Marriage between transsexual persons
Gender Recognition Bill [Lords]
4:30 pm
Mr Tim Boswell (Daventry, Conservative)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
The new clause provides for marriage between transsexual persons. I can be brief, because many of the arguments have been thoroughly rehearsed in Committee and because I deliberately tabled the new clause as early as I could so that Ministers would have time to consider it.
The new clause is designed to repair a specific unfairness in the Bill, which comes on the back of another and wider concern that has been expressed by Members. The Bill is characterised by huge swings between issues that affect people's personal lives and issues such as social security that are equally complex but of a different nature. The new clause returns us, perhaps appropriately as we near the end of Committee stage, to the identity of individuals. The greatest difficulty that we have encountered in that respect is the Bill's requirement that if a party to a marriage to whom a gender recognition certificate has been granted wishes to take up the full gender recognition certificate, they must have their marriage annulled. Therefore if the couple continue to live together, they cannot do so as man and wife.
That circumstance initially came to my mind as a theoretical possibility, and I corresponded with the Minister's colleague, Lord Filkin, six months ago when the Bill was in draft, suggesting that it might be possible to make an exception in the specific case of two transsexual persons who had both received a gender recognition certificate. The Minister's concern, which has been properly expressed here and which I share, is not to permit same-sex marriages. However, if both parties to a marriage changed gender, that objection falls, because the couple would still be a man and a woman who wished to be married to each other. No doubt, pursuing some of the prudential
consequences of the annulment of marriage, they would also wish to avoid the practical problems that might arise in respect their pensions and benefits, or any difficulty arising from the discontinuity of marriage.
Under the Government's proposals, such individuals, like any other party to a marriage to whom a gender recognition certificate had been issued, would be required to annul their marriage and, in the case I have set out, remarry themselves—they could not even conclude a civil partnership. It is an unnecessary procedure that is bound to be stressful and traumatic, and it should be avoided. If the Minister believes, as I am sure he does, in the importance of marriage as an institution but wishes to enter the reservation that marriage is to be between persons of opposite sexes, I cannot perceive what objection might be made to the new clause.
I subsequently found, although I have not taken steps to interest myself in the identity of the parties involved, that there may be a real case in which two partners, both transsexuals, wish to avail themselves of such a provision. The matter therefore becomes more urgent. The principle is important. Even if no one were currently included in the class of persons who might wish to do as the new clause would allow, it would be wrong to make such people to go through the hassle of an annulment before reconstituting themselves as the married partnership that they always believed themselves to be.