Clause 4 - Successful applications
Gender Recognition Bill [Lords]
9:30 am
Dr Lynne Jones (Birmingham, Selly Oak, Labour)
I apologise for not being in Committee when my hon. Friend the Member for City of York moved his amendment. I thank him for so doing because it raise many important issues, and I agree with him that it would have been preferable if the Bill had not required married couples who wished to remain married to divorce where the transsexual spouse also wishes to acquire their civil and human rights. However, the Minister knows that the matter was raised on Second Reading, and I intervened to suggest a very similar solution to the one proposed by the hon. Member for City of York, which is that a couple who wish to remain partners should retain their pension rights.
I appreciate that we are not discussing civil partnership legislation, and that may create some problems in drafting the legislation before us, but my hon. Friend appears to have come up with a solution. Whether or not the Government support the amendment, I hope that they will take away the issue and return with similar, if not identical proposals in a Government amendment. We can then deal with the difficult issue of couples who wish to remain together after going through the difficult and traumatic experience in which one spouse has had to face up to the fact that they are dysphoric in their birth gender and wishes to have a realignment to what they consider to be their correct gender.
Such couples are few and far between because sadly, if understandably, most marriages in such circumstances end in divorce. For those few who have demonstrated tremendous closeness and love of one another, it is heartbreaking that, in order to acquire rights under the proposed legislation, they should have to dissolve their marriage. In so doing, they should not face financial penalties.
Even if civil partnerships are introduced, the transition from marriage to partnership will be traumatic. The cost of splitting pensions is not without substance. There must be a way of preserving pension rights if the marriage is dissolved, because the Government seem determined to ensure that such marriages are dissolved. No doubt their decision will be challenged in the future.
I understand why the Government are against allowing such marriages to continue, but we must come up with a sympathetic solution so that those couples who wish to remain together are able to so do.
I wish to raise the case of a couple who have been in touch with me. They have remained together, in the sense that they see themselves as partners, but because one of them has undergone gender transition they could not live 24/7 with the other partner, so one of them has moved round the corner.
The couple are still together in one sense, and I would like to flag up the issue of what exactly living together as partners means. It is an issue for the next debate, and we need to define what we mean by partnership. That particular couple are financially dependent on one another, and do not want to get
divorced. They are living in more or less adjacent houses and maintaining a relationship.