Sex is now a protected characteristic in Scotland's Hate Crime Act

[ArabellaScott]

https://www.thetimes.com/article/4a4082ec-9444-4268-886f-f758bddfce98?shareToken=4d2124f5316814e7ce37d385e7d33956

The Act is still a bad thing, but this is an interesting development.

'Women will receive the same protection from hate crime as transgender people after SNP ministers bowed to long-standing demands from Scottish feminists following their Supreme Court victory.

The Scottish government announced that “sex” would be added as a protected characteristic under the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, a measure which some campaigners had been calling for over several years and which the SNP had previously rejected.

Jamie Hepburn, the minister for parliamentary business, confirmed the move at Holyrood as he announced the scrapping of a specific law aimed at criminalising misogyny, which the SNP has been working on for four years.'

Came to post about the dropping of the misogyny bill, reported at length here:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkx31my24ro
Too cynical to say, they decided that if they couldn't protect men who identify as women with the same law as actual women, why bother?

Which is exactly why it’s so much easier to give effect to women’s rights when you can define the word “woman”, and so much more complicated when there is no word to describe us as a class.

We’ve all been arguing why it’s so important that the word ‘woman’ refers to only actual women for years, and the fact that drafting a law to protect us is now as simple as a one-word amendment to an existing act, rather than having to tie oneself in knots drafting a whole new statute to define the concept of female biology without offending anyone by using the word ‘woman’, is testament to the fact that expanding the definition of ‘woman’ to include transwomen was eroding our rights, just as we warned.

Oh! OK! Now that the word 'woman' actually means woman, the rest is simple.

If only this idea was available several years ago.