Transgender court cases and the death by a thousand law suits
Late 1969 was time of trepidation for trans folk in the UK. April Ashley’s court case was about to be ruled on, and the cold winter broke into a colder winter of the soul as January 1970 saw Judge Ormrod pass down his infamous ordinary meaning of sex denying all trans people in the UK sex based rights in their affirmed gender. At a stroke trans people went from a legal penumbra to full umbral black, denied basic human dignity. In the umbra the did not sit, for over the next 30 years a series of court case sought to claw back dignity, searching for any means possible to get trans people a semblance of normalised rights. Finally in 2003 the European Court of Human Rights forced the UK government to provide a sliver of equality and in 2004 the Gender Recognition Act was passed. Rather than being a capstone on rights, it merely shifted a handful of trans people able to jump through protracted legal loopholes a walled off set of rights, leaving every trans person back in the penumbral shadow lands. Ever since, while the UK government has toughened protections for trans people, the reality is that those rights have been severely limited, almost as if trans people are jettisoned to luna orbit waiting for permission to re-enter and have a full set of rights again.
Then, around 2016 a slow death by a thousand cuts crept into through the courts and…
