The Section 35 Order, Part Three: Point by Point

A large crowd of trans people and allies marches through London, waving flags and placards. The banner in the front reads “Loud, transsexual and fucking pissed off.”

This is the third and final part of a series of posts analysing the UK Government’s Statement of Reasons for issuing a Section 35 Order to block the Scottish Parliament’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill (GRR). Part One looked at the constitutional issues in play, arguing that rulings on what counts as “modifying the law”, “reasonableness” and “adverse effects” will alter the balance of power between Holyrood and Westminster and thus threaten devolution. Part Two examined the interaction of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) and the Equality Act 2010 (EA), arguing that the UK Government is wrong to claim that the GRR Bill definitively alters the definition of “sex” in the Equality Act, and showing how legally permissable discrimination against trans people works in practice.

These two posts together discussed Part 1 of the Statement of Reasons, which is about whether or not the GRR Bill modifies the law as it applies to reserved matters. This post will look at Parts 2–4, which are about what the practical effects of the GRR Bill might actually be. I go point by point through the arguments, pointing out the flaws in reasoning and the errors in fact. It is not necessary to read my first two posts to follow this one, but I will refer to their conclusions regularly.

To reiterate: I’m not a lawyer. I’m writing these posts as a lay commentator with a strong interest in trans law, to help other trans people understand the law and what is happening. The other thing I’m doing is thinking through these arguments from a trans perspective, because that is the perspective that is so often missing from law, media and politics. When you think transly about the law, different and more important discussions become possible.

It is important to remember that in all of what follows, the UK Government only has to prove that it has reasonable grounds to believe that these adverse effects will happen: they do not have to prove that they will actually happen. As I argued in Part One, we do not yet know what the bar for reasonableness will be, and setting that bar has constitutional consequences. Therefore, if the court case reaches the stage of analysing adverse effects on the operation of the law rather than modifying the law itself, the Scottish Government will have a harder job to do: it must show not that the arguments are wrong but that they are unreasonable. On the other hand, it’s clear that the UK Government favoured quantity over quality in its Statement of Reasons: some arguments are much shakier than others. I do not think this approach will be looked on favourably by judges.

Gender Borders

Part 2 of the Statement of Reasons considers the “adverse effects of different GRC regimes across the UK.” It claims that “it is practically and legally undesirable for all, including in particular the individual holder of the GRC, that a person will have one legal sex in Scotland and a different one in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.” This argument is pursued through §14–16.

The easiest practical solution would, of course, be for the rest of the UK (rUK) to simply recognise Scottish GRCs. This would dispense with every concern in Part 2. Indeed, this solution may be legally relevant, because when the GRR Bill was passed, and up until the January 9th announcement that the UK Government planned to update its list of countries whose GRCs (or equivalents) it would recognise, the Scottish Parliament could reasonably have assumed that its GRCs would be recognised, because the process in the GRR Bill is equivalent to that of several approved countries. Indeed, it could also be argued that if easier access to a GRC has indeed changed the definition of sex for the Equality Act, that change was already made by the UK Government’s prior decision to recognise GRCs and equivalents from countries with similar systems. There already are trans people in the UK with birth certificates amended by self-declaration: if sex has changed, it has already changed. Perhaps this is the very reason for the January 9th announcement, to enable the “no, you changed the law” argument to be made in the Statement of Reasons. Either way, the timing means it could be plausible to argue that it is not the GRR Bill which creates the “adverse effect” of diverging regimes — if indeed it is adverse — but the UK Government’s later actions.

There is also an important precedent for the situation of diverging regimes: same-sex marriage. Marriage status is a protected characteristic, and also has consequences, like GRC status, for taxation and state benefits. Marriage is, like gender recognition, a devolved matter: changing the definition of marriage in the relevant devolved laws has a similar effect on equalities law to the GRR Bill’s. Same-sex marriage has been recognised and performed in England and Wales since March 2014, in Scotland since December 2014, and in Northern Ireland since January 2020. Along similar lines, England and Wales have just raised the legal marriage and civil partnership age to 18, again creating diverging regulation of a protected characteristic with significant tax and benefits implications. Now, a Section 35 Order is not mandated whenever the UK Government believes there are adverse effects on reserved law: it could choose to accept these effects instead. However, this does provide a useful comparator for what diverging regimes of the legal definition of protected characteristics might look like — including what it takes to enable IT systems to recognise spouses of the same gender, for example. Differing legal systems is an ordinary and intended consequence of devolution, and this has in the past already included differing legal systems around Equality Act protected characteristics.

Another important argument here is the right of trans people in general to be accommodated by the state. That is, in order to assess whether “needing to update our IT systems” (para 20) is an adverse effect, it must be weighed against “IT systems should accommodate trans people”. Similarly, the argument that companies might be confused as to the different rights that rUK and Scottish GRCs confer (para 19) needs to be balanced against the argument that the state should issue statutory guidance that helps companies deal with any complexities. And again similarly, offering trans migrants to the UK a more humane way to update their birth certificates (para 21) is, to my mind, a positive rather than an adverse effect. The UK Government certainly makes no legal argument as to why it should be seen as adverse, other than the arguments made for Scottish citizens — it seems merely to be blowing a xenophobic dog whistle.

Furthermore, such a “gender border” may already exist in the island of Ireland. Ireland is not included on the list of approved countries, as that list has not been updated since Ireland’s own Gender Recognition Act 2015 (broadly similar to Scotland’s GRR and to many countries on the approved list). It is not legally clear whether the UK Government recognises Irish GRCs — that is, whether Irish citizens in the UK who have a GRC can have their records updated for birth, death and taxes. (I would welcome clarification on this from people who know.) While this is a border between states on one island rather than between nations in one state, it is particularly relevant because of the high number of Irish citizens in Northern Ireland and the importance of the common travel zone between the states, particularly across the land border on the island of Ireland. When examining the actual practical consequences of different gender regimes, there is a significant comparator in the island of Ireland — and if the UK Government does refuse to recognise Irish GRCs as part of current changes, that has consequences for relations between the two states.

To summarise:

• Differing legal regimes, including around protected characteristics, is an ordinary part of devolution, and has precedent.
• Any administrative difficulties could be solved by the UK recognising Scottish GRCs, and so it is the UK Government’s own change of policy post-GRR Bill which has created the problem, not the GRR Bill itself.
• All the adverse effects listed also come with positive effects for the trans community, which should be part of the legal balance.

(Para 18 was not considered here, as it is covered by sections below.)

Gender Fraud

Part 3 (paras 22–28) of the Statement of Reasons discusses the possibility of people making fraudulent applications for a GRC, and argues that the GRR Bill makes this more likely. It provides no evidence for this claim, with no data from comparable gender systems as to whether such gender recognition fraud has ever occurred. A curiosity here is that the current Gender Recognition Act includes no provision for such supposed fraud, while the GRR Bill both criminalises making a false statutory declaration and allows the police to make in intervention in the gender recognition process. It seems curious to criticise a Bill which enables greater police involvement in gender recognition for creating greater risk of criminality — but perhaps the authors of the Statement of Reasons are secretly abolitionists. The more the laws, the more the crime.

These paragraphs are hard to argue with because they include neither argument nor evidence: they only say “we just think there might be more fraud now” without justification beyond a plain description of the GRR Bill. I hope, but cannot promise, that they will be required to provide actual argument and evidence in court. There are, however, a few points worth making.

First, §26 reiterates the argument that the GRR Bill changes the definition of sex in equalities law. This is not legally determined. This paragraph also makes the clear legal error of stating that sex is “biological” in the context of the Equality Act : it is not. “Biological sex” is not used in statute, and in case law it is only ever discussed as one of set of complex factors within a broader set of factors that make up sex. This is explained in detail in the second post in this series.

Second, one thing the Statement of Reasons does cite, in §27, is a letter from the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls criticising the GRR Bill (including, among other things, for not including non-binary people). This letter contains no arguments not also contained within the Statement of Reasons, nor does it cite any evidence of supposed gender recognition fraud being an issue. Meanwhile, the UN Special Rapporteur on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity urged the passing of the GRR Bill, and clarified that laws like the GRR Bill are the stated policy of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who recommends self-identification and describes medical certification as abusive. The letter also explains that 250 million people worldwide live under a system like that proposed by the GRR Bill, and that across these countries “there is no credible evidence to suggest systemic risk of predatory men using the process of identifying and living as a woman as an opportunity to perpetrate gender or sexual-based violence”. It also points out in a clear-eyed way that arguments like those in the Statement of Reasons are founded in and perpetuate the dangerous prejudicial portrayal of trans women as predators. The letter is worth reading in full. I can only hope it carries some weight in court.

Third, §28 finally concedes the point that was central to my second post: that single-sex services can argue for excluding all trans people, with and without GRCs, under the exception from gender reassignment discrimination. This is the most incoherent part of the whole Statement, where the third sentence of the paragraph simply does not proceed from the first two. This sentence states that there is a “significantly increased possibility of someone with malicious intent being able to obtain a GRC” (again without evidence or argument), and thus that “there is a related risk of people no longer feeling safe in any sex-segregated setting”, despite having just stated that when such settings are permitted to exclude trans people their GRC status is irrelevant. I’ll look at that specific situation in more detail below, explaining again why it does not count as an adverse effect of the GRR Bill.

Finally, however, I want to again point out the indignity of what trans people are being forced to argue: “Don’t worry about fraudulent applications, because we’ve enabled the police to intervene and arrest people”. We should not have to make this argument when no evidence of fraud has been offered; nor should we ever forget that this argument is founded in prejudice against trans women. We should instead be saying that the dignity of trans people in updating their records is an important aim, and any imagined and unevidenced adverse effect should be balanced against this positive effect. It is not morally or legally valid to hold back justice for trans people because of an imagined and unevidenced hypothetical. It is not reasonable.

To summarise:

• No evidence for supposed gender recognition fraud is given, and reputable sources can find none.
• No evidence for a supposed chilling effect on single-sex spaces is given, and the argument here contradicts itself.
• Hypothetical scenarios prevented without evidence hopefully do not constitute “reasonable grounds” for a major constitutional intervention.

Gender Clubs

Part 4(a)A, §31–36, discusses single-sex clubs and associations. It proceeds once more from the untested assumption that birth certificate sex determines sex for Equality Act purposes. It also proceeds from the false assumption that the blanket exclusion of men will actually enable such clubs to exclude trans women. As §28 concedes, this is for all current practical purposes done on the basis of an exception from gender reassignment discrimination, not on the basis of an exception from sex discrimination.

Let’s imagine a women’s football club that doesn’t want trans women to play. They’re not able to state that publicly, as §31 explains. Stating “legal women only” also won’t do the job, because what a woman is for the purposes of equality law is not settled, and because stating this also (as discussed in the still-extant statutory guidance) opens them up to a claim of gender reassignment discrimination. So: “women only”, and then a trans woman shows up. The club cannot simply ask her to show her Gender Recognition Certificate and prove her sex: this is also legally discriminatory. If it wants to exclude her, it’s going to have to take a gamble: does she have one or not? If she does, and they kick her out, it’s uncomplicatedly gender reassignment discrimination again. If she doesn’t it still might be. Better, for the club’s interests, if they instead have a clear policy not on how they use the exception from sex discrimination but on how they use the exception from gender reassignment discrimination, because that actually does what they want to do, i.e. exclude all trans women, as long as it’s a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. This is exactly what various sports organisations have done in practice, each applying their own standards as to if and when they include trans women. To my knowledge “has a GRC” has simply not been used as such a standard.

Therefore, §32’s statement that “The Bill’s creation of a new cohort with the ability to change their legal sex will significantly change the profile and number of individuals that associations will be unable to exclude from membership on grounds of sex” does not reflect reality, because associations do not and cannot reliably exclude trans women on grounds of sex. Similarly, §34’s contention that associations “will be required to accept, without members from a new, larger and different cohort, who would not have met the requirements currently set out in the 2004 Act” is false, because associations which want to exclude trans people are already doing so whether or not they have a GRC. And third, when §35 argues that “Accommodations, adjustments and compromises that may have been reasonably provided on an exceptional basis, may not be possible for a larger number”, it is assuming that accommodations are made only for trans people who have a GRC, when in fact they are already being made for all existing trans participants irrespective of GRC status. The recent census allows us to put a number to this: about 1 in 200 people. Moreover, it is a legal duty under the Equality Act that associations should accommodate these 1 in 200 people.

Then, in §36, the Statement suggests that the Bill “may lead to associations, including long established associations, being at greater risk of being found to be operating unlawfully”. I cannot see how “clubs might illegally discriminate” can possibly be described as an adverse effect. Perhaps — and I’m not a lawyer, so I couldn’t possibly be certain — they should simply not discriminate.

As with the false hypothetical of gender recognition fraud, §36 also suggests that clubs’ fears that they might now be sued — which, again, could only happen if they made a wrong-headed attempt to apply the sex exception rather than the gender reassignment exception — could lead to a loss of provision. This suggestion is made without evidence. It can be remedied by looking for the evidence, as I hope the UK Government will be required to in the courts, because there is none.

To summarise:

• In practice, single-sex associations and services exclude trans people, where it is a proportionate means of a legitimate aim, by applying the exception from gender reassignment discrimination, not the exception from sex discrimination.
• The exception from sex discrimination cannot in practice do what the Statement of Reasons claims it can, as confirmed by the Government’s own still-extant Statutory Guidance
• Therefore even if GRCs do change sex for the purpose of the Equality Act (which, again, is an untested question), this has no new practical implications for single-sex associations and services.

Gender Data

The next section of the Statement of Reasons concerns the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), which is the legal duty on public bodies to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between people. (Curiously, the Statement only mentions the second duty.) §38 states that GRCs mean that public bodies “will not always be considering the impact on biological women as a distinct disadvantaged group compared to the impact on biological men” and that the GRR Bill “will make an existing problem significantly worse”. Leaving aside both the discriminatory depiction of trans people’s lives as a “problem” for public bodies and the non-legal use of “biological”, the point that birth certificate sex does not necessarily determine sex for equalities purposes is again significant here. It is not GRCs, expanded or otherwise, which create the “problem”: it is the fact of trans people using public services and being supported by public bodies in our acquired sex, whether or not we have GRCs. Trans people are — and always have been — included within the categories of “man” and “woman”. We count ourselves in those categories, we report ourselves in those categories, we use services in those categories, and nothing the Government says can change that. Moreover, because sex has not been defined in equalities law, a public body attempting to use birth certificate sex for PSED purposes now, irrespective of the GRR Bill, would already be vulnerable to legal challenge from trans people claiming discrimination.

Thus when the Statement says that “it will also become more difficult to monitor UK-wide disparities between legal women and men, or transgender and non-transgender people, if membership of those groups differs between Scotland and the rest of the UK”, and pursues this argument in §40, it argues in ignorance of the simple fact that trans people in the main count ourselves in our acquired sex for the purpose of data gathering. It is very rare for any public body to ask for birth certificate sex in a monitoring form — indeed I have never seen it. It would be the setting of such a standard that would create a divergence between data sets. Indeed, this happened with the Census, with the UK Government diverging from precedent and from the Scottish Government by insisting we answer, for the first time, by our birth certificate sex. The recent publication of detailed gender identity census data demonstrates this: almost exactly two thirds of trans men and trans women answered the sex question by their acquired sex, which is around 10 times as many people as have GRCs, despite being told to answer by our birth certificate sex. When the Scottish data is published we will be able to see what effect this instruction had, if any. Monitoring, in practice, does not and cannot take place on the basis of GRC status, and it would take considerable legal threats to force such an approach on trans people. The way to achieve good data on trans people is to work with us, and to understand how we actually answer questions: that is what will give you reliable data and enable you to understand what proportion of the sex categories we account for.

Finally, §39 points out correctly that “an understanding of equalities impacts for a certain issue may require consideration of combinations of protected characteristics”. It then goes on to state, without any steps of reasoning in between, that “the greater ease with which people in Scotland will be able to change their legal sex will make it more difficult to clearly assess the impacts of policy in respect of all protected characteristics”. I cannot follow their argument because an argument is not presented, but I will point out that of course one of these protected characteristics is “gender reassignment”, i.e. being trans irrespective of GRC status, and so that the PSED requires public bodies to consider our intersection with the other protected characteristics. That is: we are trans and women, because the category of woman already includes us. Public bodies must work out both how to serve the interests of women generally and the interests of different minorities within womanhood: disabled women, Black women, trans women. It is this most of all that undermines the argument in this section, which considers the inclusion of trans women within the category of women as a “problem”, rather than part of the flourishing of human diversity which the PSED is there to protect.

To summarise:

• In actual practice, the PSED does not take GRC status into account when public bodies assess equalities, and doing so would invite legal challenge.
• In the vast majority of contexts trans people are already counted in data by their self-declared acquired sex, and only UK Government actions have ever changed this.
• Transness is one of the intersections with womanhood that the PSED should work for, irrespective of GRC status.
• Therefore the GRR Bill has no practical effect on the PSED.

The Wages of Gender

§41–47 is, as far as I can tell, a fanciful tale of someone who changes the sex on their birth certificate so that their employer doesn’t get sued for wage discrimination. I can hardly complain, because in my last post I also used an imaginary discrimination case to explain why, in the interests of justice, trans people’s sex should not be defined by their birth certificate for equalities purposes. However, the whole argument seems to rest on the assumption that the equal pay claim would have to proceed based on the comparator’s acquired sex rather than their sex at the time of the discrimination. This does not legally follow and I would be very surprised if a judge were to rule that way.

As there is no other argument here, I will instead take a moment to talk about the transgender pay gap. In the US, trans people earn 60–70% of the wages that comparable cis people earn. Trans women earn lower than trans men; and both trans women and trans men earn less than their cis counterparts. The argument on equal pay in the statement is, again, founded on the stereotype of deceitful and dangerous trans women: it is intended to suggest a well-paid man who fraudulently and rapidly changes gender so that the employer — not the trans person! — can dodge an equal pay claim. The reality for trans people in the workplace is that it is we who are discriminated against, and the chances of finding one of us who earns more than an equivalent cis person, enough to merit an equal pay claim, are vanishingly small.

To summarise:

• This section is arguing with an imaginary scenario that a lawyer made up in their head and which isn’t even how the law would likely play out.

Gender Lessons

§48–50 reiterate arguments made elsewhere in the Statement with no new material. The final section, from §51 on, concerns a very specific scenario that arises from a peculiarity of the Equality Act, which is that while schools have a specific exception from sex discrimination which allows for single-sex schools (see my last post for an explanation of how this works), they do not have a specific exception from gender reassignment discrimination. This means that if a single-sex school wants to exclude a trans pupil, it must do so on the basis that they are their birth certificate sex, as an exception from sex discrimination: a boy’s school has no means of excluding a trans boy because he is trans. Because the GRR Bill enables 16 and 17 year olds to change their birth certificate, that creates a specific issue regarding a very specific teenager: a 16 or 17 year old trans teenager with a GRC from Scotland who wants to attend a single-sex school in the rest of the UK that does not want the trans teenager to attend. That school would have no legal means of excluding that teenager. Moreover, because you can’t ask someone for their GRC status, because an updated birth certificate looks the same, and because you can’t disclose someone’s trans status to others if you know it, cis teenagers might have to go to school with Scottish trans teenagers and not even know it.

This argument again rests on the assumption that trans people can be excluded under sex discrimination exemptions— which is, again, untested. The argument also rests on the assumption that even if trans people can be so excluded, that a judge would consider this a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim in the case of 16 and 17 year olds in single-sex schools. It would already take a legal case to determine these issues in law, irrespective of the GRR Bill. Those questions aside, the question to then ask is whether the imaginary case of a very specific imaginary trans teenager is reasonable enough grounds for an adverse enough effect to legally justify a highly significant constitutional measure.

The Statement of Reasons attempts to amplify this concern by suggesting that the entire single sex school system in England could crumble because schools won’t know if their students are are trans or not. This does not seem reasonable, especially because, given that schools are rarely in the habit of asking parents for their children’s birth certificate to prove their sex, it is already the case that teachers and students can’t say for sure whether other pupils are trans or not. Not knowing whether someone is trans is, in fact, the situation in which all people and all institutions already find themselves, and institutions mostly seem able to keep going untroubled by this fact. What does seem reasonable — and legally obligatory — is that all schools should think carefully about how to best support trans teenagers already in their care.

I want to think for a moment about these trans teenagers. It is difficult to be trans in this world, and more difficult still to be trans and going through the enormous changes of adolescence , especially when the NHS is failing in its duty to provide healthcare. School presents a host of obstacles to trans teenagers: the prejudice of students and teenagers, the pervasiveness of unnecessarily sex-segregated activities, the lack of facilities and understanding. If I were a trans teenager, I would want to go to a school which understood me and which worked to provide support. I would not want to fight my way into a school a long way from home that didn’t even want me, and which had made no provisions to accommodate me, in order to study alongside students who were then aware of all the intimate details of my life. That should suggest how very rare the imagined scenario is. All that said, I also want to recognise the rights of a trans teenager who did want to attend a single sex school to privacy, dignity, and support — which is their right in both ethics and law.

To summarise:

• If it is correct that birth certificates define sex for equalities law, it is true to say that single sex schools would have no legal means of excluding 16 and 17 year old trans teenagers with GRCs.
• However, it is not clear whether schools can, or ever have, excluded trans teenagers on the basis of birth certificate sex, and the GRR Bill has not changed the fact that it would take a legal case to determine this.
• There is already no way for schools to be certain whether or not their students are trans, because parents and students are not obliged to disclose this, and schools do not routinely ask for birth certificates.
• Therefore if this change does exist, its effects are minor.

Conclusions

Every element of the UK Government’s legal case rests on the assumption that birth certificates determine sex for equalities purposes. This is unproven. While the UK Government only has to prove reasonable grounds to believe in adverse effects of the GRR Bill’s changes to the administration of birth certificates, it also has to prove that these changes do in fact alter equalities law in itself, which is a higher bar. Every element of the UK Government’s argument is vulnerable to this challenge, and so I expect this question to be the subject of a judicial review. This may end up legally determining at the Supreme Court level what goes into defining sex for equalities purposes, which could have far-reaching ramifications.

I cannot predict what way such a decision would go. It has been clearly established in other cases that sex is defined differently for different purposes: this was the cornerstone of the legal ruling which allowed Scotland to use self-defined sex for its census. However, a very similar case was heading in a different direction in England: while it was not fully litigated and so did not set precedent, the judge in that case was sympathetic to the idea that birth certificates should define sex for census purposes, which led the ONS to concede the case and change its guidance.

However, even if it is ruled that birth certificates do define sex for equalities purposes, each of the listed adverse effects is vulnerable to challenge on other grounds. In brief:

• Variation between the regulation of protected characteristics is already managed within the UK.
• There is no tenable evidence worldwide of fraudulent gender recognition applications.
• Single-sex services are unaffected because they discriminate against trans people on the grounds of gender reassignment, not sex.
• The PSED cannot practically operate by monitoring birth certificate sex separately from self-declared sex, and has to accommodate trans people’s actual lives.
• The equal pay and schools cases imagined are highly fringe edge cases with undetermined legal outcomes, and any effects are minor.

It is worth reading the recent letter from the Scottish Parliament’s Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee to the Secretary of State for Scotland, the man who issued the Section 35 Order. It asks probing questions about the UK Government’s process and the arguments in the Statement of Reasons. Questions look sharper in light of the kind of arguments made in this post: they ask about cross-border issues with Ireland, the reason for the decision to de-list approved countries from the GRC recognition list, the precedents in diverging regulation of protected characteristics such as marriage, and so on. I believe this letter is probing the arguments to better formulate a legal challenge; I also think that the Secretary of State for Scotland believes this, and that that is why he declined to meet the Committee citing the likelihood of a legal case. He did not want to show his hand, and the Scottish Government is trying to get a peek before it applies for a judicial review.

I cannot know what arguments a judge would consider reasonable or how significantly adverse an effect would have to be to legally justify a Section 35 Order. These are questions with significant consequences for the UK’s constitution. However, if an untrained eye like myself can see clear and large holes in the UK Government’s argument, a Scottish Government lawyer will be able to do much better. I am surprised that, given the gravity of the constitutional issues, the Statement of Reasons is not more robust. It looks, to me, like a hurried piece of work rushed out for the sake of the stoking a new cycle culture war.

What I can know is that every argument is without moral merit. While the law does not legislate simply on the basis of morality, it is clear to me that the Statement of Reasons is founded in prejudice against trans people, and fails at every step to consider the ordinary realities of our lives and our needs. I hope that, in analysing the law, I’ve helped some people think better about trans life, and our right to justice.