Who gets the equality protections?
The gender recognition wars rumble on.
The UK government has decided to block a controversial Scottish bill designed to make it easier for people to change their legal gender. UK ministers say the draft law would conflict with equality protections applying across Great Britain.
What equality protections? Mostly the ones that protect women. It’s odd (or cowardly) that the Beeb doesn’t spell that out. The harm done by gender ideology is done almost entirely to women; no doubt that’s why nobody cares.
Nicola Sturgeon’s government believe the current process is too difficult and invasive, and causes distress to an already marginalised and vulnerable minority group.
But what about distress to an already subordinated and vulnerable half-of-humanity group? Why do trans people matter so much more than women? Why is it all right to trample on women’s rights, but not all right to deny men who identify as women peculiar new “rights” that aren’t really rights at all?
Sturgeon appears to be flouting that fundamental rule of parliamentary politics: look after your constituents first. I cannot believe that the transwhatevers of her constituency have greater political clout than her female constituents.
Strange times.
Sturgeon also may want to provoke a reaction over this to gain more support for Scottish independence.
J.A. You are really not paying attention: If you do a web search you will discover Sturgeon is not provoking anything; the UK is escalating a feud with Scotland. :-)
I’ve heard this theory from others. My immediate reaction was, that’s smart and devious, and I’m not convinced that these politicians are either.
OTOH…If you want to do something like this, you need the right kind of issue. You need an issue that is real enough to draw a veto from Westminster, but phony enough–abstract enough–that people in Scotland can feel aggrieved by the veto without having to engage with the issue on its merits. (If Scots engaged with the issue on its merits, they might conclude that having Westminster around to keep people like Sturgeon in check is a good idea.)
Trans self-ID just may hit that sweet spot.
I gave the idea of provocation some thought last night, did some reading, and I’m not at all convinced it makes sense. It’s an obvious conclusion, but I’m not sure it adds up.
Why would this one issue be that which makes the people of Scotland rise up in fury and demand independence? Why not all the other absolute madness that’s been going on in Westminster over the last few years? The carousel of incompetent, lying Prime Ministers? Covid? The cost of living crisis? The very existence of Boris Johnson in the first place? Support for independence has remained more or less stable through all this turbulent time. But gender identity is going to suddenly tip the balance?
Well, maybe. We know how it seems to suspend so many people’s critical faculties. We know it’s an emotive, provocative issue. We know that many people are sufficiently confused or uninformed to support harmful measures under the guise of being kind. That’s why, I think, the provocation hypothesis is so attractive.
But if you look at the “should Westminster block the act?” polls, every one I’ve seen comes up with a resounding “yes”, including Scottish ones. Including ones conducted among Scottish people friendly to independence. We’re talking ratios in the region of 4:1. Those polls surely include people who have a position on the act itself, but also those who don’t care about it at all, but have a position on Section 35 as a key principle of devolution, whose inclusion the SNP overwhelmingly voted for. All of which suggests that this issue isn’t likely to be one that triggers a great increase in support for independence.
Besides, I’m not sure what Sturgeon could hope to achieve in the direction of independence by fighting Westminster on this. As I understand it, if Westminster doesn’t back down, the only recourse Sturgeon has is to take it to the Supreme Court. So what if she wins? Surely all that would do is show that Section 35 is fit for purpose and has worked in Scotland’s favour. That would hardly be a rallying cry for independence. If she loses, it might well stir up some anti-England sentiments…. but since the polls show that nobody really wants the act to pass, it would be a very strange choice of hill to die on.
We know that one of the headline clauses of the Scotland act, which made provision for devolution in the first place, is that Scotland may not make changes to UK equality law, so it seems (IANAL) unlikely that she’d win. So if we’re to be a bit conspiracy-theoretic, we’d probably have to assume she’s playing to lose and as I said above, the polls suggest this would not be an effective strategy.
So I think we’re left with perfectly ordinary, standard political pandering. I think Sturgeon is trying to hold on to power by pleasing a small but vocal audience that nobody cares about as much as they say they do when it comes to real, grown-up stuff.
Political analysis is hardly my forte and I’m arguing from a place of ignorance, but ordinary greed and incompetence seems like the more likely explanation to me.
Thanks for that soberly argued analysis, latsot. However, I would suggest that Sturgeon’s incentives for such pandering are significantly increased by the sort of clickbait-driven echo chambers that populate the result set of the web search I flagged above. The political benefit is not merely picking up support among a strongly motivated minority, but reinforcing a narrative which intimidates a weakly motivated bourgeois unionist opposition.
Agreed. Alan. That’s part of what I was failing to get across.