Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. In Scotland, it’s about to get harder...

AFEW weeks back, a very nice man from the Scottish Household Survey came to our home. We had been selected to take part in the annual government poll on how people rate local services.

My husband and I spent around 40 minutes answering questions on our neighbourhood and community, ourselves and our lives.

How did we rate the local bin collection? When did we last go to the theatre? Did we live in an engaged and friendly community? There was one question, however, which exasperated me. How, I was asked, did I identify. Female, male, or other? Female, I responded wearily.

Weeks later, it’s still niggling at me. Because I don’t ‘identify as female’, I am a woman.

Such statements can swiftly land you on dangerous ground. Indeed this week, thanks to the SNP, the country became a slightly less safe place to be a woman. The Scottish Government has now passed stage one of a Bill to reform the Gender Recognition Act.

In making it much easier for people to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate, it rides roughshod over femaleonly spaces and hard-fought women’s rights in a way that, growing up in the 1980s and 1990s at a time when feminism was on the rise, many of us could never have imagined.

For Ash Regan, a rare dissenting voice within the SNP, it was a line in the sand. On Thursday she tendered her resignation as community safety minister and voted against the Bill. In doing so, she nailed what so many women, myself included, feel about this legislation.

‘I am not against reform per se,’ she said. ‘However, I cannot support any legislation that may have negative implications for the safety and dignity of women and girls.’

Think about that for a moment. The woman who has been in charge of community safety in this country for the past three years has lost her job because she has dared to vote against a Bill that she believes endangers women and girls. To me, she seems a lone voice of sanity among a party that has collectively lost its head in an attempt to appear progressive.

To some of her parliamentary colleagues though, she will likely now be viewed as a traitor. She is not the only one. A total of seven Nationalist MSPs voted against the Bill, including John Mason – a man I have never previously agreed with on anything – while a further two abstained.

Given that the party applied the whip to the vote, what retribution awaits the rebels from SNP high command remains to be seen. In the meantime however, the reforms to the Gender Recognition Act take another step towards a reality that for many of us feels truly dystopian.

Like Regan, I am not against reform in itself. It is important that the small minority of individuals in this country who are transgender are allowed to live free and full lives, and receive the utmost support to do it.

But the reforms that will likely soon be a reality go much further than that and open up huge gaps that jeopardise the rights of women and girls everywhere.

The idea that any man, even a convicted sex offender, can live for just three months as a woman and then sail off into the sunset clutching a certificate that allows them access to women’s prisons, changing rooms, bathrooms, even domestic violence refuges, is, frankly, terrifying.

SO too is the fact that the age at which one will now be allowed to do this is to be lowered to 16, with no medical diagnosis required, merely a ‘solemn declaration’ that they will live as their newly ‘acquired gender’ for the rest of their lives.

At 16? When I was 16 I couldn’t even make a solemn declaration on what sort of lipstick to wear at the weekend. I was naïve, young and had no idea what was best for me at an age when, quite rightly, I was deemed too young to drink or drive or vote.

Finally, there is this. We are facing a time of unprecedented economic crisis, after almost three years of global chaos. Thousands of Scots this winter will be making the nightmarish choice between food and warmth, while many will struggle to be treated in our creaking and massively underfunded NHS.

A Bill like this should not be a priority. And yet thanks to a dogged insistence on dragging it through parliament, the SNP has made it something which many genuinely fear.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, as the old song goes. In Scotland, it is about to get a lot harder.