As Cass condemns conversion therapy ban, where stands Honest John? (Free to Read)

The new First Minister is about to get entangled in the same thicket of transgender policies that defeated his two predecessors

Historians will have a hard job explaining the Scottish National Party’s self-destruction in the torrid year since the (unchallenged) First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, resigned out of the blue. Most puzzling of all is the apparent role played by transgender policies in the fate of the SNP-Green “coalition of chaos” as it is now known.

The collapse of the Bute House power-sharing agreement was not a result of the failure of the SNP First Minister, Humza Yousaf, to honour climate change targets. The Scottish Green ministers and party co-leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, had already endorsed the abandonment of the Scottish government’s plan to reduce carbon emissions by 75% by 2030.  It’s now clear that the implosion of the coalition last week was over the Cass Review on gender identity services to young people, and specifically Harvie’s equivocation over Cass on the BBC Scotland’s Sunday Show on 21s April.

The Green co-leader said he couldn’t accept the scientific validity of the report because he had heard too many criticisms of it.  Later that week, after representations from SNP MSPs and MPs “upset” about Harvie’s comments, Humza Yousaf collapsed the Bute House agreement and ejected the Greens unceremoniously from the Scottish government.

It was political suicide.

Mr Yousaf was himself gone from office within the week after the “old guard” in the party, led by the former FM Nicola Sturgeon, told him in terms he could not ignore, that under no circumstances would they tolerate any deal with the Alba MSP, Ash Regan, to save his administration.  Regan’s vote would’ve been essential to prevent the Scottish Green Party motion of no confidence in Yousaf from being passed by MSPs.  But accepting Regan’s less-than-onerous terms might have given the Alba leader Alex Salmond, Sturgeon’s deadly enemy, the appearance of control over the SNP government. We don’t know exactly how they communicated this to Yousaf or what they threatened to do if he did not comply.  However, Yousaf realised he could not continue as leader without support of Sturgeon and co.

John Swinney is now First Minister of Scotland and looks to be facing many of the same problems as his immediate predecessor - with one important difference: he has the backing of the old guard. Indeed, Swinney is the personification of the old guard. However, he is also now dependent on the Scottish Greens in a way that Yousaf, ironically, was not.  Since his backseat driver, Nicola Sturgeon, has made clear he cannot do deals with Ash Regan, Swinney leads an inherently unstable minority government reliant on the 7 Green MSPs for the passage of key bills, and more importantly his budget, through Holyrood. This is a predicament that can only be described as parlous. It also puts Swinney back in the thicket of transgender policies has tried to avoid addressing.

First, the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (GRRB) currently stalled by the UK government under Section 35 of the Scotland Act. Harvie is demanding that Swinney perseveres with the fight to lift the Section 35 Order, even though most commentators thought the bill, passed by Holyrood in December 2022, was effectively dead after a Court of Session ruling last year that the UK government had acted lawfully in blocking it. They also want him to honour his predecessor’s promise to table a bill this year banning  trans “conversion therapy”.  The Greens will have the whip hand on any votes on these issues. They could also threaten to withhold support for Swinney’s first budget if he crosses their gender “red lines”.

John Swinney has so far declined to comment on the fate of the GRRB, or indeed whether he still agrees that transwomen are women. Gender-critical feminists suspect he intends to breathe life into the bill to promote Self-ID. “What I’ve assured everybody ”, he told reporters yesterday, “is that I believe in a good, solid process of respectful dialogue about these issues”.  This is classic Swinney-speak telling us precisely nothing. The Scottish government is still “reviewing” the 32 Cass recommendations on gender services, the most controversial of which is on the prescribing of puberty blockers to children which she believes should be halted.

Nor has Swinney commented on the bill to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” by the end of the year. The Scottish government consultation paper in January aroused fears that parents could be prosecuted if their actions “suppress” their child’s transgender identity. Dr Hilary Cass added her own warnings in her evidence session to Holyrood’s health committee this morning.  She said that the threat of prosecution is likely to “frighten” clinicians off treating children altogether.

“If a therapist engages with a young person”, the renowned paediatrician told MSPs, “and they change their views about their gender identity during the course of that therapeutic relationship, and then they subsequently say it was because the therapist had an intent to change their gender identity, that puts the therapist in a difficult position”.

Cass has effectively torpedoed the Scottish government’s plans on both the gender bill and conversion therapy. The idea of allowing confused sixteen year olds to change legal sex by declaration alone, as the GRRB envisages, is clearly not Cass-compliant. She argues that the brains of children and young people are not sufficiently mature to make such life-changing decisions.  She is also obviously deeply worried that a ban on conversion therapies could prevent confused young children getting the very “holistic” care they need. Treatment that considers the many possible psychological causes of their identity distress other than the belief that they were born in the wrong bodies.

The Scottish Greens are demanding that trans people are “protected by law, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, from the damaging and coercive practices known as 'conversion therapy'. Emma Roddick, the SNP equalities minister, agrees that all attempts to “change or suppress a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation are damaging and destructive”.  John Swinney will not be able to avoid stating his own position on these vexed issues for much longer.  The Scottish Conservatives are staging a debate on these issues tomorrow and the new First Minister’s contribution to it will be minutely analysed. Platitudes about dialogue will not get him through.

 Indeed, the gender debate is likely to consume him in much the same way that it consumed the energies of Humza Yousaf, and contributed to the downfall of Nicola Sturgeon. “Trans rights” seems to have eclipsed even independence in the political agenda of the SNP. Never has so much political energy been expended over the fate of such a tiny minority.