Meeting of the Parliament 27 October 2022
I have not even got into the substance of my speech. I will take an intervention if there is something specific that the member would like to ask me about.
As we have heard, the bill received one of the highest volumes of written evidence in the history of the Scottish Parliament. There were 11,000 submissions. Unfortunately, many of those contributions were overlooked in the report. I take the opportunity to thank everyone who contributed submissions. I regret to say that the timetable that the committee had set to consider evidence meant that only a small proportion of contributions could be considered. It is important that the voices that have been ignored in this debate can be heard and that legitimate concerns about the bill can be discussed.
A GRC is not just a piece of paper. Mr Justice Scoffield of the High Court in Northern Ireland described it as conferring
“a significant and formal change in”
a person’s
“status with potentially far-reaching consequences for them and for others, including the State”.
The implications of the bill go beyond simply helping trans individuals gain recognition of their acquired gender.
One of the overlooked implications is the significance of the bill’s effect on the Equality Act 2010. The Scottish Government and several members of the committee claim that the 2010 act does not fall within the scope of the bill, yet in less than two weeks’ time, Scottish Government lawyers will be in court arguing that a GRC would change an individual’s sex under the Equality Act for the purposes of the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has also shared concerns about the consequences of the bill and the Equality Act 2010, noting that
“extending the ability to change legal sex from a small defined group, who have demonstrated their commitment and ability to live in their acquired gender, to a wider group who identify as the opposite gender at a given point”
will have clear implications for the operation of the act. The bill as drafted is inextricably linked to the Equality Act 2010, as I am trying to explain—