The process of reforming gender recognition legislation in Scotland has so far been “extremely bad and a recipe for bad law,” opposition campaigns and policy analysts told the Hollywood Committee.
Referring to the committee that is gathering evidence on a bill aimed at streamlining the process by which a person can change their legal gender, groups have expressed concerns about excluding women from cis from women’s-only services for fear of encountering transgender people. face and suggested that young people were “confused” by celebrities who came out as strange or non-binary.
However, criticism of the proposed gender reform reform – backed by every party in the Hollywood bar, Scottish Conservatives – has been voiced, as other groups, including the rape crisis in Scotland and Amnesty Scotland, have said the bill will not affect the way women have access to services.
Sandy Brindley, chief executive of the Scottish rape crisis, told members of the Scottish Parliament’s Equality, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee that the service had been comprehensive for 15 years and that “all this time there have been no incidents of trans people abusing it. “
Naomi McAuliff, Amnesty’s program director in Scotland, said she saw no evidence from other countries that had introduced similar systems that this would lead to a significant increase in the number of applicants. She mentioned Ireland, which has a similar population to Scotland and has had less than 900 applications for a gender identification certificate since introducing self-identification in 2015.
Earlier, Lucy Hunter Blackburn of political analysts Murray Blackburn Mackenzie expressed concern that the bill would open the process of applying for a “larger, more diverse group”, including – by removing the requirement for a medical diagnosis – those who were not by gender. dysphoric, warning that the previous act of 2004 was “reassigned to do other work”.
Hunter Blackburn said the commission could not ignore how the change in the law on obtaining a gender identification certificate would affect policy.
“The process leading to the introduction of the bill is extremely bad and is a recipe for a bad law. “I hope the commission now corrects, not repeats, these mistakes,” she said.
Susan Smith of the Scotland Women’s Group’s campaign said: “If [parliamentarians] they tell people: “We believe that the only criterion for whether you are a man or a woman is identity”, it is becoming increasingly difficult for individual organizations to have a policy that contradicts this … the reality then becomes [that] the person who makes these decisions is often a low-paid receptionist at a sports center who tries to tell someone that he can’t go to a women’s session alone. “
Calling on the commission to expand its evidence base, Smith and Hunter Blackburn said SMEs should talk to pediatrician Hillary Cass, who is reviewing gender identity services for children in England and Wales.
Malcolm Clark, of the LGB Alliance for Gender Critics in the UK, said young people were influenced “by celebrity, peer pressure, a bunch of social media nonsense” and that SMEs should also seek evidence from those who subsequently withdrew. -transitional.
Asked by SNP MSP Karen Adam if he could see similarities in his rhetoric with warnings about educating children about LGBT issues in the 1980s, during Section 28, Clark said he saw no comparison, saying that pro-reform groups such as Stonewall used “the good name of the gay rights movement to make this set of demands acceptable.”
Hunter Blackburn also suggested that there was a consensus among critics and supporters on the “really problematic” requirement in the bill for candidates to live in their own gender for three months, something she described as “regressive and reinforcing stereotypes” and which the Scottish trance Alliance described it as “random” during a previous evidence session.
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