Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Is Scotland changing the law on gender by stealth?

It’s not often that feminists threaten legal action over plans to increase women’s representation on public boards, so the Scottish Government has managed something of a feat. ‘For Women Scotland’, a volunteer-funded gender-critical lobby group, isn’t against the principle of the Gender Representation on Public Boards Act. It’s the Scottish Government’s definition of ‘women’ they have a problem with.

The statutory guidance for the Act defines ‘woman’ to include a transwoman without a gender recognition certificate who nonetheless must meet three criteria:

1) enjoys the protected characteristic of gender reassignment under the Equality Act 2010

2) is proposing to undergo or has already undergone a process to change their sex from male to female

3) is living as a woman.

The law ‘would not require the person to dress, look or behave in any particular way’, but ‘it would be expected that there would be evidence that the person was continuously living as a woman’, for example, by employing female pronouns or using their female name on their driving licence, passport and utility bills.

On its face, and to anyone not familiar with the labyrinthian intricacies of gender law, this might sound like a reasonable compromise to accommodate a minority population. But For Women point to a clarification in the guidance: ‘The Act does not require an appointing person to ask a candidate to prove that they meet the definition of woman in the Act.’ This represents a ‘wholesale redefinition of women’, according to For Women, and they suspect the law on gender recognition is being changed by stealth.

The group’s spokeswoman Marion Calder says:

‘It beggars belief that the Scottish Government has introduced new legislation that contravenes the very essence of what a “woman” is in law.

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