In 2018 the Scottish Government held a consultation of its proposals to review the Gender Recognition Act 2004, making it easier for a person to be legally recognised as the opposite sex.   The current law was designed for those people with the most extreme version of Gender dysphoria (or transsexualism as it was previous called) who want to live their lives as the opposite sex, and this law assists them by reissuing them a new birth certificate with their registered sex at birth changed, and further protects them by making it illegal for others to ever make reference that this has occurred.

What is controversial about the Government’s proposals is they want to alter the law so it is possible for anyone to go through this process and not just those who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.    The scrapping of all the current criteria also removes all safeguarding measures making it easier for this to be abused, thereby allowing predatory males the legal right to access spaces where for example women and girls are vulnerable or undressed, like hospital wards or prisons.

These concerns were raised with the Government during the last consultation and because of this the reforms were delayed, with the Government stating they wanted to reassure us that the rights of women and girls would not be affected by the changes to the law.   The long awaited government plans have came in the form of a second consultation of a draft Bill and this is now open for the public to comment.  

The consultation paper includes an Impact Assessment, which is a very small section that supposedly outlines all the evidence available and weighs it up as to whether or not the new law will negatively impact on others.  With regards to the specific point of transwomen or predatory men falsely claiming to be trans accessing ‘women only’ spaces, and the increased risk of sexual violence, the government claims there is no evidence that this has occurred.    Instead it cites an academic paper by a trans activist outlining its support to abolish the current protections for women within the Equality Act. 

This report reduces women and girls who are ‘unsafe, vulnerable, and threatened by the sight of, and proximity to, male genitals, even if those genitals belong to a person who…identifies as female’ to a just feeling of discomfort of seeing ‘non-normative bodies’.  To emphasise this point the report likens seeing a naked male body within a ‘women only’ showering facility to seeing a woman who has had a double mastectomy.   This is extremely offensive to the thousands of women across the country who have suffered from breast cancer to have their bodies used as a comparison in this way.  

It’s particularly cruel to use a women’s scarred body to argue for the inclusion of male people in ‘female only’ spaces.

It also spectacularly misses the point of why women are worried about losing their ‘female only’ spaces. 

The reason why we have ‘female only’ spaces isn’t simply that women might find the appearance of a male body offensive, it’s because of the high instances of sexual violence perpetrated against them by men.

In its attempts to reassure women of this crucially important and sensitive aspect of the changes to the law, the Government have instead revealed that by using this report as their best evidence, they have absolutely no understanding of what the general public have been worried about all this time.

This was reported widely in the media, see here, here and here.