Women have come no distance at all if our sex can simply be appropriated by men

Twenty-five years of devolution, exploring Scottish solutions to Scottish problems, and now the Scottish Government finds itself in court arguing that a man can be a woman. Donald Dewar must be turning in his grave, and he won’t be the only former first minister to be doing so.

It’s almost two years to the day since MSPs uniquely sat late into the night to unashamedly ensure that the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was passed ahead of Christmas. The speed, the whipping, and the after-hours sittings were surely only justifiable by the political necessity to get this through before the public caught up with the facts. But with the legislation then blocked by Westminster, their goose, it seemed, was cooked.

Claims that the GRR was the most consulted over, most scrutinised, most agonised over, and its consequence just a minor administrative change, were laid bare as lies since the work that should have been done in Holyrood committees was done by eminent legal brains in the Supreme Court last month, now forced into arguing over the very definition of ‘what is a woman’.

Questions, interrogations, intellectual arguments, scrutiny, real-life examples, that should all have been hotly picked over at Holyrood as the GRR made its way through parliament but never saw the light of day as politicians, captured by a gender ideology, were prepared to ignore the obvious and dismiss reality. And at the same time, in the name of inclusivity, throw the women that argued against them under the bus. 

If the Scottish Parliament had had its way, gender self-ID in law would have caught up with what was already a policy in practice by stealth. Not for the first time will I say, “thank the Lord for Isla Bryson”, for there was no better illustration of how ridiculous the proposal of self-ID was than a double rapist, dressed in pink leggings with his genitals so clear for all to see, while declaring himself a woman.

Nicola Sturgeon, Humza Yousaf, Jenny Gilruth and the rest may not have been able to call Bryson a man but anyone with an ounce of self-respect, an understanding of biology, a modicum of legal knowledge and an understanding of the patriarchy could see him for what he was, a man, a rapist and a chancer. But a chancer, all the same, who managed to shine a light on the absurdity of what our learned politicians had just voted for.

Imagine if that case had not come to the public eye, so hard on the heels of the GRR being passed. Imagine the furore that would have then ensued in nationalist circles when Alister Jack, then Secretary of State for Scotland, stepped in to call a halt to this farce. Imagine where we would now be if the women from the grassroots of feminism hadn’t put their heads so bravely above the parapet. Imagine if there was no JK Rowling fighting the corner of women who had had enough, but whose voices couldn’t or wouldn’t be heard. Imagine a world where your sex didn’t matter. A world where women were erased, and their rights trampled on. In a Scotland where those same politicians, who now have the audacity to decry the actions of the Taliban in banning women from education and access to healthcare, can still applaud their own moves to effectively eliminate Scottish ‘women’ as a sex class.

And if you need evidence of the chilling effects of this, don’t just turn to the academic consequences of all-women shortlists potentially being filled by biological men, look at the BBC’s recently published list of 100 Women of Influence from around the world and wonder why, amid the many campaigners against sexual violence and those fighting against the odds for female equality, that on that list the BBC felt compelled to include a biological man. 

I am sure Brigitte Baptiste, a transwoman whose new identity is styled on that of Brigitte Bardot, and who used the example of a wax palm tree to illustrate how science recorded changes of sex and gender in plants, is at the top of their particular ‘queer biodiversity’ game. But answer me this, how does the experience of Baptiste or indeed, an inanimate tree, possibly deserve to sit alongside the horrific experience of Gisèle Pelicot, drugged and raped by countless men precisely because she is a woman?

Pelicot was assaulted not because of her gender, but because of her sex. There are others on that list whose horror stories include terrible tales of sexual assault and exploitation – all because of their biological sex and not some innate sense of who they think they are or how they choose to identify. And of course I am not saying transwomen are rapists. I am not even saying all men are rapists. But as Pelicot knows to her cost, it is only men that rape. And haven’t women fought long enough, hard enough, to be recognised in our own right without competing for a place on a roll of honour with men?

And that gets to the nub of what we heard in the Supreme Court. Aidan O’Neill KC, acting for the For Women Scotland campaign group, shaped his arguments around how the patriarchy had subjugated women. He painted a picture of how far we have travelled but which in reality, is no distance at all, if our sex can simply be appropriated and our protected spaces colonised by men.

O’Neill argued that the problem that women faced in those early examples of discrimination was “biological determinism” and what women face now is “biological denialism”, both caused by patriarchal shape shifting and the legal fiction that sex can be changed when it can’t.

To be fair, I’ve been embroiled in this whole sex and gender debate for more than six years now, but I still had to put incredulity to one side as I watched these fine legal brains trying to wrestle with all the intellectual gymnastics involved in real-time and yet still get to the clear absurdity that men cannot be women. And that the potential risks of accepting that falsehood are clear.
Every woman who considers themselves a “feminist to their fingertips” should have been watching this case, albeit squinting through their very fingers and pondering on how a Scottish Government that solemnly declares itself in favour of eradicating violence against women is the same Scottish Government that can argue a man can be a woman, a man can get pregnant, and a man with a legal certificate that says he is a woman, can be a lesbian.

It may be pantomime season, but this is no joke and is a case where only women could lose, and men potentially win. Welcome to the patriarchy.