I have some experience sponsoring a partner to migrate to the UK. Anyone who hasn’t done this has no idea of the byzantine bureaucracy you need to navigate to do this. You need very specific paperwork, from very specific dates, in very specific formats. (1/15)

Is there some valid reason that you can’t produce a particular piece of paperwork? Good luck chump. Better hope you can afford to hire a lawyer for the tribunal after you get automatically rejected. (2/15)

My wife is now a citizen of this country and in order to achieve that we had to make three separate applications. The cost was somewhere in excess of £3000 all told. At every stage, she had to prove she could speak English. (3/15)

The previous ways she’d proved it (international test certificate, UK university test, Life in the UK test) were not valid for citizenship. She had to travel 200 miles from our home for a 10 minute chat at an approved centre that cost £100, to demonstrate the obvious (4/15)

Why is the process so complicated? It’s because the UK government wants as few people as possible to be able to use this legal route to immigration. They are hostile to immigration and they put in place structural barriers to prevent it. (5/15)

They make the laws and then hide behind them, as if the law had somehow tied their hands. But their true aims and intentions are obvious. (6/15)

Reading @LaurakBuzz’s journey to get a gender recognition certificate over the last months strongly reminded me of my experience with immigration. Collect your evidence, some of it incredibly personal (prove you love your wife! Print off your private emails and photos!) (7/15)

Then send it to someone you’ll never meet and hope they can’t find a reason to reject you. Because that’s what they’re looking for. They don’t start from a position of seeking to approve. (8/15)

The reasoning is the same. Just as the immigration system is designed to prevent immigration, so the gender recognition system is designed to prevent full legal recognition of trans people’s identities. (9/15)

I am a cis lesbian. There are many who seek to speak for me in the so called debate on self ID. I reject them. Trans people making a statutory declaration instead of prostrating themselves before a faceless panel of cis people is no threat to me as a woman or a lesbian. (10/15)

Many of the people who argue against self ID are woefully and deliberately misinformed. They don’t know what self ID would do. They’ve never even heard of the Gender Recognition Panel. (11/15)

This is what self ID does. It lets you be legally called a wife when you get married. It lets you legally be recorded as a woman when you die. (For trans women, that is. Trans men are frequently forgotten in the hysteria over trans women.) (12/15)

Birth, marriage, death. That’s it. Not bathrooms. Not changing rooms. Not domestic violence shelters. All these places are now - and always have been - open to trans women. If that was dangerous, our viciously transphobic press would have scraped up some evidence by now. (13/14)

I believe that one day we will have a system of legal self ID. I believe that one day we will have medical care for trans people based on a system of informed consent. I believe that one day we will have legal recognition for nonbinary identities. (14/15)

The only question is how long will it take? And how many people will we hurt and how many lives will we destroy before we get there? (15/15)