Plans to make gender change easier shelved

UK’s Labour government has mothballed plans to make it easier legally to change sexes.

LGBTQ pride rally.

Labour has mothballed plans to make it easier to legally change gender, The Times has learnt, in a step to counter Reform UK’s surge in the polls.

During the election last summer Labour promised to change the “undignified” process of gender transition by replacing the panel of doctors and lawyers which approve gender recognition certificates with a registrar system. It had been criticised as “self-ID by the back door”, letting people change their legal gender too easily.

However, multiple sources said that the reforms were not a priority for ministers. They expect the plans to quietly “go away”.

Gender-based issues have been a point of tension for Labour, but Sir Keir Starmer has strengthened his position on biological sex after previous struggles to define a woman.

Yesterday (Sunday) Wes Streeting, the health secretary, bemoaned a decision by the NHS to remove the word “woman” from medical documents. He has also placed an indefinite ban on puberty blockers for children.

One insider pointed to a poll this week that put Reform above Labour for the first time, and said it would be “catnip” for Nigel Farage’s party if Labour was to push ahead on gender. Another warned that going ahead would give more ammunition to Elon Musk in his attacks on the government, at a time when President Trump is acting to bolster single-sex spaces.

A third source referenced the fronts on which the government is already defending its position, such as winter fuel payments, the economy and inheritance tax, and said: “Why would we open that particular can of worms for ourselves at this particular moment?”

Changes promised by Labour included making it easier to obtain a gender recognition certificate - the document allowing transgender people to have their affirmed gender legally recognised - by letting a single doctor sign off on it instead of two.

Ministers also intended to drop the requirement that people live as their preferred gender for two years before obtaining a certificate. Doing so would have meant amending the Gender Recognition Act, and there is little appetite within the party to reopen that debate in public.

It is understood that the reforms, which were included in Labour’s manifesto, have not been officially dropped because this would start arguments with parts of the party’s voter base.

Separate moves for a transgenderinclusive ban on “conversion therapy” are understood to be going ahead.

Some sources suggested that the reluctance to push ahead with broader reform was down to a desire to protect relations with the United States.

Recently, Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders including reducing transgender protections and banning transgender women and girls from female sport.

Today (Monday) Starmer will attempt to counter Farage’s party with a series of hard-hitting videos on immigration. The party has also run adverts with Reform-style branding and messaging. The adverts do not display Labour’s logo and use a similar shade of blue to that used by Farage’s party.

Reform said yesterday (Sunday) that its membership had passed 200,000, although the veracity of the figures is disputed. The party said its next goal is to overtake the membership of the Labour Party, which stands at about 300,000.

A government source said: “If we’re going to push back against Reform this is the kind of thing we need to be doing.”

Sex Matters, a charity that campaigns for the primacy of biological sex, welcomed the mothballing of Labour’s gender recognition plans. Helen Joyce, its director of advocacy, said: “If this news is correct, we welcome it.

“The next step, once the Supreme Court has ruled in the case of For Women Scotland concerning the meaning of the protected characteristic of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act, is for the Labour government to make good on its manifesto pledge to protect single-sex spaces.”

Streeting said at the weekend that the NHS must stop focusing on “daft nonsense”.

He wrote in The Sun on Sunday: “How is it that, in the name of inclusion, the word ‘woman’ has been erased from many NHS documents?”

“I have told the NHS to get back to basics. I say this as a gay man from a working-class family. If the equalities agenda doesn’t speak to the working-class man in me as much as the gay man, or as it should to my sisters or black and Asian friends, then what is it for? Who is it for?”

THE TIMES