The Scottish Government wants to remove the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria to obtain a gender recognition certificate, instead allowing people to “self declare”.
It also plans to lower the age at which someone can legally change gender, from 18 to 16, and reduce the time in which a person must live in their “acquired gender” from two years to three months.
The EHRC said that the moves could in practice extend the right to change gender from a “small defined group” who had demonstrated their commitment to the process to “a wider group who identify as the opposite gender at a given point”.
Ms Sturgeon said she was “slightly concerned” that the regulator had not “accurately characterised the impact” legislation, expected to be published within weeks, would have.
She said: “What the Bill will seek to do is simplify an existing process. It doesn’t confer any new rights on trans people. This is a Bill that is designed to reduce the distress, the trauma and the anxiety and often the stigmatisation that trans people suffer in our society.”
Green MSP: ‘Critics are transphobes’
Her comments came after Maggie Chapman, the Scottish Green MSP, denounced critics of the reforms and questioned the impartiality of the EHRC.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think many of the critics are transphobes. I think many people might be misinformed because this debate has become very polarised and there is an awful lot of misinformation out there.”
However, a collection of 15 groups in Scotland issued a joint statement in which they welcomed the EHRC’s intervention.
They claimed recent meetings between Shona Robison, an SNP minister, and campaigners with concerns about the reforms – organised after The Telegraph revealed that ministers had discussed the proposals only with pro-trans lobby groups – had been “brief and disappointing”.
Marion Calder, the co-founder of For Women Scotland, one of the signatories, said: “The message we took from our meeting is that the Scottish Government has not been listening to women, and given that draft legislation will be introduced in a matter of weeks, this ‘listening’ exercise has been nothing but a sham process.”
