Meeting of the Parliament 26 March 2024
Today’s stage 1 debate will be relatively brief. The cabinet secretary and the convener have said that the amendment is a technical one.
The one question that many women across Scotland will have is this: how did we end up here in the first place? The Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018 set out the objective for public boards to ensure that at least half of their non-executive members were women. That included the definition of the word “women” to include trans women. For Women Scotland brought a judicial review of the 2018 act, and, on 18 February 2022, the inner house of the Court of Session ruled that it was outwith the Scottish Parliament’s legislative competence as it amended the definitions of the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010.
The Court of Session declared that incorporating some of those with the protected characteristics of gender reassignment, whether or not they hold a gender recognition certificate, into the definition of women unlawfully
“conflates and confuses two separate and distinct protected characteristics”.
An exception in the Equality Act 2010 allowing provision for women excludes biological males. The Scottish National Party Government has therefore introduced the amendment bill to align with that ruling.
Women have fought for hundreds of years to achieve equality and to ensure that their rights are protected, but those rights have been eroded by a Government that is hell-bent on bringing in laws and legislation that put women’s rights at risk. From attempting to bring in legislation that would allow 16-year-olds to change their gender without a medical diagnosis, to moving the goalposts on who can obtain a gender recognition certificate, which would have meant that, if the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill had been enshrined into law, predatory men would have been allowed to take advantage of the system, to allowing a convicted rapist to be sent to a women’s prison, it is clear that women’s groups have had enough of laws that create a hierarchy of protected characteristics. It is divisive; it creates more division in our society.
Women’s groups will continue to challenge the Government when it attempts to bring in legislation that will have a detrimental impact on women, their rights and safeguarding. The Scottish Conservatives will support the amendment bill today, but I ask that the Scottish Government begins to work with women’s groups and not against them.
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