When girl meets boy: The Gender Recognition Bill and its effects

For some years prior to the unfortunate demise of the Scottish Law and Practice Quarterly I had been writing a quarterly column giving a fairly personal view of recent developments in family law, usually in Scotland, but occasionally from abroad.The editors of the Journal have now given me the opportunity to share my thoughts with a far larger audience than was possible with SLPQ, and this is the first of what is intended to be a quarterly update in family law where the issues are chosen for no other reason than their topicality and their interest to me: I hope that readers will usually find something of interest to them too.The first topic that I want to write about in this new forum is, neatly, an update of the topic covered in the final issue of SLPQ, the Gender Recognition Bill, currently before the UK Parliament. (For a description of the judicial activism that led to the need for such a bill, see my commentary on Bellinger v Bellinger [2003] 2 All ER 593, published in (2004) 8 Edin LR 93.)