Most of us will soon be filling in the Census which is
now done online. Quite why it needed to be done a year later than the other
parts of the UK is therefore unclear as doing things on the Internet does not
involve any risk of catching Covid. But SNP Scotland loves to be different.
I haven’t done my census yet, but from past experience
the vast majority of questions will be about matters of fact. I will be
expected to answer truthfully. So too if any of us fill in an application form
about a job or even apply to join a club it is expected that we answer
questions factually and truthfully. Of course, we can lie about our age or our
qualifications, but if found out we might lose the job or even be convicted of
fraud.
But on one issue and I think one issue only the SNP
now thinks we can answer questions without reference to the facts. It wants to
bring in a self-declaration model about gender. What this means is that someone
will be able to simply declare that he is a woman despite having a male body or
that she is man despite having a female body. We will not, at least not yet, be
able to self-declare about any other aspect of our body. If I am white, I
cannot self-declare that I am black. If I am 93, I cannot self-declare that I
am 23. If I have Covid I cannot self-declare that I don’t have it, until my
body is free from the illness. But I can change my gender whenever I want and
without any checks from doctors or anyone else.
Self-declaration about gender involves something
rather strange about language. It divorces being a woman from the objective
characteristics of being female. It is not possible, I think even the SNP
admits, to self-declare about one’s biology. A person is objectively either
male or female. It is not possible to change this. A man who changes his body
to mimic as far as possible the body of a woman, remains biologically male. But
what then is the self-declaration about? If I can be a woman even though I have
a male body, what is it that tells me I am a woman? It cannot be my body. But
if it is not my body, what can it be?
I am nearly always confident of describing someone as
a man or a woman based on appearance. Apart from infants we nearly always can
tell just by looking. This is how we learn the words “man” and “woman”. But if self-declaration
is not based on appearance or physical characteristics, the words “woman” and “man”
when used by people self-declaring are being used in a completely novel way.
They are being defined perhaps by some inner feeling, but they are not being
used as the rest of us use them. This makes them homonyms. Someone may say “I
am a woman”, based on an inner feeling, but it is the equivalent of someone
using words like “bank” to mean both a place that stores money and a place next
to the river.
When I learn a foreign language such as French, I may
say “Je suis une femme”, but if I looked like a man my French teacher would
correct me. “Non, vous êtes un homme”. If I based being un homme or being une
femme on an inner feeling that no one else could share, it would be impossible
for me to learn French. But the same obviously goes for English. Every person
who wishes to self-declare their gender has learned English by means of objective
physical characteristics which are sharable.
I could not learn the words hot or cold unless being
hot or cold was an objective characteristic of things that everyone talking can
perceive in the same way. But the same goes for words like “man” and “woman”. Everyone
including the person wishing to self-declare learned these words by their
parents and teachers correcting them. If as a child I pointed to a large
breasted person in a dress and said “Mummy it’s a man”, she would have said “No,
it’s a woman”. The word would not have been learned in relation to anything
going on in the head of the woman.
The SNP therefore wants to have a new definition of “woman”
based on the feelings going on in some people’s heads, but they want this new
word to be used in exactly the same way as the old one. This is the problem
with self-defining. No one else is doing it. Our words are defined by the linguistic
community.
The reason why women are concerned about self-declaration
is that it will allow the self-declarer all the rights that the rest of women have
who have obtained them not be means of self-declaration, but by means of having
female bodies.
Society over the centuries has developed certain
social rules. While it is acceptable for women to take off their clothes with
other women, it is not normally acceptable with men. This is because of the
difference between male and female bodies. Women don’t want men to see them
naked unless they are sexual partners.
So too women’s bodies are usually less strong than men’s
bodies for which reason there is women’s sport.
If a woman is raped, she is likely to be scared of men
for which reason she would hope to be examined by a woman doctor and would hope
that her rape counsellor would also be a woman
Women only want people with female bodies to be in the
changing room. They want to compete only against people with female bodies and
they want their doctors and rape counsellors to have female bodies.
Normally this isn’t a problem. When everyone used the
word “woman” to mean someone with a female body “women only spaces” were safe.
But self-declaration changes that. It allows people with male bodies to define “woman”
in a way that allows those with male bodies to go into those spaces.
Women in those spaces do not care what is going on in
the head of a person who self-declares as a woman, what they care about is that
this “woman” has a male body.
Every male in Scotland who does not self-declare he is
a woman is defined as a man based on his male body. It is for this reason that such
men cannot take part in women’s sport, cannot be women doctors and women rape
counsellors. But a subcategory who define “woman” in a different way can access
women only spaces simply because despite having male bodies they define themselves
as women. But the reason for keeping them out of women only spaces remains the
same. They have male bodies. How they define themselves has nothing to do with
it.
The SNP pretends that those of us who object to
self-declaration are doing so out of prejudice and that there is nothing to
fear. But the example of the American swimmer who despite being male is competing
in women’s races shows exactly why we should be concerned.
This swimmer despite having male anatomy shares the
changing room with young women. If any of these women object they will be
thrown off the team. But the trans swimmer still dates women. It is likely that
he is still attracted to female anatomy and uses the male anatomy he retains sexually.
It is unclear if this trans swimmer is heterosexual or a lesbian. Can lesbians father
children?
It may be that this trans swimmer is entirely honest,
but his team mates will be evaluated in their swimsuits as to whether they
might be suitable for date and they might notice the enthusiasm in his swimsuit
if he finds them attractive. It is for precisely this reason that women have
fought to keep male bodies out of changing rooms and for women’s sport to be a contest
between female bodies.
Everyone in Scotland defines every word we speak
objectively and collectively, because we speak a shared language with
definitions and rules that are not made up by me or you, but by all language
users together. It is this that makes the SNP’s attempt to change the meaning
of “man” and “woman” so bizarre. They might as well change the meaning of “English”
to “Scottish”, if a man can become a woman simply by saying that he is one.
If being a woman has nothing to do with having a female body, what is to stop me declaring that Nicola Sturgeon is a wee boy?
