The Absurdity of Self-ID (August 21, 2023)
Iain Macwhirter gets to the heart of the madness which has contaminated public debate on transgender issues - the absurd suggestion that a man can become a woman by the power of his own mind and imagination.
"Trans women are women, intoned the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. Get over it. Biology is for the birds. Women aren’t women any more, they’re 'menstruators' or 'people with cervixes', said the NHS, since people with penises had now to be regarded as female.
"Anyone who disagreed was a 'transphobe' and likened to racists by Sturgeon. There was to be 'no debate'."
Well said, sir!
A fierce public debate is now raging despite the best efforts of politicians like Nicola Sturgeon and Patrick Harvie which is a good thing, of course, because reason, common sense and sanity and will prevail in the end.
Labour is desperately backtracking from this self-ID mess
The party is trying to dig itself out of a hole as Humza Yousaf pushes the SNP further into it
By Iain Macwhirter - The Times
It was the most extraordinary case of policy capture in the history of devolution. A handful of Scottish government-funded trans charities, backed by the LGBT lobby group Stonewall, managed to persuade Scottish political parties, the civil service, the NHS and much of the media that humans can change sex simply by an act of the imagination.
Trans women are women, intoned the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. Get over it. Biology is for the birds. Women aren’t women any more, they’re “menstruators” or “people with cervixes”, said the NHS, since people with penises had now to be regarded as female. Anyone who disagreed was a “transphobe” and likened to racists by Sturgeon. There was to be “no debate”.
She dedicated the energies of Scotland’s government to her Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) bill. This enshrined the doctrine of self-ID: which allows any man to change their legal sex simply by making a declaration and living “as a woman” for three months. The bill was backed unthinkingly by the Labour opposition, whose leader, Anas Sarwar, now says he has “reflected”.
The madness of self-ID only became apparent to him and everyone else in January when a double rapist, Isla Bryson (Adam Graham), was placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison after he self-identified as a woman. Sturgeon could still not bring herself to admit that Bryson was a man even as she ordered the Scottish Prison Service to move him, and other trans sex offenders, to a male jail. This fatally undermined the first minister’s credibility, already stretched by the failure to deliver that independence referendum. She became the first casualty.
Sarwar nearly became the next. But under pressure from Sir Keir Starmer, the UK Labour leader, who has also “reflected”, he is now trying desperately to dig his party out of this transgender confusion. Humza Yousaf seems determined to dig the SNP further into it, even though the GRR bill is opposed by about two thirds of Scottish voters.
The Scottish Green Party has made delivery of the GRR bill their “red line” for remaining in coalition with the SNP. Their increasingly intemperate leader, Patrick Harvie, has taken to attacking critics of the Greens’ policy agenda as “old men whose time has passed” even though it is principally women such as the youthful Kate Forbes MSP, a former SNP leadership candidate, who have been opposing the dilution of women’s rights under the gender bill.
Harvie is in no position to throw his (light) weight about. Following disasters over his Green colleague Lorna Slater’s Deposit Return Scheme and the Highly Protected Marine Areas, the SNP rank and file is rapidly tiring of the green tail wagging the SNP dog. Yet Yousaf, their leader, is being willingly wagged into staging a doomed defence of Sturgeon’s gender law against the UK government, which has blocked it under Section 35 of the Scotland Act.
Alister Jack, the Tory Scottish secretary, did so on the grounds that the GRR bill would have an adverse impact on UK-wide equality law and would undermine the protection of women in single-sex spaces. That it would have such an impact on UK law seems patently obvious. Self-ID is not being introduced in England. If the GRR bill were passed in Scotland alone, trans people who have changed their legal sex under self-ID would in theory have to change it back again at the border. This is absurd. It would never happen. So self-ID would be spread, without consent of Westminster, to the largest country in the union.
Last week the Scottish government claimed that it was Jack’s actions, not the trans dogma, that were “irrational”. This was dismissed by Lord Stewart, the advocate general, in the first judicial skirmish over the bill. Section 35 is part and parcel of the “devolution framework”, he argued, and is there to cover just such issues of legislative dissonance.
In next month’s shoot-out in the Court of Session, Yousaf will try to argue that the government’s block on the bill is a “full frontal assault” on devolution. This imputation of political bad faith will almost certainly be dismissed as irrelevant to the essential problem with the GRR bill, which is that it erodes women’s protections in a way that is not acceptable elsewhere in the UK. In England biological sex is still taken seriously. The Equality and Human Rights Commission made clear this year that women have the right to exclude biological males from single-sex spaces and sporting events.
After a brief period of woke confusion on trans rights, Starmer has finally woken up to the danger that self-ID poses to his attempt to reach No 10. He echoes the gender-critical slogan that a “woman is an adult female” a dictionary definition that had been regarded as transphobic by the SNP leadership. Starmer knows whose side voters are on.
The Scottish Labour leader does too. Sarwar says he no longer supports the bill in its present form. “We still have work to do to make sure we are protecting single sex spaces” he said last week, “based on biological sex”. This recognition of biological reality is welcome, if belated. Had he wanted to protect women from trans sex offenders, why did the Scottish Labour leader whip his MSPs to vote for this deeply flawed SNP bill in the first place?
The absurdity of self-ID should have been obvious to anyone. Yet it wasn’t until the presence of sex offenders in women’s prisons caused a public outcry that the “trans women are women” dogma was questioned. Why did the Scottish political classes ever subscribe to this belief? It was because the same activists, backed by intellectuals and politicians who should have known better, managed to impose an omerta on public debate on biological sex and the impact on women’s sex-based rights of its abandonment.
That shameful censorship lingers at the Edinburgh festival, as we saw last week. Graham Linehan was banned from successive Fringe venues because of his adherence to human biology. He finally managed to stage his show outside the Scottish parliament. All credit to Holyrood for dismissing cancel culture and upholding the founding principle of the Scottish Enlightenment: freedom of speech.
