

Transgender issues should never be treated as a mental health problem, according to a radical parliamentary report published on Thursday that demands a complete overhaul of the legal protections for transgender people in the UK.



The House of Commons women and equalities committee said the government should introduce a non-binary gender option on passports, require all police officers to undergo transphobic hate crime training, and ensure transgender people cannot be excluded from single-sex institutions such as women’s refuges.

The report also insists transgender prisoners should be allowed to serve their sentence in a prison that is appropriate to their gender, says 16- and 17-year-olds should be allowed to switch their legal gender, and calls for an explicit ban on anti-transgender hate speech.

“I can think of no group that suffers more discrimination than trans people,” committee chair Maria Miller told BuzzFeed News. “We must think about the human rights of every single person who lives in our country, and at the moment the human rights of trans people are not fully protected.”

Miller, a former Conservative equalities minister, said it was also time to move away from an arrangement where individuals are only allowed to legally switch gender if they gain a legal certificate through the approval of a “quasi-judicial system” in which “a panel of doctors and lawyers decide on your gender for you”.

Instead, the committee concluded the government should swiftly follow the lead of Ireland, Malta, and Argentina and move towards a system of gender self-declaration, making it easier for adults to transition without going through a legal system that often requires them to have publicly lived in a different gender for several years.



Miller also said people with gender dysphoria who wish to have surgery should no longer be treated as mental health patients on the NHS: “Having support for trans people located in mental health services is a relic of the past. In many ways it has been treated in a similar way to other LGB issues decades ago: We shouldn’t be treating trans people as if they have a mental health problem or as if they have a disease.”

“There is clear evidence that public attitude is well ahead of the law,” Miller concluded. “Almost half the population accept that gender is fluid and is not as simple as male or female. There will be a minority of people who might be uncomfortable about that, but parliament is there to represent the way that society is today.”

