Married transexual wins pensions rights

In a landmark ruling, a married transsexual was judged to have been discriminated against by being subjected to male retirement laws after changing their gender from male to female.
 

Christine Timbrell, who was born Christopher Timbrell in 1941, won her appeal to claim her state pension at 60 after Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) decreed that she was ineligible as she had not divorced her wife, Joy. Timbrell’s sex change operation took place in 2000, but she applied for her pension in 2002 and asked for it to be backdated to her 60th birthday, a year earlier.
 
HMRC argued, however, that her new gender status was not recognised in law. While under the 2004 Gender Recognition Act single transsexuals are entitled to enjoy the full status of their gender, the sex of married people is only recognised if the union is annulled or dissolved.
 
Timbrell’s operation was carried out with the knowledge and consent of her wife and they have continued to live together as a married couple. They met when Timbrell was a man in his 20s, have been married for 42 years and have two children.
 
After the HMRC ruled against her, however, Timbrell subsequently took her case against the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), which is responsible for pensions pay-outs, to the court of appeal.
 
According to the Guardian, her lawyer Marie-Eleni Demetriou, who represented her at a hearing in March, argued that the fact she would have to end her marriage for her gender to be recognised was a “disproportionate” violation of her human rights.
 
The DWP’s Jeremy Johnson acknowledged that Timbrell’s situation was “difficult” and that the choice before her was a “harsh” one, but insisted that, because she was a male in law, she was only eligible to claim her pension at 65.
 
Lord Justice Aikens, who gave the ruling on behalf of three appeal judges, said that before the Gender Recognition Act came into force, English law had had no way of dealing with the transsexual issue, which meant that “once a man, always a man”.
 
But he added that the lack of legal framework around recognising gender change and subsequent pension rights amounted to discrimination. This meant that the DWP could not deny Timbrell, an accountant from Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, the right to claim her pension as a woman from her 60th birthday.