No Anti-Misogyny Bill After All. Wish I Could be Surprised!

[HarpieDuJour]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crkx31my24ro

So it looks like the Scottish government isn't going ahead with the long-promised anti-misogyny bill. The SC judgement is being blamed, of course. Is anyone even the smallest bit surprised?

Not me 😒

If the SC decision has affected this, does this mean that the original bill wasn't actually a misogyny bill, but another trans rights bill instead?

This is a really bad look. I mean, how obvious can you be that you utterly don't care about protecting actual women?

The misogyny bill was always a way to shoehorn in gender ID. All of these laws are completely useless. Enforce the laws we have - we have all of the legal armoury to deal with misogyny and VAWG - we don't need more busywork for tax-payer subsidised legislators. They need to get the police and courts to comply.

I mean we have ACTUAL LAWS against rape and they're applied less than 1% of the time.

It seems as soon as anyone has a grievance they immediately want to MAKE A LAW. It's the new setting up a charity. This one is a good example. Someone wanting to make a law about something for which he's already had legal redress and the perpetrator sentenced. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74zyw00zkeo

Yes, I think so. And now that they can't conflate men and women...they are not interested.

Punishment of those pesky women who dared to challenge the government rhetoric on what a woman is?

I'm shocked. /s

I don’t think this new approach is necessarily a bad thing - now the that SC has confirmed that sex is a protected characteristic, it’s far easier to just add sex as a limb of the hate crime legislation, the same way it includes sexual orientation and gender reassignment.

Before the SC ruling, when the definition of ‘women’ was interpreted as including men, defining misogyny was much harder to do.

But now that it’s crystal clear what a woman is, it’s also far simpler to define misogyny, as we have a workable definition of sex.

Bingo!

Which is why many women were against the misogyny bill

Not surprised in the slightest given the nonsense that when on in the Equalities Committee on Tuesday.

Keeping Maggie Chapman as deputy chair and thenholding the session in private to discuss the SC ruling.

I am so incensed, I created an online petition on having No Confidence in the Scottish Parliament’s Equalities,Human Rights and Civil Justice.

https://www.change.org/scottishparliament

Exactly. I can't see what the hell an anti-misogyny law has to do with the SC decision.

If they were part-way through drafting it, and were going to include transwomen and now they can't, well surely it's quite simple - edit those parts. What am I missing?

I don't think you're missing anything! If anything, it's easier to draft now, as pps have said.

I don't think it was ever a viable law to be able to legislate for without massive unintended consequences which would have been against the interests of women anyway

FWS have endorsed the approach of including the protected characteristic of sex in hate crime legislation instead - there’s an article in the Times but I don’t have a free link right now (hopefully someone can share it).

IMO, this change in approach is a great example of how simple it is to protect a class of people when you can define that class, and of exactly why it’s so complicated to protect that class without falling foul of all sorts of unintended consequences when the class isn’t defined as such in law.

It’s obviously a direct result of the SC ruling, as we didn’t have the same legal certainty around the definition of ‘woman’ or ‘sex’ before that, and now it’s much easier to protect women in law, and for the police to be able to work out who is a woman and who isn’t(!).

Yup. It was yet another trojan horse. The only 'women' of interest were the male ones.

Scottish government dropping this the minute they are told men can't become women does appear to be a very bad optic.

However, I agree that it's better this way because women as a sex class are now defined as those born female, which is right and proper and as it always was.

Exactly what i was thinking.