acquired gender”. Applicants must enter the date from which they can prove that they have been living full time in their acquired gender. The evidence that the guidance suggests that the applicant provide is in the form of documents that are dated and include the applicant’s name in the acquired gender. Examples of the documents that can be used are driving licences and passports, payslips, bank statements, official letters from doctors or dentists, utility bills or academic certificates. The guidance states that typically five or six different documents should be included.
90. The court was not provided with any further explanation of what names are regarded as being in any particular gender or whether this refers only to the pronouns used. The guidance also refers to the making of the statutory declaration that the applicant has lived as a male or female and intends to live in that gender until death. There is no guidance as to what it means to live in a gender, other than to ensure that the person’s name in certain documents is a name in the acquired gender.
91. The application of this guidance and the relationship between the criteria in sections 2 and 3 were considered by the Divisional Court (Sir Andrew McFarlane P and Lieven J) in AB v Gender Recognition Panel [2024] EWHC 1456 (Fam), [2025] 1 WLR 227. There the appellant appealed against the Panel’s decision to refuse her application for a GRC in the female gender. The judgment records at paras 7 and 8 that the applicant had provided a range of documents showing that she had changed her name. It noted also that the medical report from a doctor practising in the field of gender dysphoria had described the applicant’s goals as regards treatment as requiring “a basic biological incompatibility” since she wanted both to achieve a gynaecoid body shape including adult female breast development and also to retain the capacity “to have a functional penis, with capacity for erection and genital sexual response”: para 27. It was, the doctor said, for the applicant “to decide what takes priority”. The second medical report provided with AB’s application recorded that at interview, the applicant had presented as “straightforwardly feminine” and that she had “moved into a stable female social role”.
92. In her judicial review, she challenged the Panel’s conclusion that there was very little evidence that the applicant was “living in real life as a female”. She submitted that she had followed the guidance by providing as evidence her passport (stating her sex as “F”), deed polls by which she had adopted female names and bank statements with her female name prefixed by “Miss”: para 42. She also referred to the hormone treatment and testosterone blocking medication that she had taken except for a short period. The Court criticised the Panel’s decision letter for failing to analyse properly the evidence supporting the applicant’s assertion that she had been “living in the acquired gender”. The decision had not referred to the passport, deed polls or bank account statements and had not given any reasons as to why they were dissatisfied with this evidence. The Court held that the Panel had erred in considering only the medical evidence on the question of whether she had been living as a woman: para 62. That was only one part of the evidence before the Panel on the issue and some of the statements in the medical reports were supportive of her assertion that she had been living in the female gender.
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