Proposed changes to recognise “transgendered persons” are offensive and dehumanising, a leading transgender campaigner has said. This is despite the fact that the Irish law looks set to be based on the UK’s, which is one of the most radical in Europe.

Writing in yesterday’s Irish Times, campaigner Leslie Sherlock said that government proposals to recognise transgender persons “offends by referring to transgender people as ‘lonely, distressed, passive’, making recommendations which dehumanise transgender experiences”.

The proposals, published in July, do not require applicants to have had a ‘sex change’ operation meaning a person with male sex organs could be officially recognised as a woman.

However, Ms Sherlock criticises the proposals’ requirement that applicants fulfil the medical criteria of gender identity disorder (GID) diagnosis or present evidence of gender reassignment surgery.

“GID is classified as a mental disorder, which many transgender people find offensive,” she says.

She said that there had been a movement away from requirements such as GID diagnosis and forced divorce in Europe, whereby a married person who ‘changes sex’ has to divorce their spouse.

“The Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, Thomas Hammarberg, has explicitly called for the separation of medical requirements from legal rights,” she said.

“Respectful legislation would rely on a transgender person’s self-determination of their identity, rather than a psychiatric diagnosis. Realistic legislation would recognise that transgender people have relationships and families, and would protect these families,” Ms Sherlock added.

Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton announced the proposals after the publication of a report by the Gender Recognition Advisory Group, which was set up by the previous Minister, Eamon O’Cuiv.

The proposed legislation would require applicants to have lived with their acquired gender for at least two years. If applicants can provide a formal medical diagnosis of their condition they do not have to undergo a ‘sex change’ operation.

In 2002, eight doctors from London’s renowned Portman Clinic, which specialises in treating mental illness, said that those who sought “gender reassignment” treatment tended to be “individuals who, for complex reasons, need to escape from an intolerable psychological reality into a more comfortable fantasy”.

In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, they said that the desire to seek surgery was “a measure of the urgency and desperation of their situation”.

They said: “By carrying out a ‘sex change’ operation on their bodies, they hope to eliminate the conflict in their minds. Unfortunately, what many patients find is that they are left with a mutilated body, but the internal conflicts remain.”

They described a ruling in 2002 by the European Court of Human Rights which gave a post-operative transsexual person permission to marry in his adopted gender role, as “a victory of fantasy over reality”.

Ms Sherlock also criticised as “callous” the recommended requirement that applicants must not be in a subsisting marriage or civil partnership.

This requirement, she said “would force many to make the impossible choice between having their gender legally recognised and remaining in a marriage or civil partnership”.

She said the proposal disregarded “the reality that many transgender people are in loving relationships. Unique complications arise with the very strict requirements for a divorce to be granted in Ireland – four years separation with no prospect of reconciliation”.