The long-awaited Transgender Action Plan has just been published and is available from the Home Office web site.
I will need to sit down with my notes to see what, if anything, is missing from the workshops we held last year and to scrutinise the wording. From a quick pass, there are are few hard policy areas (Rather than just soft information-publishing initiatives) that jump out:
- A welcome focus on health (i.e. NHS) issues.
- Looking at gender markers on passports is mentioned, something that has already been announced. I would like this to have gone further to include other forms of ID (E.g. driving licenses) but even getting one form of ID to be optionally gender-free is a precedent. I’m also aware that at least some government IT projects are now trying to avoid use of gender markers unless strictly necessary.
- Plans to extend the current rules allowing homophobically-motivated crimes to attract increased prison sentences to be extended to cover transphobia too.
- Marriage is specifically mentioned, although until the equal marriage consultation is published this will unsurprisingly be vague.