@MaMelon
Trenchant lassie? Patronising, much.
Pro independence women (and men) who voted for the SNP are responsible for this - it’s not up to the rest of us to feel any level of nose cutting sympathy towards them. They are adults, they knew what they were voting for, they must now accept that their vote may very well bring about harm and disadvantage to other women.
I wish that we're facing this because it's what the SNP and only the SNP wants. Then we could simply vote for someone else, problem solved.
The Gender Recognition Act 2004 is a law written by the Labour Party.
GRA Reform efforts were instigated by the Conservative Party in 2016, who accepted wholesale only the arguments of the pro-self-id side made during its Transgender Equality Inquiry in 2015.
It took Theresa May to (inadvertently) save women's sex-based rights in 2017 when she dissolved parliament. Because in 2016, as a result of that Transgender Equality Inquiry, Maria Miller (CON) as sponsor and supported by Jess Phillips (LAB) brought a Private Members Bill named the
Gender Identity (Protected Characteristic) Bill
A Bill to make gender identity a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 in place of gender reassignment and to make associated provision for transgender and other persons; and for connected purposes.
Amongst other things, connected purposes included abolishing the sex-based exemptions for all purposes for all those who had a GRC under the GRA 2004, and there is now no way to discern whether this would have then also applied to all those who gained a GRC under the reformed GRA as proposed. (Various statements made at the time and since made by the Bill's supporters leads me to believe that they intended to disapply the sex-based exceptions from all those who self-identified as the opposite sex, which for all intents and purposes means abolishing them.)
The Bill passed its first stage reading in December 2016, but thanks to Ms May it fell when she dissolved parliament in April 2017.
Which gave those who even back then understood the implications of this reform just enough time to marshall women's rights campaigners and concerned women and men from all over the UK. So when the GRA reform plans were revisited under the new parliament in 2017, which occasioned a public consultation that closed in 2018, it resulted in a large number of feminist submissions opposing the plans. Since then, the movement to defend and uphold women's sex-based rights under the Equality Act 2010 has grown too large to be ignored. Even for the SNP, who had to hold another public consultation because it admitted that it had not properly carried out the first. (Obviously nothing has changed the SNP's aims regarding self-id, but this second consultation was most definitely not in its interest.)
And just in case you're in any doubt, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party all committed to introduce self-id at the same time as the SNP did.
As for the claim that SNP voters knew that they were voting to abolish women's rights if they voted SNP, that's laughable. A large proportion of the public continues to be unaware that these reform proposals exist and even if they know of their existence, few understand their implications for society in general and the rights of women in particular.
By all means despise independence supporters and their party of choice. It's a free country and you have every right to do so. But don't pretend that people voted SNP in the full knowledge of what their plans are for women's rights.