Up before the Court of Session in Edinburgh today is a legal question: was Scottish Secretary Alister Jack’s decision to block the SNP’s gender reforms a lawful exercise of his statutory powers?
In January, Jack invoked a relatively obscure power to block the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill. The GRR Bill – the brainchild of Nicola Sturgeon and her Green coalition partner – would lower the age at which someone can change their legal sex to 16; remove the requirement for medical experts to be involved in the process; and reduce the statutory waiting period from two years to three months, plus a further three-month reflection period.
At the heart of the Bill is a principle that is still fairly new even within gender politics: self-identification. Self-identification holds that a person is whatever gender they say they are, regardless of their birth sex.
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