What I've Learned as a ...Campaigner.

The debacle over Gender Self-ID has shown our democratic institutions at both their best and worst. I should know. I've seen them at work first hand.

For the last four years I’ve had a ringside seat as a key demand of the wayward LGBTQ+ lobby was successfully pushed through the Scottish Parliament. And then disintegrated in front of our eyes.

Of course, I’m talking about the Gender Self-ID Bill that was passed by Holyrood before, thankfully, being blocked by the UK government. Has there ever been legislation that went from hero to zero in such short order? Just a month after being declared a symbol of noble Caledonian moral progress the whole idea of Self-ID was enveloped in public ridicule and anger when a double rapist was housed in a women’s prison. Whoops.

Yet no one can say the Scottish Parliament wasn’t warned about the risks of Self-ID. In May 2022 I was one of four people who were asked to give evidence to the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee that was scrutinising the legislation. Or so we were told.

You can watch the whole session here if you have two hours to spare.

Susan Smith from For Women Scotland, Kate Coleman from Keep Prisons Single Sex and Lucy Hunter Blackburn from Murray Blackburn Mackenzie and myself could not have been clearer about the specific pitfalls of such vaguely worded and ill thought through legislation.

I’ll write another post soon about the poor evidence and platitudes that formed the submissions from the other side. In the meantime, here’s my summing up where I pointed out that Self-ID had only been a demand of the LGBTQ+ lobby in the UK for less than a decade. Yet it was now being proposed to pass a law without solving any of the obvious contradictions in a policy that insists we have to accept what anyone says about themselves, no questions asked.