Meeting of the Parliament 12 March 2025
I will come back to the member if there is time towards the end.
Children who are experiencing the normal challenges of growing up are being told by adults that they were born in the wrong body. The profound and often irreversible harm that that has caused, and continues to cause, is horrific. One day, there will be a reckoning for those responsible.
Then there is the destruction of girls’ privacy in schools. In 2021, the SNP issued trans guidance for schools, which stressed that there was no legal basis for excluding boys from girls’ toilets and that pupils should be free to join physical education classes with the gender of their choosing. It also included advice on increasing the number of gender-neutral toilets. There have been instances of sexual harassment and assault. I find it reprehensible that young female pupils are too scared to go into school toilets because of the presence of young men, even where there is no ill intent. As a parent, I would refuse to accept that. No pupils or their parents should be bullied into submission because schools have been told to accept and promote self-ID.
In 2022, Scottish Government civil servants were sent material that described biological sex as a
“binary system ... set by the medical establishment to reinforce white supremacy and gender oppression”.
I mean, for goodness’ sake—I only got a few highers and none of them were in science, but in what mind-bending parallel universe is it okay for civil servants to peddle basic biological falsehoods?
The same material labelled some women’s rights campaigners as TERFs, which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”. Initially used as a smear by the gender lobby, the term has since been embraced by Scotland’s proud legion of TERFs. Trust me—you do not want to get on the wrong side of them. Today, I thank them for their heroic work. From the very beginning, the TERFs could see the problems with self-ID. At every level, from the top of the Government to our NHS, councils, policing and schools, women’s rights have been set on fire. Even today, after all this has played out in public, many state agencies just do not get it. Scotland’s TERFs have been bravely determined in their fight for justice, and that fight continues.
Just over two years ago, my party did everything that it could to try to prevent the SNP’s harmful gender self-ID law from being enacted. John Swinney, Anas Sarwar and Alex Cole-Hamilton all voted for it. Anas Sarwar has since claimed that he would not have done so if he had known then what he knows now. He is not here to explain himself, but I would be happy to give way to any of his colleagues if they can reveal exactly what it is that they did not know back then. None of them will, as expected. The reason was—