A Church position paper on the Gender Identity Bill awaiting to be debated in Parliament has raised serious concerns on the potential impact of the proposed law. The seven moral experts who drew up the paper have concluded that the Bill ran the risk of being an act of injustice instead of its declared intention of conferring dignity and equality.
Lamenting the short period of consultation, the experts admit there is no clear-cut answer to the kind of legislation required but stress that such a complex problem needs to be guided by ethical principles that find the right balance between the rights of the individual and those of the community.
The position paper says that gender change is being trivialised to the point that it sounds like a simple amendment to an ID card.
It questions the very definition of gender identity as proposed in the Bill, describing it as very vague and wide open to interpretation.
The Bill is an “in-house experimentation with a leap into the unknown”, the experts warn: it would have been much wiser to draw upon the acquired experience of other established legal systems.
In sheer contrast to the experts’ position paper, Equalities Minister Helena Dalli has described the Bill as a “law of social conscience” that would enable transgender people to change their gender identity without necessarily having to undergo sexual reassignment surgery”.
The benefits of simplifying procedures are not in question. What is raising doubts is some of the finer script in the Bill, particularly those regarding secrecy and the ease with which anyone can change his sexual identity.
The Notarial Council has expressed its own reservations, particularly with regard to the issue of secrecy, saying that the Bill puts into question established practices of the public registry, which should be totally transparent and provide complete factual information. Like the Church experts, the notaries are concerned that the proposed secret registry will undermine third party rights and easily lead to abuse.
Most preoccupying in the Bill is that a gender change can be made through a mere notarial deed, where anyone can simply make a “clear and unequivocal declaration” of their preferred sex and new name and all public documents are changed accordingly. The Bill does not even put a limit to how many times this can be done.
The ease with which a gender change can be made, like it was a simple matter of choice, or even a whim, entirely ignores the psychiatric, psychological and social impact.
As the Notarial Council points out, notaries are duty-bound to explain the legal implications of the deed but not its social effects.
Human rights NGO Aditus has argued there are social, financial and family issues at stake that go far beyond simple legalities. The Life Network chairman said the Bill would dissolve the identity of a man and a woman and the sexual standards and social forms based on marriage, family, motherhood and fatherhood.
There are too many red flags for the Equalities Minister to ignore. There is no doubting the genuineness of her intentions – to decrease the hardship for a minority, in this case transgender people, and to protect them from discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Any initiative, no matter how well intended to help minorities, should keep in mind the common good. The flaws already identified in the Bill are serious enough for a thorough rethink of the draft.