The SNP’s Genderbread Border.

Soon "woman" will mean different things north and south of Carlisle. What could possibly go wrong?

This is my recent Spectator column on Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Reform Bill. Read article in full here

The Scottish Government says that once people have changed their legal sex, with a gender recognition certificate, human biology becomes irrelevant. Rishi Sunak is equally adamant that it does not. In England, ‘self-ID’, as it is called, has been rejected by a Conservative government that insists on defining women on the basis of biological sex. 

Confused? You will be. Forget the Northern Ireland Protocol – an existential gender border is being drawn across the British mainland. We may end up with different definitions of what a ‘woman’ is north and south of the border. 

After self-ID, the ‘presumption’ in Scots law will be that transwomen cannot be excluded from women-only spaces, and it could be a criminal offence to disclose their previous gender. This will not be the case on the other side of the ‘genderbread’ border – so-called after the emergence of the transgender teaching graphic, the ‘Genderbread Person’.

This is because, in a very real sense, transwomen are not women under the Equality Act 2010, as it is applied in England. The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has made this clear: Scottish transwomen cannot assume that they can come to England and sue a woman’s judo club for discrimination if they are refused membership on grounds of their original birth sex. 

The Equality Act says that transwomen can be excluded from single sex groups as: ‘a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate end’. The example given in the guidance on the legislation is a counselling group for female victims of sexual assault. This effectively writes the primacy of sex over gender into the operation of the Act. The only way to exclude a transwoman with a gender recognition certificate from a single sex group is by reference to the sex they were born with, not their legal sex on their new birth certificate.

Transwomen cannot be women in the Stonewall sense if they can potentially be excluded from bodies on grounds of their natal sex. So what now? The Scottish Parliament is rushing through radical legislation that will fundamentally change our view of sexual differentiation with no thought to the implications for the UK, for women, or even for people with genuine gender dysphoria.