Another day, another drama. This time Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney is in the spotlight, after he conducted a rather odd radio interview with BBC Five Live on the trans debate.
With three days to go until the general election and some polls predicting Swinney’s nationalists could lose more than half of their Westminster seats, the FM is under pressure to persuade more voters to back the SNP on the big day. The Nats are no strangers to being out of touch with the general public and one issue that exemplifies this rather well is the party’s stance on self-identification. Swinney’s former boss Nicola Sturgeon was determined to pass the Gender Recognition (Scotland) Bill – which, among other things, proposed to lower the age at which one can legally change their gender from 18 to 16 years old. Two-thirds of the Scottish public were opposed to the reforms and yet MSPs from across Holyrood supported the plans regardless. The bill was blocked by outgoing Scotland Secretary Alister Jack and while short-lived FM Humza Yousaf tried to appeal the move, Edinburgh’s Court of Session backed Jack.
Swinney was one of the MSPs who voted in favour of the Dear Leader’s gender plans – yet he now seems to be a little less convinced of them. Struggling to sum up his own stance on the trans issue, the First Minister had a rather awkward exchange with the BBC’s Nicky Campbell today.
NC: First Minister, how many genders are there?
JS: Em… Well, I think there’ll be quite a debate about that, Nicky.
NC: What do you think?
JS: Certainly from my point of view, I recognise that… Well, I think that on this debate a woman is an adult born as a female and there are also transgender women.
NC: So how many genders are there?
JS: Well, I think people debate and discuss that. From my point of view there’s the male and the female gender.
It certainly wasn’t an answer that went down well with everyone. Little more than a week after JK Rowling blasted Sir Keir’s Labour party for its ‘dismissive and often offensive’ approach to concerns raised by gender-critical feminists, the Harry Potter author has struck again. The women’s rights campaigner took to Twitter this afternoon to post a scathing tweet about Swinney’s rather suboptimal performance. The writer went on to slam the recording as being one ‘in which the First Minister of Scotland does a very good impression of a teenager trying to bullshit his way through questions on a book he’s never read.’
Ouch…
Listen to the clip here:
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