Clause 9 - General
Gender Recognition Bill [Lords]
3:30 pm
Mr Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire, Conservative)
Amendment No. 44 would clarify exactly what rights are established by the Bill for transsexuals, and for many other organisations. It seeks to balance the legitimate and proper rights that the Bill will give to transsexuals with the rights of others, because I believe that they will be very severely and, in some cases, very negatively impacted by the Bill's proposals.
I will illustrate my points by taking three different examples. If we look carefully, we will see that whereas ''gender'' is used in just about every other area of the Bill, ''sex'' is distinctly used twice in subsection (1). In another place, Professor Lord Chan, a professor of medicine, drew attention to the serious issues surrounding the transfusion of blood. Certain people can be adversely affected by the transfusion of female blood. He said:
''Let us take the example of a person who says that he is male and is in fact female from the point of view of the chromosomes. We know of a rare but dangerous syndrome of people who have been transfused with blood from women and there is a transfusion reaction.''
He continues,
''it has been recorded in the United Kingdom in about 50 cases. On medical grounds there is a need for a person who has received a gender recognition certificate to disclose what their sex was at birth.'' —[Official Report, House of Lords, 29 January 2004; Vol. 657, c. 413-414.]
If we take subsection (1) literally, as I see it, it will not be possible for the National Blood Service or a hospital to find out the original birth sex, or chromosomal identity, of the person giving blood. If a person gets an adverse reaction because of that, serious legal cases will result. That is an extremely important point. It may happen only in a minority of cases, but we have discussed several issues that may occur only in a minority of cases and we must consider it.