Hansard

Like Elaine Smith, I draw members’ attention to the comments that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, made earlier in the week when she warned against complacency regarding women’s rights. She said that women’s rights

“cannot be an optional policy, subject to the changing winds of politics.”

She is absolutely right.

One in three women across the world experience violence that is perpetrated by men. Between 60 million and 100 million women who should be alive today are missing, presumed dead, because of male violence. One woman dies every minute due to problems relating to pregnancy, and 15 million adolescent girls around the world have experienced forced sex—and we can multiply that number several times for adult women. Seventy-two per cent of human trafficking victims are female, and the vast majority, many of whom are children, are trafficked for the purposes of prostitution. Women also work two out of three of all labour hours worldwide but earn just 10 per cent of the world’s income.

Last year, New Scientist reported that sex-selective abortions have stopped the birth of 23 million girls since 1970. They were aborted not because of their gender identity or because they were non-binary—they had no value because they were female.

There are many marginalised groups in the world, and they all deserve protection from discrimination. One of the ways that marginalised groups empower themselves is by organising themselves and excluding the group that has historically been responsible for their oppression. Black people form groups excluding white people, gay people have their own groups and so do trans people—indeed, the Scottish Trans Alliance has argued to the UK Government’s Women and Equalities Committee that the law should be changed to allow for services and organisations exclusively for trans people. I think that that is absolutely reasonable.

I also think that it is reasonable for women, if they wish, to organise on the basis of their sex. It is also legal. It is a kernel of decades of feminist thought to say that gender is imposed on women in order to uphold their oppression. By gender, feminists mean presentation, modes of dress and the falsehood of masculine and feminine personality traits. If we say that gender is somehow innate—that it supersedes sex—the logical conclusion is that women can somehow identify out of our oppression. Many feminists disagree with that, but increasingly that has become a problematic—indeed a dangerous—thing to say.

This weekend, Selina Todd, professor of modern history at Oxford University, found herself disinvited from making a short speech at a conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first women’s liberation movement meeting in the UK, at Ruskin College. Professor Todd is a feminist and a socialist who has written extensively about women’s history and working-class history. Since 2017, she has been president of the Socialist Educational Association. The decision to silence Professor Todd was not supported by the women who attended the conference and has been widely condemned, including by leading feminists such as Caroline Criado-Perez and Helen Lewis, but she is one of a growing number of feminist academics who have been censored for their views that biological sex matters and that women, as a marginalised group, should be allowed to organise themselves according to their own definitions. Indeed, Professor Todd now requires security to attend her work. Sadly, she is not alone. Professor Rosa Freedman, an expert in human rights law who has worked for the UN and the University of Reading, has suffered similar abuse. The door of her office at university has been vandalised and urinated on, and she has been followed home by individuals threatening rape and violence.

Elsewhere, the philosophy professor Kathleen Stock has found herself deplatformed and subjected to a sustained campaign to have her ejected from her job at the University of Sussex. Sadly, many other prominent feminists have been subjected to similar treatment, including Dame Jenni Murray, who was mentioned by Rachael Hamilton, and Germaine Greer. Helen Lewis has been subjected to online death and rape threats. Lewis was subject to that abuse because she criticised a gamer in the United States who posted an image of a woman having her throat cut on the grounds that the woman was a TERF—a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

It is not just in England that feminists have been silenced. Last year, in Scotland, a number of MSPs attended a meeting at the University of Edinburgh at which female academics and writers spoke about women’s sex-based rights. One of them was the journalist Julie Bindel. She has spent her life campaigning against male violence, and that was what she spoke about that day. On her way out, accompanied by Professor Freedman, a man lunged at her, screaming abuse. Two security guards had to hold him back. That particular individual had taken the name of an American radical feminist he disliked, and he regularly threatens violence against feminists online. He was later arrested, but I understand that the Crown Office dealt with the matter informally, which is unfortunate, particularly as the majority of members of this Parliament afterwards signed a motion lodged by Jenny Marra MSP condemning the attack and asserting our right to discuss sometimes difficult issues, particularly at universities.

It is therefore disappointing that subsequent attempts by women to meet, including at the University of Edinburgh, have been shut down by threats of intimidation. It is even more worrying that women such as the feminist poets Jenny Lindsay and Magi Gibson have been subjected to online mobs trying to prevent their getting work or blocking their performances. When the Scottish Poetry Library last week said that that was unacceptable, a letter written by activists said that bullying was okay. If we really value women’s rights, we cannot allow that to happen, and international women’s day is an appropriate time to highlight that threat.