Meeting of the Parliament 12 March 2025
That was a bold attempt, but this legislation was a completely different thing. The bill was about the removal of women’s rights.
It is no wonder that women were angry that evening. I remember it well. Parliament had passed a law that would allow anyone from the tender age of 16 to legally change their sex based on nothing more than self-declaration. In the eyes of the state, any man could be a woman, regardless of the inevitable impact on women’s rights. Not only that, but Parliament also rejected my commonsense amendments to prevent sex offenders from exploiting gender self-identification, as they inevitably would.
Not long after the law passed, a man called Adam Graham was convicted of rape. He said that he identified as female and wanted to be known as Isla Bryson. He was initially sent to a women’s prison, before a public backlash forced his removal. That episode ignited the public awareness in Scotland and beyond and, when Nicola Sturgeon was unable to answer whether Bryson was a man or a woman, the game was up. She could not concede that Bryson was a man, even though everyone else could see it as plain as day. However, nor could she say that Bryson was a woman, despite his self-declaration. The SNP’s belief in the purity of self-identification without condition collapsed under Nicola Sturgeon’s inability to answer that question.
It has since been reported that SNP MSPs were assured during those long and late sittings that the issue was a storm in a teacup and that, once the law passed, all the fuss would die down by the new year. How very wrong that was. We are still talking about it, because we need to be talking about it. That is why my party has decided to hold today’s vital debate.
The SNP has said that a rapist being in a women’s prison was nothing to do with its law. In fact, it is right about that, although that does not make it any better, because the Scottish Prison Service’s decision to put a rapist in a women’s prison was due to the SNP pushing gender ideology long before the bill passed. Trans lobbyists, funded by the SNP Government, saw voiceless and vulnerable women in prison as an easy first target. They succeeded in getting the Scottish Prison Service to adopt self-identification in 2014, eight years before the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill was lodged.