The British government is currently consulting on how best to reform the Gender Recognition Act 2004, the law which allows trans people to change their legal gender. One of the ideas the government is consulting on is whether people should be able to self-identify as a different gender or non-binary without the need for a certificate from a medical professional. But it has led to controversy.

The Conversation sought two differing legal perspectives on what changing the law would mean.

Alex Sharpe, Professor of Law, Keele University

In the 1980s, I remember reading a story in the satirical magazine, Private Eye, with a headline something like “Queen thought Dead”. The story went onto explain how somebody, somewhere, had apparently thought the Queen dead, or at least a little peaky, but apparently they were mistaken. The Queen was chipper. Long live her majesty. The satire captured a trope all too evident within modern journalism. Australians call it a “furphy” – a rumour or story, especially one that is untrue or absurd. One right royal furphy circulating in the UK currently is one that suggests women’s rights will be seriously imperiled if the government changes the law to allow gender self-identification.

Currently, the process of recognition under the Gender Recognition Act is unnecessarily invasive, cumbersome and costly. According to a BBC fact checking exercise, it can take more than five years for trans men and women in England and Wales to legally change their gender under the current system, a fact expThe Conversation sought two differing legal perspectives on what changing the law would mean.lained primarily by a chronic lack of funding devoted to NHS transgender health care provision.

It also undermines the dignity of trans people because it approaches our lives in terms of mental illness, an indignity shared by gay and lesbian people until 1973 when homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It also fails to cater for non-binary people.