Women are fighting back against Scotland's gender identity policies

Is a ‘woman’ an adult human female or a person who identifies as such? This is the question I asked Nicola Sturgeon at the United Nations earlier this year. But, oddly, she wouldn’t answer it. Instead the first minister of Scotland explained that, as ‘an ardent, passionate feminist,’ women’s concerns about how gender self-ID laws might harm them are ‘misplaced.’

The day after Sturgeon’s UN address, in a leaked online conversation, three female SNP MSPs complained that Sturgeon’s remarks proved that she was ‘out of step’ with the party. ‘FFS [for f***’s sake]’ one wrote, sharing a tweet from ‘Engender’ (a self-described feminist policy and advocacy group) whose director had praised the first minister’s supposedly ‘positive feminist analysis of trans rights.’

And today the Sunday Times reports that ‘several SNP figures, including a minister, are understood to be deeply worried that plans to make it easier for individuals to switch gender could damage the party’s performance at the Holyrood elections in May 2021.’ Which is why the Scottish government may have decided to delay their reform of the Gender Recognition Act for at least two years.

Perhaps one reason for the delay, and why ‘women’ are upset by the first minister’s unwillingness to define them as a category worthy of legal protection is that her gender policies have very real consequences.

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Scottish women have been busy organising themselves at the grassroots to raise awareness about this. And in June a Holyrood committee, chaired by the SNP’s Joan McAlpine, pushed back against the government’s move to replace questions about sex with ‘gender identity’ in Scotland’s 2021 Census. Sex will now remain binary in the poll and a person’s trans status and sexuality will be voluntary additional information.

‘They [the government] seem to have understood some of the wider concerns,’ McAlpine told me by phone: