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X-rated passports?

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25 February 2022 / Nicholas Dobson
Issue: 7968 / Categories: Features , Public , Human rights
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Gender identity in the spotlight: Nicholas Dobson analyses the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Elan-Cane
  • Neither the European Convention on Human Rights nor the Human Rights Act 1998 in domestic law impose any current obligation for the secretary of state to issue an X-marked, gender-neutral passport.

According to the Anglican clergyman and essayist Sydney Smith (1771–1845), ‘there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen.’ However, the past being ‘a foreign country’ where they ‘do things differently’, sex and gender are more complex nowadays. For, as the World Health Organization indicates, while ‘gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender’, this ‘may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.’

So how does UK law treat transgender people, ie those having a gender different from their birth record? Under s 7(1) of the Equality Act 2010 (EqA 2010) a person has a gender reassignment protected characteristic in the light of a process (or part process) ‘for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing

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