Mick Hartley

Scotland continues on its merry way to a world where gender matters, but sex doesn't. Last week:

People will for the first time be able to self-identify their gender in the Scottish census next year — a change that critics insist “seriously harms” the quality of data collected.

Guidelines issued by the National Records of Scotland to the question “What is your sex?” tells respondents, “If you are transgender the answer you give can be different from what is on your birth certificate.”

In other words, they can just make stuff up.

Equalities groups and some academics had challenged the Scottish guidance. Lindsay Paterson, professor of educational policy at Edinburgh University, said the outcome was “very disappointing”.

He added: “There will be a separate question on gender identity, so allowing people to use their gender identity to answer the sex question is a missed opportunity to understand the relationship between people’s sex and how they think of themselves.

“For example, it will be impossible to say how many people who were born as male have chosen to identify as female.”

The guidance “seriously harms the census as a source of data for comparing men and women in Scotland”, Paterson added.

“It defies not only the legal ruling in England and Wales, but also the scientific understanding of sex as being a biological reality rather than a feeling. The decision by the Scottish census authorities is thus a serious setback for systematic social research and for well-informed public policy.”

Lisa Mackenzie of the policy analysis collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, said that the census would contain “a de facto conflation” of sex and gender identity, and flew in the face of advice from 80 leading social scientists."

And the logical follow-up, today:

Scottish authorities are being urged to record suspected rapists by their natal gender amid claims that allowing male offenders to identify as women would “significantly distort the records”.

Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, a women’s rights academic think tank, has petitioned Holyrood to “accurately record the sex of people charged or convicted of rape or attempted rape”.

A request which would have seemed ridiculous only a few years ago. Of course men convicted of rape should be recorded as men, whatever their self-declared gender might happen to be.

The petition, which has more than 12,000 signatures, calls on Police Scotland, the Crown Office and the Scottish Court Service to classify the sex of such offenders as exclusively male.

Alice Sullivan, professor of sociology at University College London, has written a submission supporting the proposed change claiming that statistics from south of the border demonstrated the need for action.

“The issue of rapists identifying as women is not hypothetical,” she said. “Documented instances of females being charged with rape as an accomplice are rare. Yet, between 2012 and 2018, the proportion of rape defendants classified as women varied between 1.2 per cent and 1.8 per cent.

“During this seven-year period, 436 individuals prosecuted for rape were recorded as women.”

Sullivan added: “We can respect people’s gender identities without denying the material reality of sex. Ideally, crime statistics should record both.

“Crime statistics do not exist to affirm the identities of the perpetrators of crime. The accuracy of such statistics is vital, both as a foundation for data analysis, and to ensure that public trust is not undermined.”

Dr Nicola Williams, the director of the campaign group Fair Play for Women, has also submitted evidence to the Scottish parliament. She said: “In Scotland the crime of rape can only be committed by a person with a penis. While such a person may have a female gender identity, it is their male body that enables the crime.

“Given the low numbers of female sex offenders, a tiny number of misrecorded males can significantly distort the records for female offenders.”

Alex Massie sums it up – Women are fall guys in self-identification fantasy:

This Scottish government has no time for those who deny the reality of climate change but it is an administration busy enthusiastically denying the reality of biological sex. We must follow the science on one matter but abandon it on the other.

In place of reality there is fantasy, and a government that believes in fantasy in one area is one that will be happy fabricating evidence in another. It is a question of trust and probity and, in the end, of character. So this is a revealing argument in many ways.

Nicola Sturgeon, of course, is “a feminist to her fingertips”, which makes one wonder why she pursues an agenda that would redefine the idea and reality of womanhood so completely the term would, in effect, lose any and all usefulness. The first minister insists that her plans to make it easier for people born male to identify as women (and vice versa) need not concern women in the slightest. There is no clash of rights between trans people and women. Any appearance to the contrary — such as the fact the majority of women’s organisations who responded to the government’s latest consultation on its plans opposed them — must be ignored or wished away. Women’s experiences and their fears are not so very important after all.

But then that is so often the case. The wonder is not that women are sometimes exasperated but that they are not, frankly, in a state of permanent revolt. To put it another way: if men experienced the disadvantages endured by women, something would have been done about it centuries ago….

Henceforth, if the government has its way, a person may change gender having spent just three months living in their new identity. Sturgeon and Harvie argue that a man who self-IDs as a woman after fewer than 100 days is a woman no different from any other. This is a bold claim and if it has not become a matter of raging controversy that may be, in part, because it is an issue the television news would rather avoid and because, frankly, few people can believe this is what the government believes. But it is….

[I]t is a factual, physical, intellectual and moral absurdity to argue people with male bodies can be women no different from those with female bodies; just as it is equally ridiculous to insist that a pregnant transgender man is a chap no different from the fellow who impregnated him.

Once again, however, the Scottish government asks us to believe the impossible. As a matter of justice and decency, trans people must have space and opportunity to lead their lives as they see fit. Neither they nor the government, however, has the right to corrupt meaning like this. Which, again, is why this is such a revealing argument. For it is one between those who think truth must matter and words must have meaning, however inconvenient this may be, and those who think wishful thinking may replace truth and by doing so make fantasy a new kind of reality.