Meeting of the Parliament 27 October 2022
That is a great question, because the definition was already in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the bill is just rolling it over into this legislation, as the Scottish National Party would like to see it reformed. I hope that that answers the member’s question. Maybe not as such, but there was lots of debate around acquired gender and what it meant. Does it mean that someone is dressing in a certain way, acting in a certain way, speaking in a certain way? A lot more discussion around the issue could be had and it could be debated.
When organisations such as MurrayBlackburnMackenzie—MBM—and For Women Scotland talk about protecting single-sex spaces and the rights of women in Scotland, they do so because they know that the bill and its consequences, as outlined by the EHRC, erode the legal protection of single-sex spaces. We cannot allow those arguments to be ignored until the legislation has undermined measures that protect women’s dignity, privacy and safety and that promote their equality.
A bad-faith actor would currently find it very difficult to obtain a GRC, but with the proposed reforms a non-falsifiable declaration is all that would stand between them and receiving a GRC. That means that they could insist on using or getting access to female-only changing rooms, rape shelters, healthcare services and women’s prisons.
We are being asked to vote on an all-or-nothing choice between the system of safeguards that is currently in place and self-declaration—on a false dichotomy of elaborate oversight or no oversight. Legislators in 2004 did not decide upon the safeguards that are in place today by accident. I appreciate that some of the hurdles that trans people must overcome to obtain a GRC are tied up in those safeguards, but there is room to make the process easier without tearing it to pieces. There is certainly room to work on reducing the time that trans people have to wait throughout the process and room for medical support from our national health service.
It is a hard task for our legislators to ensure that safeguards exist so that the system is not taken advantage of and I hope that members can join me and achieve that aim, rather than just accepting that we can reform the legislation without doing so.
Concerns were also raised, and ignored, about lowering the age at which somebody can obtain a GRC to 16. Indeed, some of the evidence used to support those concerns came from the interim Cass review, which was similarly brushed aside by the majority of the committee. That landmark review notes—