If there was a global, legal and secular definition that covered all eventualites, we would not have this problem. This is all down to badly thought-out, rushed through bills to appease the Church, yet try to keep LGBT people happy.

As it stands it has so far done neither.

And on another note, why is everyone making such a big fuss over Christine and her wife’s denial of being gay? I think John (8) hit the nail on the head. You don’t just find out that your husband is transsexual and then decide you like women. That’s not how love and attraction work. Therefore, it really isn’t a lesbian relationship, despite being a same-sex relationship! Crazy stuff, eh?

Actually 68.

Blondie:

>
> I agree with what she is trying to do but I had a
> problem with the quote: “We are not gay and it would be
> hypocritical to pretend that we are. That is what we would be
> doing by entering into a civil partnership.” If she is a women
> in love with a women that makes her gay

Should the state be in the business to defining a person’s, or a couple’s sexuality? Or indeed, should you?

Make that equal access to marriage, or else you still get to have one version for straight and another for gay.

Learn your history; it was dropping the idea of gay marriage and and picking up same-sex marriage, and equal access, that got things moving at last, over in Hawai’i, in the mid-90s. Suddenly it ceased being about gay rights and became about human rights, and plugged into the well-established laws against sex and race discrimination, and took off.

And this was deliberately crafted in the UK – Blair’s ministers put through the civil partnership bill and the gender recognition bill side by side, arm in arm, when equal marriage was already well established in other countries.

If the recognition is granted the applicant has to be listed on a central register, the security of which is an unknown factor, but it is open to a great many agencies and may not be secure.

The new birth registration is then added to the most recent birth registrations, with the original left unsealed, so it becomes easy to identify in the indexes that are now online. And the new birth certificate is only a poor imitation, easily spotted as being issued due to the recognition process by anyone familiar with registration documents. With the popularity of family history that is a great number of people.

The Equality Bill, currently in the Lords, intends to add further to the discrimination faced by those who refuse to submit to that most unsatisfactory process by requiring them to be insured as if still their original sex too. Insurers will no doubt refuse to honour insurance if that is not complied with. So people who transitioned decades ago will be having to embarrass themselves everywhere insurance is bought. Such as car rental or travel counters.

The act is a disgrace. Since it went through at the same time as the disgraceful civil partnerships law, under the same, most Roman Catholic ministerial control, the whole system urgently needs reform. A court judgment as sought by Christine Timbrell might start that.

If Pink News thinks it is an LGBT site then its writers should know that act requires considerably more, and because of some of those outrageous requirements and other failings of the procedures, at least half of those eligible in the UK under European law to be recognised as being fully the sex of their identity have not used the law and face the same discrimination as the woman in the report.

It also does not provide full recognition. In many circumstances people are still allowed to treat a person who has gone through the process as if they have not.

Those requirements, even if one has completed all imaginable surgery, and regardless even of having transitioned decades previously with never a regret, include obtaining a fresh mental illness diagnosis, with a report submitted to be permanently retained in a government file that includes such details as if, how and why one masturbated before transition, how and why one dressed previously, who, if anyone, one had sex with, and why. That is a permanent file as in lodged in the public record office for ever.

Many who have gone through the process found that re-traumatising.

More…

The point is: whether we agree or not with the discriminatory law, its basis lies on the average life histories of women in this society, not on some biological ideas of what a woman is.

And the one thing transexual women don’t share with non-transexuals is “having lived as a woman”, specially in cases where the transition happened so late in life.

So, not only the law is wrong (in my opinion), but also in this case the demand simply doesn’t make sense.

At the moment “marriage” is between opposite sex couples, CP between same sex couples (I shoud have made that clear at 3); she can’t have it both ways: she either follows through (and gains the financial benefit) or doesn’t bbut stays married. That’s no more unfair than the facts that:
a) men can’t get a pension until to 65 (at present)
b) same sex couples can’t marry

She’s not fighting the discriminatory law at all. She’s just fighting to be removed from the category that’s discriminated against and put into the category that isn’t discriminated against. She’s not asking to change the discriminatory part of the law at all.

I find it outrageous that no one seems to realize this.

The clear way to end these problems is not to allow trans women to participate fully in this discriminatory system but to END the discrimination that causes it. Equalize the age of eligibility for men and women.

Really, for all of the posturing that European countries do about how non gender biased they are, they seem to be oblivious to and unaware of glaring gender biases against men that are right in front of their eyes. This clearly biased law is one example. Male only conscription in many European countries is another. Is it that people don’t notice? Don’t care? Are too lazy to challenge? This really puzzles me.

Why has no man challenged this obviously biased law in court?

Now please, let some woman, or man, explain to me that this law is biased but it’s ok because ___________________

either they see themself as a straight couple and therefore christine sees herself as a man.

or they dont see themselves as a romantic couple at all and its a financial arrangement and shouldnt be married anyway

they hate divorce becazuse its against their religious beliefs, but these religious beliefs let couples who arent in love to marry for financial reasons? or these religious beliefs let a man become a woman, still claim to be a man but want to be legally seen as a woman while saying their a man…

I am confused.