This morning, when asked if it was his position that trans women are women, Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney replied in a rather blustery manner: ‘The answer I’ve given to that question before, is that, em… I accept that to be the case.’ It’s an interesting response. Not the emphatic ‘yes’ demanded by gender identity activists. Nor the ‘no’ demanded by gender critical feminists and those still wedded to objective reality. Nor the ‘well, it depends’ that is the outcome of the legislative tangle caused by the lack of clarity over the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act when it interacts with the Gender Recognition Act.
His use of ‘accept’ is one I have encountered before, from those not particularly attached to the wilder claims of the gender identity movement, but who ploddingly go along with it anyway. It’s an admission of defeat, almost, a resigned sigh of a word. An acknowledgement that this is just something one is supposed to go along with these days. And on the topic of resignation, it is also a subject matter that ultimately scuppered the leadership of the two previous first ministers.
There have been several column inches written this week to highlight the illogicality of the SNP’s stance on this issue. Tess White of the Scottish Conservatives has been particularly forceful in pointing out that nationalist politicians continue to try to ‘ride two horses on single-sex spaces’, on the one hand claiming they believe single-sex spaces should be protected for women, while simultaneously arguing at the Supreme Court against For Women Scotland that ‘sex does not mean biological sex’ in the Equality Act.
Unlike Swinney, I do not feel this situation is something we must simply ‘accept.’ Over many years, activists have successfully befuddled our political leaders into defending absurdities such as male rapists in female prisons, but after so many years of being asked to strike a ‘balance’ or a ‘compromise’ with those who wish the word ‘sex’ to be stripped of its material definition, I feel strongly that we have to clear away the Orwellian doublethink and return to common sense.
What precisely is the ‘balance’ that can be struck when women say ‘No’ and a minority of men say ‘We want!’. What precisely is the ‘compromise’ women are demanded to make when they need single-sex spaces, services, and opportunities, but a minority of men insist said spaces should include them? Some things really are binary, and as much as activists have beclowned otherwise intelligent minds over this issue, human beings are, indeed, mammals. As Helen Joyce and other women have argued, we are interesting, clever, inventive, and often really rather ridiculous ones, but mammals are sexually dimorphic, and yes, this does actually really matter sometimes when providing services.
The ‘case by case basis’ so often trotted out as a proposed solution to whether males who identify as trans women can be included in a specific service or space is absurd. At root, still, is a decision on whether to value women’s needs or to prioritise men’s demands, with women never quite certain if they can be sure, say, that their changing room, cervical smear examination, hospital ward, or – should they be unfortunate enough to end up in one – prison, is truly female-only.
This was never something that women were going to accept. If Swinney wishes to avoid the fate of his predecessors, he would do well to acknowledge that – instead of continuing to placate his party’s gender ideology activists who insist that women are not a definable category of human being.
Comments