Meeting of the Parliament 22 December 2022
I thank all the people who have made today possible: everyone who engaged in the consultations and scrutiny processes, my committee colleagues and everyone in the Parliament—MSPs and staff—who has contributed to this important bill. Most of all, I thank trans people, who have put up with delay, abuse, loss and grief. Today is for them.
I stand here this afternoon with a multitude of mixed feelings: relief, anticipation, frustration and sorrow. I feel sorrow that the six years of work on the bill—it has been arduous work, which was undergone most of all by trans people themselves—has taken place in an increasingly toxic environment and a miasma of intensifying myths about the bill, about gender recognition, about wider aspects of trans people’s lives and about the motivations of those of us who stand in solidarity and love as their unshakeable allies.
Many of the myths are not only mistaken but entirely irrelevant to the bill that is before us today. A gender recognition certificate is not a route to medical transition, nor vice versa. They are entirely separate processes. Indeed, demedicalisation is a key principle of the bill. There is no place for those conspiracy theories of big pharma and child mutilation. They are not only bitterly ironic in the context of trans healthcare, with its underinvestment and multiyear waiting lists; they are false in outline and detail, deliberately disseminated to mislead and muddy the waters.
I stand in frustration at the gaps in the bill, which our best endeavours have not yet been able to fill. Sex is not, as some would like to imagine, binary and immutable. That is why, as soon as possible, I am determined, and the Scottish Greens are determined, to achieve comprehensive gender recognition for non-binary people in Scotland—they are not forgotten.
There is a second gap: those under 16, for whom formal gender recognition would be appropriate and beneficial. I will continue to work for that, for trans children everywhere.
I am saddened that the amendments that I lodged at stage 2 were not supported, including those on the removal of waiting times and of the new criminal offence of making a false declaration; those clarifying and limiting the power of third parties to seek revocation of a GRC; and those providing penalties where applications are malicious or vexatious. I am disappointed because they represent international best practice and, most important, the needs and experience of trans people themselves, whose voices have not been sufficiently heard above the clamour of noisy opposition.
I am deeply unhappy that, despite resisting the most horrendous amendments this week, the bill now includes provisions that I can describe only as dog whistles. Such messages in legislation can never make for good law, for they create and legitimise the context of hate and fear in which, heartbreakingly, trans people are obliged to live.
There is nothing new here. Every time a group of marginalised people come close to achieving their rights and emerge from the fog of condescension and ridicule through which they have previously been seen, the same story is told—the story about the need to protect women and children, especially girls, from some new and insidious threat. That has never been true, and we look back with collective shame at the way in which our society has been duped by it. In exactly the same way, we will look back at the current moral panic with deep regret.
The myths that are being spread about the bill follow those old patterns with depressing precision, yet we are far from the first country to carry out such reform, which applies to populations of many hundreds of millions, and nowhere that has gone before us has experienced any of the scenarios that are hinted at by the bill’s opponents. That is no surprise, because those scenarios simply do not make any sense. Women and girls are, indeed, vulnerable to predatory attack, as trans women know better than most, but no potential attacker needs a GRC to play their power games.
Our society is based on self-identification. From the time that we are born until the time that we die, we, or someone on our behalf, tells the world who we are, where we live, what we earn, and what name, what faith and what national identity we recognise as our own. There are penalties for untruths, just as there are in the bill, but the fundamental understanding is that each of us knows better than anyone else who we are.
Finally, those long years have shown that there is no bright line between people who claim to support trans rights but in practice oppose every step towards them, and those who view all trans people as fraudulent or, at best, deluded. In the spectrum of trans myths, the most extreme provide a kind of invisible ballast for the mainstream, but they are still myths, still toxic and still untrue. As the great feminist Judith Butler has written of this movement, they
“assemble and launch incendiary claims”
to defeat us
“by any rhetorical means necessary.”
In closing, I, too, want to bring the words of a trans person to this chamber. We have spent many hours talking about trans people. Let us hear them:
“It’s a scary world for trans people at the moment. My family were initially supportive, but we moved my mum to live nearer to us recently and realised that she is now a TERF. It’s a sign of things going on in the rest of the world. She talks about how trans people are predatory, and are going to go into toilets and commit sexual assaults. I remember the repeal of section 28 and this is what it feels like. Like we are demonised by society and are portrayed as threats. And people with loud voices on social media and in mainstream media are saying that we want this to sexually assault people. There is so much very loud hate and demonisation. We are people.”
So, Presiding Officer, we will not be defeated—not today, and not in the months and years to come. We now have a choice: to stand in the miasma of scaremongering myth or to step into the sunlight with our trans siblings. I choose to step into that sunlight and vote for the bill.
14:03