EZIA DUGDALE |

Kezia Dugdale: classic populism inflamed the gender debate

There has been nothing wrong with the parliamentary process: the issue is that the recognition bill opponents dislike the conclusions

Kezia Dugdale

Sunday December 18 2022, 6.00pm, The Times

There is a rotten irony in the tagline “women won’t wheest.” That line is used by many campaigners against the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which will go through its stage 3 proceedings in the Scottish parliament this week. The phrase implies both that women are united in opposition to this legislation and that they have been somehow silenced during the bill’s passage.

From where I sit, it is the women who support this legislation who find themselves voiceless: women who have watched the colours green, white and purple, the symbols of universal suffrage, be appropriated by a cause they don’t support; women who have been lifelong supporters of organisations such as Scottish Women’s Aid, Rape Crisis Scotland and Engender, who have had to watch these great organisations denigrated as being in the pockets of the powerful purely because of how they are funded rather than what they believe or where the evidence points them to.

Lesbians and gay women are portrayed as one homogeneity particularly outraged or sidelined by this legislation because of the reach of powerful political figures within their number.

While I have written previously about what this proposed legislation does and does not do, I have resisted the temptation to enter the debate online or in the media, safe in the knowledge that the bill had a parliamentary majority. It would pass, and so too in time would the fractious debate. But with hours to go, I feel that there is a need to call out the populist tactics at play and to defend the process and indeed the people this bill is really about — the trans community — and their human right to live their lives with dignity and respect. And I do this as a lesbian and a defender of women’s rights.

The primary purpose of this bill is to demedicalise the process of securing a gender recognition certificate. There are 13 countries that already use self-identification; Scotland will soon be the 14th. The populations of these countries total 350 million people. That is one hell of a data set from which to find a pattern of the law being abused by predatory men. Yet as Victor Madrigal-Borloz said on Friday: “There are no administrative or judicial findings that validate the idea that the risk of abuse is a material one.”

Madrigal-Borloz’s opinion matters because he is the UN independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. That is a long job title, but an important one to disclose if you are in the business of substantiating your argument with facts.

Sadly, facts have been absent from much of this debate, which instead has fed on division and been driven by and riven with fear. This is classic populism, where for one to be strong another must be weak; for one group’s rights to be enhanced another must be diminished; that I cannot be a feminist, a lesbian and still support trans rights.

This is a bill introduced with good intent. But a proposal designed to improve the lives of trans people has, during its deliberation, left them extremely vulnerable. Through the lens of some hysterical media outlets, they have become synonymous with sex offenders, people to fear, people who should be doubted and have their motives questioned. It is what the same media outlets did to people of colour in the Sixties and to gay people in the Eighties.

Imagine a scenario where an individual might choose to pretend to be of a particular religious minority group in order to commit a crime and then pin that crime on an entire community. Would society’s response be to take away the rights of that religious minority simply because of the actions of one awful individual? Or would it say that this individual is no person of faith but an abuser of everything that faith represents?

Opponents of this bill fall into two categories: those who want to diminish the universal human rights of trans people because of the actions of predatory men pretending to be something they are not, and those who simply do not believe changing sex is something that is possible.

The next populist tactic is to question the process. Hence why we have heard so much recently about a bill that has “been rushed”, together with suggestions that the government is unwilling to compromise or to delay the process to allow work on detail.

This bill is one of the most consulted upon in Scottish parliamentary history. Those opposed to it do not want delays to improve it, they want to use them to dilute and defeat it. Each attempt to postpone or weaken the legislation perpetuates the unfounded stereotype of trans women as violent or predatory.

There is nothing wrong with the process the bill has followed other than that its opponents dislike its conclusions. They choose to question the democratic process rather than accept this is a direct product of it. They just don’t like the bill. They never will because it does not align with their worldview. God knows, we all have to live with democratic outcomes we don’t like.

Most of the substantive amendments that parliament will consider this week are designed not to strengthen the bill but to weaken its scope and application. One or two are less about strengthening the law and more about strengthening political support for the bill.

It will pass this week. It is just a question of whether it will do so by a margin of five or 25. Supporters of the bill, like me, would sooner see it pass comprehensively.