MPs: ‘Dangerous’ gender reform Bill should be scrapped

One of the SNP’s longest serving MPs has said Holyrood’s gender self-ID Bill risks women’s safety and should be axed.

Angus MacNeil, who has nearly twenty years’ Commons experience, fears “bad-faith actors” could exploit the law to gain access to women’s safe spaces.

Cross party colleagues agree, with Conservative MP Miriam Cates, the DUP’s Carla Lockhart, and Labour’s Rosie Duffield warning that the legislation lacks “adequate safeguards” to protect women and changes UK as well as Scottish law.

Legal sex change

Last month, the Scottish Parliament voted to make it much easier for people to change their legal sex, including, for the first time, 16 and 17-year-olds.

Despite significant public opposition – around two thirds of Scottish voters said they were against the plans – MSPs voted by 86 to 39 to approve the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Act.

The new law will remove the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, allow children to apply to change legal sex from their 16th birthday, and reduce the waiting time for adults from two years to just three months.

Dangerous loophole

MacNeil, chairman of the International Trade Committee and an SNP spokesman on Trade at Westminster, called for the approved Bill to be “withdrawn and scrapped”.

He said: “This is not about trans people. It is about people who could possibly masquerade as trans people and invade women’s safe spaces”.

The legislation, he argued, creates a “loophole” that could be exploited by men “who pretend to be trans” and consequently “poses a threat to women”.

‘A real risk’

In a letter to Scotland Secretary Alister Jack seen by The Telegraph, MPs Cates, Lockhart and Duffield said the Bill was extremely ambiguous and posed “a real risk to the safety of women and girls in Scotland”.

The MPs also warned it could “threaten the legal basis on which women and girls are currently protected in the rest of the United Kingdom”.

And that there “could foreseeably be a scenario by which someone changes their legal gender in Scotland and then acquires a new legal status in England, despite having never gone through the English gender recognition process”.

Jack has already signalled the UK Government’s readiness to invoke the Scotland Act to block the Bill. But a Scottish Government spokesman said: “Any attempt by the UK Government to undermine the democratic decision of the Scottish Parliament will be vigorously contested by the Scottish Government.”