Meeting of the Parliament 19 June 2025
I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for securing the debate. As she has outlined, gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is one of the sustainable development goals, and it is one that we should all strive to implement.
As Katy Clark has just stated, we must use whatever mechanisms we have at our disposal to tackle misogyny. I, too, regret the Scottish Government’s decision to drop the planned misogyny legislation.
Since its inception eight years ago, the National Advisory Council on Women and Girls has been a wise, prescient, brave and visionary body. Its members, including the brilliant, compassionate and much-missed Emma Ritch, realised that progress would require mechanisms of accountability as well as substantive changes. One of the council’s recommendations was that Scottish ministers should deliver an annual statement on gender policy coherence, followed by a debate in the Scottish Parliament. It might have taken some time to get here, but we have that statement in the form of a report, and we have this debate, and I am grateful for both of those.
It is commendable that, in its motion for this debate, the Government has sought not to boast about achievements or make excuses about shortcomings but simply to note the statement and let us talk about it. With the same dignity and respect, most Opposition parties have refrained from lodging amendments to make political points and set the debate on a path of division and conflict—most, but not all.
Once again, our few opportunities to talk about the real structural barriers to the wellbeing of women and girls, of families and communities and of living generations and those to come—our tiny slivers of time for conversation and progress—are to be dominated by the discourse of transmisogyny. Let us be clear: of the social and economic oppressions, institutional and structural injustices and participatory and intersectional shortfalls that women and girls experience, absolutely none is inflicted by transgender or non-binary people. On the contrary, the poisonous rhetoric of prosperous so-called gender-critical activism damages all women and girls, trans and cisgendered.
I go back to the advisory council and its practical, trans-inclusive, intersectionally aware, robust and transformational feminism. It was created as a catalyst for change. That change is not always comfortable, and it is certainly not always easy, but I think that we recognise today, from bitter experience, that it is more urgently needed than ever.
Gender equality is not a zero-sum game. It is not about dividing the cake differently but about baking an entirely different kind of cake—one that benefits men, boys and non-binary people as well as women and girls. It provides radical, sustainable and compassionate alternatives to misogyny, exploitation, injustice and violence—violence in our homes, schools and streets; in the homes, schools and streets of Gaza and elsewhere; in the bleak destruction of climate change; and in the plans and profits of a resurgent war machine.
The council produced 21 recommendations, with on-going, sensitive and meticulous work about how those recommendations can become real. The Scottish Government has, to its credit, accepted them all. If fully implemented, they would transform Scotland for the benefit of everyone—perhaps most of all for the children in poverty to whom our attention continually returns. In my closing speech, I will address some of the ways in which we are moving towards those goals and that gender policy coherence, and some of the ways in which we can do much better.
Meanwhile, on behalf of the Scottish Greens, I welcome the report and the motion, and I whole-heartedly reject the culture-war games that, I fear, we might get into later this afternoon.
15:37