Scotland is now going ahead with the same kind of reform the U.K. government shelved back in 2020 because of concerns over women’s rights and equality laws. In Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her government are pressing ahead with a new gender recognition bill with full support from the Green and the Labour Party, but the move is facing substantial opposition that underlines just how fraught the transgender issue remains in the U.K.
Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party (SNP) faced the biggest rebellion so far within the party when Minister for Community Safety Ash Regan resigned from her post on Oct. 27, ahead of the first vote on the bill in the Scottish Parliament, which was meant to express support for its “general principles” before it could move to the amending stage.
The Gender Recognition Reform Bill easily passed that first hurdle with 88 votes to 33, with only the Scottish Conservative Party opposing it. However, despite the SNP imposing the whip on its own members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) in Holyrood, Ash Regan and six other SNP members voted against the bill and two more abstained, out of a total of 64 SNP MSPs. While this is not a substantial number, more have said that they would vote against the bill at a later stage unless it undergoes sufficient changes during the amending stage.
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In its current form, Scotland’s new “trans law” would allow anyone from the age of 16 to get a gender recognition certificate (GRC) issued without having to undergo any kind of medical procedure, and a psychiatric diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” would no longer be required. Therefore, even minors from the age of 16 could “change” their legally-recognized sex, just like with Spain’s “trans law” which will be probably adopted before the end of the year in spite of stark opposition from most of the country’s health professional organizations.
In Scotland, the planned reform of current laws inspired by gender ideology will lower the time required to have lived in one’s chosen gender from two years to only three months before such a person is issued a GRC. In practical terms, this means that an applicant will have to confirm his or her decision at the end of a three-month reflection period.
The applicants will no longer have to make a statutory declaration that they intend to continue to live in their “acquired gender” for the rest of their life, meaning that in Scotland one will be allowed to change his/her legal sex several times in their life.
Although the Scottish-planned “trans law” is a little less radical than the Spanish one, it does raise fears over women’s rights.
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Minister for Community Safety Ash Regan, who resigned on Oct. 27 after concluding “that [her] conscience will not allow [her] to vote with the government,” had written an open letter in 2019 to express her doubts about “changing the definition of male and female.”
John Mason, another of the SNP rebels, has said about the planned gender recognition reform that “what it does do is increasingly blur the distinction between women and men,” and “if it becomes less clear who is a man and who is a woman, then almost inevitably it becomes more difficult to ensure women are paid equally. (…) It becomes more difficult to ensure women have access to safe spaces including prisons, where they can be reasonably certain that no men will be present.”
Meanwhile, the left is already planning an ever-lower age limit when a child will be allowed to obtain a gender recognition certificate without the need for parental consent.
“I am determined that appropriate gender recognition for under-16s and non-binary people will be part of our shared future,” Green MSP Maggie Chapman has claimed. Children in Scotland, a charity that receives over £1 million a year in public money, has been lobbying for children as young as 12 to be allowed to apply for gender recognition certificates to live in the gender of their choice, as such a move would, according to the charity, help “normalize trans identities.”
It should also be noted that the official guidance issued in 2021 by Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government now allows children as young as four to “change their gender” at school without parental consent.
One of Sturgeon’s best-known opponents on gender issues is J.K. Rowling, the famous author of the Harry Potter series, who last December labeled as Orwellian the new Scottish police policy of recording biological male rapists as women when such a rapist “identifies as a female.”
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For years now, Rowling has been living under death threats from trans activists, but she remains vocal in the defense of women’s rights against a very aggressive transsexual/transgender lobby.
In November 2021, three trans activists posted a picture on social media, where they were standing in front of her Edinburgh home holding signs accusing the female writer of transphobia and where her address was made visible, thereby making it public.
In an opinion piece published in The Times on Oct. 15, Rowling accused Scotland’s first minister of being “deaf to women’s concerns over gender ID,” warning that “soon… in Scotland, (…) intact males who are judged to have met the meager requirements will be considered as ‘valid’ and entitled to protections as those who’ve had full sex reassignment surgery, and more male-bodied individuals will assert more strongly a right to be in women’s spaces such as public bathrooms, changing rooms, rape support centers, domestic violence refuges, hospital wards and prison cells that were hitherto reserved for women.”
As was revealed last June by The Telegraph, Scottish civil servants were told during training sessions organized at their workplace that so-called “gender critical” women or “terfs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists) “hate all trans people” and have “an unhealthy fascination with trans kids,” and that biological sex is a “falsehood” invented by the medical profession to “reinforce white supremacy and gender oppression.”
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In London, the Tavistock Gender Identity clinic is now being shut down by the British National Health Service after damning reports have shown numerous cases of ideologically-motivated malpractice and abuse over the years, including large numbers of children who were administered “sex-changing” therapies with irreversible side effects despite appearing to have shown signs of autism that were ignored when referred to the clinic. At the same time in Glasgow, 9-year-olds are now prescribed puberty-blockers as a first step towards “sex change” at “Sturgeon’s Tavistock.”
These drugs are associated with higher rates of cancer, osteoporosis, psychological disorders, and higher rates of suicide and suicide attempts.
A new report into the Sandyford clinic run by the NHS in Glasgow has found the same kind of malpractice issues and abuses driven by gender ideology.
Following this new report, Dr. David Bell, who was the author of a report on the Tavistock clinic, told The Telegraph:
“Sandyford should be shut down. NHS England has agreed that the gender service at Tavistock be shut down for these reasons. It is not that English children have different bodies or genes or minds to Scottish children.”
Psychiatrists have also asked the Scottish government to shut down the facility.
Trina Budge, director of the feminist campaign group For Women Scotland, has said, “There is absolutely no evidence to justify Sandyford continuing to medicate clearly vulnerable and troubled children with experimental and, what is becoming increasingly clear, dangerous drugs. We have repeatedly called for the children’s gender clinic to be shut down and resources diverted to good mental health care — we know that, with support, most children will be happy with their bodies if given the chance to mature.”
However, similar to what is happening with the governing coalition of socialists and communists in Spain, the very left-wing Scottish SNP government backed by the Green turns a deaf ear to all such calls and reports.
Due to concerns over the knock-on impact Scotland’s reform effort to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 might have on women’s rights and equality between men and women, the U.K. equalities watchdog also wrote to the Scottish government in January asking it not to overly simplify the process of gender recognition, but to no effect.
Now, it appears that Scotland has embraced the most woke and LGBT-friendly agenda of the four nations that make up a very woke, LGBT-friendly United Kingdom. In its efforts to fight dissent on these controversial issues — even in cases involving powerful puberty-blocking drugs that have been consistently shown to destroy the health of young people — the country is implementing a totalitarian series of laws under the guise of “liberalism.”
