Correct facts on gender reforms
THANK you to The Herald on Sunday for supporting, through your letters page, dialogue on the proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act.
We would like to correct a crucial misunderstanding of the proposals, repeated in Susan Smith’s letter (October 28). Neither the current proposals, nor the Gender Representation on Public Boards Act passed earlier this year, redefines female to include those who, on a whim, or for devious purposes, simply say they identify as female. The proposal for gender recognition law is that a person must be living as a woman, and must intend to continue to do so for the rest of their life, to obtain legal recognition as a woman (and similarly for recognition as a man or a non-binary person). A person who falsely declared they were doing that would be committing a criminal offence. The definition in the Public Boards Act is more technical, but amounts to the same thing.
People who are living as women already access single-sex spaces as women (no woman is required to show her birth certificate or her genitals to enter a single-sex space). Those who seek to abuse such spaces or who pose a risk can lawfully be excluded whether they are trans or not. None of that will change with the reform to gender recognition law.
Becky Kaufmann Scottish Trans Alliance Edinburgh
In her letter to you about changes to the Gender Reform Act, Susan Smith speaks of “the conflation of sex and gender”. Alas for clarity in this and related spheres, the word “gender” seems to slide and slither between at least three distinct meanings.
Sometimes, it is merely a synonym for “sex”, meaning a person’s biological sex.
Sometimes, it is used to mean the cluster of characteristics and behaviours conventionally associated with persons of a particular sex.
We are being told about gender (or gender role) in this sense when we are told that women are caring and men can’t express their feelings; women do housework and men put up shelves; women are from Venus and men are from Mars; women wear lipstick and dresses but men don’t.
Sometimes “gender”, by itself or in the phrase “gender identity”, is used to mean the sex a person feels themself to be, ie “identifies as”, which may differ from their biological sex.
This ambiguity seemed to me to infect both the Scottish Government’s consultation and that of the UK Government. Paul Brownsey Bearsden