A clause

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Theocracy replaced by genderocracy. You are required to believe in magical spiritual immaterial gender to the exclusion of literal physical sex.

Public bodies will be forced to consider gender identity under a proposed Scottish human rights bill that threatens to undermine the Supreme Court’s ruling on sex.

The draft Human Rights Bill for Scotland, due to be discussed at Holyrood in the coming weeks, contains a clause that would force public bodies to consider “gender identity” when forming policies and delivering services.

Well why stop there? If public bodies have to consider magic gender why don’t they have to consider all the magic ideas people have about themselves? If the law says self-image trumps material reality then all our ideas about ourselves, no matter how grandiose or conceited or absurd, should logically be allowed to trump the humble facts.

Campaigners say this goes far beyond the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” in the UK’s Equality Act — and fear it would “legislate for a compulsory belief” that people who believe they are women are women.

Equality laws should have nothing to do with in the head ideas about the self such as magic gender, but that ship has unfortunately sailed.

That would directly contradict the Supreme Court ruling in April 2025, which clarified that the definition of a woman is based on someone’s biological sex, not what gender someone feels they are.

And perpetuate this endless stupid childish game we’ve all been forced to play or be punished for refusing to play.

A FWS spokeswoman said: “Putting gender identity into Scots law is hugely problematic. The Equality Act recognises the right not to believe in the concept of gender identity yet the Scottish government plans to legislate for a compulsory belief in it and for public bodies to take it into account.

That’s the thing. This is a belief. It’s not an external objective fact, it’s a fluffy interior idea, and nobody should be forced to pretend to believe it.

Last year the Scottish government reintroduced the idea of a human rights bill. 

…

In addition, there would be an “equality duty” implemented, which would require public authorities, such as councils and the NHS, to consider how they can deliver the ICESCR rights while designing policies and delivering services.

The proposals, ministers admit, “have evolved to explicitly” include “additional grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, ethnic origin and disability”.

Sneaky sneaky sneaky. Those last three are objective external facts. Sexual orientation is the outlier, in being internal and in a sense subjective, but it does have a long well-documented history of persecution, and it doesn’t trespass on other people’s rights. Genner idenniny doesn’t and does.

A Scottish government spokesman said: “The Scottish government accepts the Supreme Court judgment. The proposed human rights bill will not overturn this decision.

“Since April last year we have been taking the necessary steps in response, making changes to policies and guidance impacted by the judgment.”

And yet here we are.

Comments

One response to “A clause”

  1. The Whimster Gap Avatar
    The Whimster Gap

    Part of me wonders what the Scottish Government – and, in particular, the SNP-Green majority – is playing at; and part of me thinks that it is simultaneously a clever and stupid political strategy.

    Here’s the thought. The SNP now has several years’ experience trying to pass TRA-inspired hooooman rights legislation. Irrespective of the merits or demerits of these instruments, cooler heads within the Party must know that its attempts are doomed to founder on the rocks of the wider constitutional arrangements of the UK. So what gives?

    Well, there’ll be a good chunk of the SNP vote that is simply wedded to the idea of Scotland leaving the Union, and they’ll vote SNP irrespective of its other policies. Another chunk will be protest voters: they don’t particularly like Labour or the Tories, and are looking for an alternative. That explains why there’s a nontrivial group of Reform voters, too – it’s just a matter of whether your protest vote is left-facing or right-facing. Neither of these constituencies is necessarily be-gendered. But by embracing genderwang, the SNP has mopped up that constituency, too.

    Why, though? Why are the cooler heads in the party willing (with just a couple of exceptions) to go along with that?

    And the answer is that it’s precisely because it runs into, and is incompatible with, the law not just in the rest of the UK, but of the rest of the UK.

    Let’s say you’re a Holyrood government that wants to leave the Union. One part of doing that is to erode the legitimacy of UK institutions. But you can’t really complain that they’re undemocratic – not straightforwardly, granted that the Scots have twice as many elected representatives as the English – and so the national liberation stuff won’t wash. What you can do, though, is to get your devolved parliament to pass laws that you know will be unacceptable to the Scotland Office, or will be challenged in the UK Supreme Court. And you’ll lose.

    But in losing, you win something else. Now you’ve got an arrow to shoot: here’re institutions based in Westminster, or UK-wide, that are undermining the policies of, and laws passed by, the elected Scottish government. And that’s going to breed resentment, and to strengthen the calls for more devolution and for leaving the Union entirely. You could even throw in a few claims about colonialism if you wanted. They’d be bollocks, but that doesn’t really matter.

    It’s not quite a matter of engineering a constitutional crisis, but it is a matter of scraping away layers of legitimacy.

    And if that is the strategy, it’s quite clever. It’s also quite stupid, because imagine your manifesto for a new nation-state being tethered to such a daft idea. But that’d be a problem for another day.

    By the way: the Bill is intended to include CEDAW, so I’m really interested to know how they’re going to square that with the TRA stuff.

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