Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat. In May of last year I spoke on the broad precursor of this proposed Gender Recognition Bill. At the time I raised a number of concerns which Sinn Féin shares with transgender individuals and their representative advocacy group, TENI. I recognise and acknowledge that some small changes have been made to the Bill. I have heard many positive remarks from right across the political spectrum. However, a wide range of respected human rights bodies has been telling the Government that there are unacceptable and unnecessary provisions placed in this Bill. For the life of me I do not understand why the Minister for Social Protection has failed to take on board many of these legitimate concerns.

Most of us would agree there is a clear need for a legal framework for trans people to have their gender reflected accurately. It was for this reason that Sinn Féin produced its Bill on this in 2013 which, if enacted, would have given trans people a pathway to legal recognition without having to jump through unnecessary hoops, such as wasting psychiatrists' and endocrinologists' time by having to get official say so from a medical expert about what their gender is when they could just as easily articulate precisely what it is themselves.

I would like to think that our legislation would not have been downright cruel and forced happily married couples to divorce so that one person might have his or her gender accurately recognised. Our legislation was rights-based and we are pleading, even at this later stage, with the Government to recognise the gaping and unnecessary flaws in this Bill. We will end up reluctantly supporting it because people need an avenue for recognition but members of the Labour Party, in particular, need to recognise that this is far from the win on a social issue it is presenting it as. Telling trans people to divorce or they cannot have their gender recognised is insulting in itself but it is a further insult to say that to them and then portray it as giving them some kind of legislative gift. I take no pleasure in saying it is just plain wrong.

I have met a wide range of groups and individuals on this issue and it saddens me that their legitimate views have not been listened to or reflected in this Bill. It does not have to be like this. Originally, there seemed to be the suggestion from the Government that the single requirement, or forced divorce requirement, was necessary because it did not want to inadvertently introduce same-sex marriage. It seems somehow redundant to do this when same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions are legally recognised here and when we are very close to the referendum on this important matter. Trans people who are married or who have families are entitled to the same protection under the law as everyone else and for a State that supposedly holds the institution of marriage in such high regard, it is a bizarre and cruel approach to effectively force divorce on people who may not want it. It violates people's basic rights to equality, and that is before one even gets to the nuts and bolts of this, taking into account that people will have to separate from their families for five years before divorcing. The idea that this State or any state would compel people to do that is appalling, to say the least. Belgium, Georgia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Spain have all done away with compulsory divorce for gender recognition and those countries have not experienced societal melt down. Let us be inclusive about this and do the same.

There is no constitutional bar to this, so there is no logical reason to institute the State-sanctioned break-up of families so that people can access documentation to accurately reflect who they are. I would go so far as to say that I have my doubts that a law compelling trans persons to be single to avail of legal gender recognition is actually unconstitutional. The Minister and her Department know full well that it is unlikely this provision would be upheld in the European Court of Human Rights. While we uphold the decisions of that court in other cases concerning divorce and gender recognition, they have essentially concerned states where access to divorce was much simpler and far less paternalistic than in this jurisdiction.

It remains the case that this law, in a weird pervasion of justice, would force a happy loving couple to perjure themselves in order to access a divorce, incur huge legal fees and wait five years to get a piece of paper that states their correct gender. That is quite simply a kick in the teeth for trans people. Surely it is perfectly reasonable to ask what the motivations of the Minister for Social Protection are here. I would like her to spell it out for us.

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