Trans gender debate: Scotland should get on with Gender Recognition Act reform – Laura Waddell

A recent Savanta ComRes survey showed women in Scotland are more in favour of gender reform than men.

SNP MP Mhairi Black said she did not feel that women’s rights were being threatened by Gender Recognition Act reform (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Many of us suspected this to be the case all along.

While polls show majority support for Gender Recognition Act (GRA) reform among Scottish women, an army of obsessive single-issue social media accounts is dedicated to attacking its supporters. Many of them claim their interest in opposing the reform is to ‘protect women’, a sentiment typically shouted at women who disagree.

As MP Mhairi Black said during a speech at the start of this week, “we hear claims that women’s rights are being threatened. Well I am a woman, I don’t feel threatened. If anything, the thing that makes me feel most threatened is quite often the very aggressive – and often male – anonymous accounts who proclaim to be defending me from something”.

Black’s words, enunciating the problem so clearly, completely chime with my own experiences.

I’m not the main target of this bile – minorities being demonised are. But after a decade on Twitter, throughout the heady days of Indyref, ill-advised debates on all kinds of fractious topics, and frequently clashing with the misogynists and their enablers who lurk within Scottish public life like woodworm, I was finally pushed to deactivate my account when GRA reform backlash reached fever pitch.

I’ve learned many things from these experiences, primarily that abusers often feel justified in their abuse. Misogynists contort and manipulate reason to pretend antagonising and intimidating women is a noble cause and, at the slightest pushback, consider themselves the victim of those who stand up to them.

But having a self-righteous man make threats to you, a woman, while he claims without irony he is doing so to protect women, is one of the most unsettling incidents I have ever experienced online.

Men who think they know what is best for women and go beating their chest in public about it enact a particularly Neanderthalic form of patriarchy. When women say we don’t want or need such protection, not only are we not listened to, but that rage is frequently turned on us.

Aside from those who saw political opportunity to capitalise on anti-reform fearmongering and the fury it inspires (for just one example, see the importance placed on it by the Alba Party in their short history), negative GRA viewpoints have been overemphasised in the press.

This has furthered a misguided belief there are two polarised warring sides, women on one side, trans people on the other. But this is a lie. It was not reflected in the broadly positive consultation responses submitted by Scottish women’s charities, who have endured sustained online harassment from GRA reform conspiracy theorists ever since, and it is not reflected in polling of the general public.

As has now been confirmed, Scottish women are largely in favour of the reform. The loudest, most aggressive and most arrogant online voices, claiming to speak on behalf of all Scottish women, have actually been drowning most of us out. A story as old as the hills.

Bigots can no longer hide behind the pretence of ‘protecting Scottish women’. It’s time to get the reform done, and stop coddling those throwing poison darts at society.

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