Labour Member of Parliament Charlotte Nichols suggested that the law should allow a person’s gender to be changed on documents posthumously.
The U.K. politician asked in January if Britain’s Gender Recognition Act (GRA) of 2004 could be amended to allow for “transgender people who are deceased to be legally remembered by the gender they lived by.”
Stuart Andrew, the equalities minister, said that the government had no plans to amend the act.
Nichols told The Telegraph, “My question follows on from a recent petition supported by many of my constituents, regarding amending the Gender Recognition Act.”
“The genesis of the petition was the murder of my constituent Brianna Ghey, whose life was brutally cut short before she was old enough to have formal legal recognition of who she was and how she will be remembered by her family, friends and our community,” Nichols continued.
Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old male who identified as transgender, was stabbed 28 times and died in February, 2023. The two perpetrators, both age 15 when they committed the murder, had discussed killing four other children. They were both sentenced this month to life in prison.
The petition in question demanded amending the Gender Recognition Act (2004) so that family members can request a gender recognition certificate (GRC) and reissued death certificate for a transgender person who has died. The petition accumulated nearly 14,000 signatures and closed on August 15, 2023.
“As announced in 2020, we believe the Gender Recognition Act 2004 is effective, strikes the right balance and allows for those who wish to legally change their sex,” the government responded in March, 2023. “We have no plans to change it.”
Nichols’s suggestion prompted criticism.
“It is patently absurd, factually inaccurate and a statistical distortion,” said Tory Member of Parliament Liam Fox. “We should not be encouraging the idea that people can simply choose to change their biological status nor should we bend truth to accommodate an ever more extreme and dangerous ideology.”
“Dead people should be able to get a mortgage and vote,” activist Kellie-Jay Keen wrote sarcastically on social media. Keen founded the organization Let Women Speak and has been a vocal critic of policies that allow for gender self-identification.