Recognition Against Liberation: On the UK’s Unreformed Gender Recognition Act

In this short article I argue that the UK government’s decision not to update the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) is more than a missed opportunity. It weaponises the GRA, now an effective instrument of assimilation and containment. The failure to reform the GRA seems like a maintenance of the status quo, but given that the circumstances have significantly changed since 2004, the GRA now explicitly fails trans people, inc nonbinary people... and in fact this is the intention. Rather than being a flawed attempt to improve trans lives, the GRA is a well-designed apparatus of biopolitical control that reinforces binary gender and cisnormativity, demanding assimilation in return for recognition.