Respect and Equality: Transsexual and Transgender Rights by Stephen Whittle; Cavendish, 2002 In April, Georgina Beyer will introduce her gender identity anti-discrimination bill into Parliament. To contribute to this debate, I thought I'd explore the work of UK transgender rights activist Stephen Whittle in this review. It is now almost thirteen years after Parliament passed the Human Rights Act 1993, which protects lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and heterosexuals from discrimination on the basis of employment, accomodation, goods and services in New Zealand. But not members of the transgender/whakawahine and whakatane communities, who have continued to await freedom from discrimination. Stephen Whittle is a transman who has some experience of gender identity discrimination, and is also a lawyer. As an activist in Press for Change, Britain's transgender lobby group, he has rich and useful experiences to share. I recommend his book to those who want transgender rights recognised in law here. In the United Kingdom, their trans communities have taken advantage of the Blair administration's more convivial attitude toward integration and co-existence within the European Community to use its judicial institutions, particularly the European Court of Justice, to remedy employment discrimination issues. Consequently, government departments and agencies have had to change their employment practices, recruitment procedures and organisational cultures to reflect this. I should note that the United Kingdom's anti-discrimination laws are in the process of consolidation, and previously only applied to employment, without including accomodation, goods and services as they do within New Zealand. As one particularly heinous educational policy document demonstrates in this collection, there are occassional attempts to blunt the effects of antidiscrimination policy through providing alleged occupational exceptions that are more based on kneejerk transphobic aversion to visible gender transitioning and reassignment than any rational, evidence-based legitimate occupational reason. For example, why shouldn't transitioning police or medical staff or frontline government agency staff beemployed? It might well encourage greater social integration and discourage antisocial previous survival behaviours from vulberable members of the trans community. Whittle's analysis is particularly important when it comes to issues of policing, prison policy, military service and asylum seeker policy. It is refreshing to learn that some police jurisdictions have taken their responsibility to provide equitable employment on the basis of gender identity seriously, both in the United Kingdom and California. Unfortunately, gender identity status is a forbidden subject of debate in any military context. As for prison policies, there are specific issues involved in insuring that if imprisoned, transgender inmates are in an appropriate gender correctional facility, can seek seclusion if vulnerable to violence, have access to ongoing reassignment-related medical care and do not face the threat of transphobic violence and/or rape. In the case of transgender asylum seekers, it is basic human decency and morality that demands that someone not be abandoned to probable assault, rape, murder and 'disappearance,' so that gender identity status must be grounds for valid asylum and/or refugee status, particularly if their country of origin is rabidly transphobic. In many cases, the United Kingdom is far more civilised when it comes to transgender rights. In April, New Zealand has the chance to catch them up. So let's do it, and free our transgender/whakawahine and whakatane/fa'afafine sisters and brothers from marginalised lives of discrimination that many encounter. Craig Young - 5th March 2006