This is a shameful week for Scottish nationalism. Let us state plainly what has happened: the government in Westminster has had to intervene in Scotland to save women’s rights. Central government has had to use its legal powers to defend women’s safety and liberty from Scotland’s devolved nationalist government that seems to have diminishing regard for such things. Nicola Sturgeon’s reputation deserves never to recover from this.
This is the news that the government intends to block Scotland’s Gender Recognition Bill. This is the bill that would make it easier for people in Scotland to legally change their gender. It would also lower the age at which they can do so, from 18 to 16. There was widespread public hostility to the bill, and furious opposition from women’s rights campaigners. And yet still MSPs passed it last month, by 86 votes to 39. Clearly they know what is good for Scotland better than the Scottish public.
Scotland under the SNP is becoming a liability
Now, in an unprecedented move, Westminster will prevent the enactment of this peculiar, unpopular law. For the first time, ministers will deploy Section 35 of the Scotland Act, which allows them to block laws passed by Holyrood if they threaten to undermine UK-wide laws. In this case, says Scottish secretary Alister Jack, the bill will have a ‘significant impact’ on the rights of women as laid down in equalities legislation. Streamlining the process by which people can switch gender – or at least believe they have switched gender – could devastate single-sex spaces and even the rules on equal pay for men and women, says Jack. He’s right.
This is an extraordinary state of affairs. The supposed feminist Nicola Sturgeon having to be reminded that women’s equality matters. The supposedly evil Tories having to take extreme measures to defend women’s hard-won freedom of association from the politically correct meddling of Scotland’s nationalist elites. Scotland, that greatest seat of Enlightenment, the tiny nation that did so much to foster human reason, having to be told that men are not women. That just because a man says he is a woman, that doesn’t make him one. ‘We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation’, said Voltaire. We look to Scotland now and see a political class supporting even the right of male sex offenders to ‘change gender’ and potentially go into women’s spaces.
Euphemism abounds in the discussion on Scotland’s gender bill. All we’re doing, say Sturgeon and her acolytes, is expanding trans rights. Surely only a horrible Tory transphobe could oppose that. In truth, the SNP wants to institutionalise in law a borderline religious idea that many people simply do not accept – namely, that we all have something called a ‘gender identity’, a gendered soul, and sometimes this soul is in conflict with our biological casing. And in such cases, the solution is to give the person’s gendered soul, their subjective feeling about what sex they are, full recognition in law. There are people in Scotland who reject this article of faith as surely as others reject the idea that bread becomes the body of Christ during Mass or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse. Why should they be forced to abide by the eccentric, reason-lite beliefs of their rulers?
The women who valiantly rose up against Sturgeon’s gender bill are right: making it easier for men to ‘become women’ threatens women’s rights. We’ve seen this already. Witness the barging of biological males who identify as female into women’s sports, women’s changing areas, women’s prisons. When you reduce womanhood from a biological, social, relational thing to a mere identity that can be adopted by anyone – even those of us who have penises – you hollow out the rights of womanhood, too. Erasing the idea of ‘woman’ erases a woman’s liberties, specifically her liberty to associate with her own sex and her own sex only. It could do no other.
Westminster should be applauded for halting this law that would trample over sex-based rights. To call the government’s intervention ‘transphobic’ is disgraceful. It’s further proof that the word ‘transphobia’ is now used to tar and demonise anyone who stands up for women’s rights, or just for biological truth. We should not tolerate this slippery, cynical rebranding of the progressive ideal of sexual equality as a ‘phobia’, a species of bigotry. The bigotry belongs to those who wish to force women to accept men in their spaces and who damn as a ‘TERF’ (ie, a witch) any woman who dares object.
Scotland under the SNP is becoming a liability. Sturgeon seems to be pursuing government by Twitter, where the aim is less to represent the good sense and interests of the Scottish people than to appeal to eccentric culture warriors online. Scotland has become a laboratory of authoritarianism under nationalist rule. Witness its criminalisation of everything from unpopular speech to heated football chants. For all the talk of trans rights, the gender bill is in keeping with this tinpot tyranny of the Sturgeonites, with its threat to empty women’s freedom of substance and meaning. It’s great that it will be binned.
The nationalists should heed Scotland’s greatest son, Robert Burns. With Europe in revolutionary tumult, he wrote: ‘Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention / The Rights of Woman merit some attention.’ They do indeed, Rabbie.
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