Yesterday Nicola Sturgeon spoke at an event celebrating 30 years of the charity Zero Tolerance and its long running – and essential – commitment to ending violence against women. In a revealing sign of the times in Scotland today, organisers emailed those attending the event to warn them certain subjects should be ignored. As they put it: ‘We wish to create a safe and supported environment for our guests and ask you to support us in this aim by refraining from discussions of the definition of a woman and single sex spaces in relation to the gender recognition act.’
The intellectual poverty displayed here is embarrassing
Well, good luck with that. It should be noted that there is no evidence or even suggestion this request emanated from the first minister’s office but, for the moment and whether Sturgeon likes it or not, this is the hot-ticket women’s issue in Scotland. I say women’s issue but, really, it’s not just a women’s issue. It is, in the end, a choice between those who wish to inhabit a reality-based world and those who insist truth is an endlessly moveable, malleable, feast.
To recap: the Scottish government intends to allow people to change their legal sex because they feel like doing so. Until now, those seeking a Gender Recognition Certificate (themselves a minority of those identifying as ‘trans’) required a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. A majority of Scottish MSPs – including most Labour and Liberal Democrat MSPs as well as all the Greens and most SNP members – consider this a stigmatising and intrusive requirement. Henceforth a GRC should be available to anyone over the age of 16 who says they wish one. The door to gaining one has not just been unlocked, it has been removed from its hinges. For, as the Scottish government has argued in court, sex is no longer considered ‘immutable’.
A good deal of the reaction to Sturgeon’s appearance at yesterday’s Zero Tolerance event has focused on the fact she was, despite strictures to the contrary, heckled by a lady appalled by the SNP-Green government’s reckless disregard for the concerns expressed by many women. That was a shoe-throwing moment, right enough, but what Sturgeon actually said during her address was more interesting and more revealing.
For, as she accepted:
‘Much of what I’m going to say today is about male violence against women because it is men who commit violence against women. In my long experience, most men who commit violence against women don’t feel the need to change gender to do that. Those who do, my argument is we should focus on them because they are men abusing a system to attack women. What we shouldn’t do is further stigmatise a group of women who are already too stigmatised.’
The intellectual poverty displayed here is embarrassing. For this is exactly what Sturgeon’s critics have been saying for years. Trans people – of whom there are not many – are hardly the issue and certainly not really the problem. Those who would seek to take advantage of a newly-lax approach to identity and, with it, the functional ending of single-sex spaces are the problem. Those women – for it has mostly been women – brave enough to insist upon this have been denounced as bigots for their troubles. (This is before we even consider the related-but-distinct issue of putting young children on a medicalised motorway to transition that has few, if any, exits.)
And yet, by her own government’s (admittedly quite mad) definition, Sturgeon is, I think, now guilty of ‘transphobia’ herself. It has hitherto been deemed ‘transphobic’ to suggest not all trans people are the same and that some people claiming to be trans might in fact scarcely be trans at all. And yet here is the first minister accepting precisely that proposition. Not all trans women are women, some may be ‘men abusing a system to attack women’.
God loves and will forgive even a slow learner but it says something about this debate that even this concussion to palpable reality – predatory men will take advantage of even well-intentioned schemes for their own ends – counts as a moment of shining, revelatory, progress.
Once this is accepted, however, other questions follow: why would you wish to make it easier for so-called ‘bad actors’ to access previously single-sex spaces? This is what the Scottish government’s proposals for self-ID do. It may not be their chief intention but it is an unavoidable consequence of the Bill currently being rammed through parliament.
Moreover, if a system of self-determined identity becomes the norm there is precisely no way of distinguishing between the ‘bad actors’ and genuine trans people with a history of gender dysphoria. This is not accidental. The point of the legislation is to widen the definition of ‘trans’ so a new – and theoretically real – sense of true identity is more easily available to anyone who desires it.
And since it is considered ‘transphobic’ to even hint at questioning anyone’s bona fides we are left in the laughable situation of pretending that everyone must be precisely who and what they say they are. In which light, it seems worth noting – and worth repeating, in fact – that fully 50 per cent of the trans prisoners currently incarcerated in Scottish prisons only discovered their new gender identity after they were charged. The twinned mantras of ‘no debate’ and ‘trans women are women’ require one to avoid even raising an eyebrow at this.
Of course, men do not need a gender recognition certificate to commit acts of violence against women but, while insisting her government’s Bill offers no ‘new rights’ to trans people, there is no avoiding the reality that Sturgeon’s gender recognition reforms grant new opportunities to men minded to infiltrate women’s spaces.
Now the first minister herself suggests that men taking advantage of these provisions are not actually good faith trans people. This is precisely what her critics have been saying for years and for years Sturgeon has disdainfully ignored these critics, most of whom have been women and feminists of unimpeachable credentials. Their concerns are, in Sturgeon’s own words, ‘not valid’.
The Scottish government has lost itself in a maze on this issue. On the one hand, it argues in parliament that its Bill will have no impact on the provision of single-sex spaces protected by the Equality Act even as, in court, it also argues that the issuance of a Gender Recognition Certificate changes a person’s sex ‘for all purposes’. It is simply impossible for both these views to be true concurrently.
Nor does the state seem interested in discovering if self-declared, newly-minted men or women are actually ‘living’ in their new personae. Guidance issued for the Gender Representation on Public Boards Act states ‘The Act does not require an appointing person to ask a candidate to prove that they meet the definition of woman in the Act.’ Thus biological men may qualify as women for the purposes of a gender-balanced boardroom. So, there you have it.
It is not clear whether Sturgeon has actually changed her mind on this issue or if she even understands the implications of her own remarks. For, taken at face value, they suggest a significant shift in emphasis and a long overdue capitulation to reality. But once you start down this road, further questions arise and the entire basis upon which the Scottish government’s Bill is built begins to crack. Why on earth would you wish to make it easier for men to ‘abuse a system to attack women’? At some point even a first minister as stubborn and intellectually incurious as Nicola Sturgeon will have to answer that.
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