Since September 2015 the right to change the gender as which you are legally recognised has been available across the entire island of Ireland. Both the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Gender Recognition Act 2015 were political responses to court decisions. The decade that divides their introduction saw huge developments in social, political and legal attitudes towards LGBT rights and thus the two pieces of legislation differ in significant respects.
This paper will comparatively analyse the gender recognition processes in both jurisdictions on the island of Ireland. It will uncover how the provsions, possibilities and limitations of the earlier legislative scheme informed and underpinned the introduction of the subsequent one. Given that the recognition scheme south of the border is simpler and less intrusive than that in the north, there is an attraction for northern trans people to apply for recognition in the south.
Both the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956 and the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, 1998 evidence a policy whereby people born in Northern Ireland are generally entitled to Irish citizenship and to hold Irish passports. Yet upon close reading of the 2015 recognition scheme an interesting incongruity emerges. People in Northern Ireland, who are Irish citizens, are effectively prevented from applying for Gender Recognition south of the border, whereas people who are not citizens but who have lived in the Republic for one year can apply, as can people who are Irish citizens living all over the world apart from the North.
This paper will analyse this anomaly with a view to offering suggestions for how this might most effectively be regularised to ensure that recognition under the Gender Recognition Act 2015 is equally available to all who may wish to do so.