Humza Yousaf’s gender muddle

The SNP’s ill-fated gender reforms shaped Nicola Sturgeon’s last days as First Minister, but if Humza Yousaf has learned from the experience, he is not showing it. The SNP’s crown prince – or perhaps clown prince – is tying himself in knots over the sex of a double rapist who has just been sentenced to eight years.

‘Is Isla Bryson a man or a woman?’ Sky News asked him. You would think any serious contender for the top job in the Scottish government would have prepared a convincing response to such a predictable question. Not Yousaf; the best he could come up with was that Isla Bryson was ‘at it’. At what, you might wonder. But, as Yousaf tried – and failed – to explain, it was clear that Yousaf doesn’t know.

With astonishing chutzpah, Yousaf asserted that he didn’t think, ‘they’re a true transwoman’. At the same time, he lamented that the law – for ‘many, many years’, he insisted – allowed Bryson to self-identify as a woman ‘if they wish’.

This – remember – is the leadership contender who, if elected, has committed himself to challenging the Section 35 order that blocked Sturgeon’s self-ID bill, legislation he had promoted enthusiastically as a Scottish Government minister. If self-ID had existed for ‘many many years’, why did the SNP government need to keep MSPs up until the early hours to ram that bill through Holyrood in the week before Christmas? It just doesn’t make sense.

The problem for Yousaf, Sturgeon and every other politician who has developed an evangelical zeal for self-ID, is reality: men cannot become women. As soon as hard cases turn up, they flounder. Yousaf’s support for self-ID evaporated as soon as Bryson’s name was mentioned. Whatever he might have voted for in the chamber, his true colours emerged when he was in front of a TV camera. Yousaf was eager to declare – on air – who might not be really trans.

If Yousaf becomes First Minister, and he is currently the bookies’ favourite, then heaven help trans people north of the border. Whatever the law might have to say, the FM will be there ready to judge whether someone is a true transwoman or merely ‘at it’.

This is why I have spoken out against self-ID since 2016. It is an absurd idea that unleashes further absurdity. Allowing anyone to change their legal sex is a big deal. If sex matters – and it does – then any arrangement that allow an individual to be treated by the law as the other sex needs proper checks and balances. Not a wannabe first minister making snap judgments, possibly for political expediency.

His fellow contenders for the role do get it. Neither Kate Forbes nor Ash Regan appear to be in danger of getting tripped up when asked: ‘what is a woman?’. Maybe it’s easy for them because they are women, but then so is Nicola Sturgeon – and Sturgeon is far from being the only female politician to have had the wool pulled over their eyes by those peddling gender ideology.

What is going on in Yousaf’s head is harder to fathom. But he should know this: altering policy that effectively allows anyone – including Bryson – to change their identity and then demand the rest of the world to go along with it makes a mockery of the policy. Worse, it will inevitably attract those who wish to do as they please.

On one point, Yousaf was right. The law actually does allow Isla Bryson to self-identify as a woman. But UK law would also allow Bryson to claim to be the King of Siam: after all, we can all entertain our own fantasies without risking a visit from the police to check our thinking. But at the same time, the law does not allow Bryson – or anyone else – to demand that the rest of society pays any attention to such nonsense. It certainly does not allow Bryson to inherit the rights of women by self-ID alone. Yousaf appeared to know that when he claimed Bryson was ‘at it’. But then he went wrong. His somewhat authoritarian approach to divide the sheep – ‘true transwomen’ – from the goats – those merely ‘at it’ – is unsustainable. The rule of law means that the law must apply equally to everyone. Ministers should not be in the business of deciding who is at it and who is not.