The House of Lords vote backing same-sex marriage legislation was good news, and brings equality one step closer. One welcome result will be trans people won’t have to dissolve loving marriages in order to gain gender recognition.

However, there are still some issues which remain to be resolved in order for the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill for England and Wales to be great and inclusive legislation.

These could still be dealt with when the House of Lords debates the bill in detail next week. It is their job to scrutinize bills – and they could seize the chance to do so on 17 and 19 June.

Firstly, spouse’s survivor pension rights. Mike Freer, Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Finchley and Golders Green, has been raising awareness of this issue. Basically, if a married man dies, the pension his spouse will get will be radically different depending on whether the surviving spouse is a man or a woman – the man being awarded much less.

This was an issue that also faced married trans people – until the UK government agreed to amend the bill so that such marriages would be treated as special cases. The pension rights of spouses of transitioning trans people will now be protected – which removes the obstacle the government had raised in place of divorce, namely the potentially very severe loss of income for the spouse.

The government’s refusal to make pension provision equal seems to be based on the argument it’s unrealistic to expect the pension companies to pay more. Julian Huppert, Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge, made the suggestion that, if it was so important to protect the purses of these pension companies, maybe government ought to start suggesting nobody, gay or straight, should get married.

The percentage of people this affects as part of the population as a whole is small, 5% to 6% being the commonly accepted figure. To pay surviving spouses differently depending upon their gender would surely get some human rights lawyers sniffing around the European Courts.

Another injustice which could be newly embedded into law affects married trans people applying for a gender recognition certificate (GRC). While the requirement for divorce is now gone, a new requirement, that of written permission from the spouse, has been inserted. Activists are calling this the ‘spousal veto’.

While more marriages are surviving a trans person’s gender transition than before, the proportion which don’t still vastly outnumbers those that do.

Helen Grant’s statement of the government’s position seemed to indicate that they simply couldn’t conceive of a spouse who would want to draw out divorce proceedings. Yet, within 10 minutes of me posting a quiet question on Facebook, one trans person came back with exactly that scenario – the spouse had constantly changed their mind at the last moment, restarting negotiations over children and property, dragging their heels about replying to everything.

Why should marriages involving trans people that end because of transition be any different at all from other marriages that break down acrimoniously? Lots of people I’ve spoken to think it’s probably more likely that people divorcing trans people will become deliberately obstructive, something I’ve seen at second hand on more than one occasion. I’ve heard of divorce proceedings that have taken six years or more. In such cases, the trans person would simply be stuck in limbo.

That’s why the government holding out on the spousal veto is so objectionable – it hands someone’s gender recognition on a plate to someone who is likely to be hostile to them. It means married trans people’s basic rights of identity become entirely dependent upon another person’s goodwill.

A third area, and one which is quite technical, is the removal of the gender recognition certificate cause for divorce in both the Matrimonial Causes Act and the Civil Partnerships Act. Put simply, if a trans person has a GRC but doesn’t tell their spouse at the time of the marriage, then the spouse can use this non-disclosure to annul the marriage. If a trans person does not have a GRC, then non-disclosure of their gender history isn’t necessarily a reason that can annul the marriage. The discrimination is between those trans people who have GRCs and those trans people who don’t.

The reason for a GRC is the individual is treated in law as being of their ‘acquired’ sex – except, it seems, for marriage. This is perverse, given that the UK government was pushed into the Gender Recognition Act in the first place because of the requirement to allow a trans woman to marry a man.

Those people who don’t identify as male or female (non-binary people) will also find that the bill is not worded in a friendly way towards them. Getting the government to even acknowledge there might be such people has proved extremely difficult.

While the bill is a welcome step forward, some simple amendments would make it an even bigger step towards equality. The government’s timetable for the bill means that time is running out for those amendments to be included.