Wales has learnt nothing from Sturgeon’s self-ID debacle
Now it's Mark Drakeford’s turn to try to tear up women’s rights.
On Sunday afternoon, an 11-year-old girl vanished while walking home in Galashiels in Scotland. Thankfully, following a huge police search, she was found alive 27 hours later. A man has now been charged in connection with her disappearance. The police have named the suspect, Andrew George Miller, and have described him as ‘transgender’. Miller, a butcher, identifies as a woman called Amy George.
Just three-and-a-half weeks have passed since the UK government announced it would block the Scottish government’s proposed Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. Since then, news stories concerning male rapists and child abductors who claim to be transgender have made headlines. Most notable has been the case of convicted rapist Adam Graham, who claims to be a woman named Isla Bryson. Thanks to Scotland’s trans-inclusive prisons policy, Graham was due to serve his time in a women’s jail, until a public backlash prompted a u-turn last week.
The case of Graham / Bryson has raised questions about the consequences of making it easier for people to change gender. Nicola Sturgeon and her SNP colleagues have tied themselves in knots trying to avoid saying whether Graham is a man or a woman. The upshot is that, finally, a more critical lens is being shone on such cases. This week’s press coverage of the Scottish girl’s disappearance calls the suspect a man ‘who also identifies as a woman’. This is progress, of sorts. It shows that more people are refusing to accept gender self-identification at face value.