outdated. The World Health Organisation has moved from “gender dysphoria” to “gender incongruence”, under a non-mental health classification. The UK is now out of step with international best practice.

Ireland, Denmark, New Zealand and Argentina have all reported positive administrative and public health outcomes from policies based on legal gender self-declaration. As we have heard today, these nations are not collapsing and the sky has not fallen in. They are modernising, but in the UK we continue to ask trans people to navigate a legal process that is, according to the Government’s own consultation, dehumanising, overly bureaucratic and prohibitively expensive. We continue to ask trans people to prove that they are ill in order to access the legal right to live as their authentic selves. That contradiction is not only outdated, but harmful.

Trans people such as Yannifer are not asking for special treatment; they are asking for respect, safety and recognition. I would like Yannifer to know that she is heard, and that we see, value and respect her. That is why I am urging the Government and the Minister to reconsider the recommendations of the Women and Equalities Committee, to allow self-identification, remove the requirement of a gender dysphoria diagnosis from the Gender Recognition Act and reform the Act completely to enable self-identification, as the petition requests.