Will teenagers soon be able to travel to Scotland and change their gender in just six months – without their parents knowing or medics being involved? Holyrood is preparing to vote on a highly controversial Bill
As far back as the summer of 2021, the invitations started appearing on Twitter. ‘Trans pals in England and Wales, I’m more than happy to host you,’ said one activist in Scotland. ‘Come up and party. Celebrate your recognition. Gretna is going to be jumping once more.’
Gretna, the first town over the border, and nearby Gretna Green are, of course, synonymous with runaways, their fame dating back to 1754 when the law in England changed to make weddings more heavily regulated.
In Scotland, things remained straightforward, and a 16-year-old could gallop in on horseback, have a quickie wedding and depart, legally married, with the paperwork to prove it.
Those days are long gone, but we may be about to enter another era where folk on the English side of the border might once again look towards a more liberal Scotland and see a legal loophole.
Sinead Watson, 31, from Glasgow, transitioned from a woman into a man on 2015, but says she suffered bitter regrets and has now detransitioned
We are not talking marriage certificates here, but birth certificates — specifically ones that have been amended to reflect an individual’s chosen gender. Under proposed new legislation to be voted on today, 16-year-olds who are resident in Scotland (even temporarily, it would appear) will be able to legally change their gender without parental consent.
They won’t be able to do it, shotgun-style, in a day, but within six months of declaring their intention a boy could legally be re-registered as a girl, and vice versa.
This is happening at the very time NHS England has tightened regulations governing treatment for gender-questioning individuals and has decided to close a pioneering clinic, the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), after a series of scandals.
It follows the independent Cass report, which was triggered by the concerns of whistle- blowers, including doctors, that patients referred to the Tavistock had been put on a gender-transitioning pathway too quickly. The Twitter user issuing the tongue-in-cheek mass invitation to Scotland specifies in her Twitter bio that her tweets are aimed at over-18s only, but the proposed law won’t be.
‘In reality, someone of 16-and-a-half could be in possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate,’ points out Stephanie Davies-Arai, who founded Transgender Trend, an organisation for parents concerned about the medical transitioning of young people.
A troubled young person, Sinead was suffering from depression and had a history of sexual abuse when she fixated on the idea that all her problems stemmed from being in the ‘wrong’ body
And if your English or Welsh child goes to university in Scotland, they could return home with a new legal gender ‘by the Easter holidays’, she adds.
The new legislation certainly has its critics. Indeed, there has been such a backlash against the ease with which teenagers will be able to change gender under the proposed new laws that Nicola Sturgeon, who has championed the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, has faced her biggest rebellion since the SNP came to power.
In October, nine MSPs defied the party whip to either abstain or vote against the Bill. Among them was Ash Regan, the former minister for community safety, who resigned, saying her ‘conscience’ could not allow her to vote for the Bill.
Though Scottish Conservatives last week called on the Government to postpone the vote on the legislation, they were ignored and MSPs yesterday sat through a marathon parliamentary session, during which they ploughed through more than 150 tabled amendments to the controversial Bill and it is expected to be passed today.
One successful amendment put forward by veteran SNP backbencher Christine Grahame last month now requires 16 and 17-year-olds to take six months to live in their preferred sex transitioning, rather than three. ‘It’s too young,’ she said.
Nicola Sturgeon, who has championed the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, has faced her biggest rebellion since the SNP came to power
But Sturgeon isn’t expected to budge on self-identification — the most controversial part of the Bill, which allows people to change sex without the need of a doctor’s diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Meanwhile, the For Women Scotland group has attempted to challenge legislation that allows trans people living as women to be considered female when it came to assessing the gender balance on public sector boards.
But its complaint was thrown out last week when Lady Haldane, a judge at the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, said the definition of sex was ‘not limited to biological or birth sex’.
Parents, family campaigners and medics have all expressed apprehension over Sturgeon’s legislation. One woman who is deeply concerned has very personal reasons for being so.
Sinead Watson transitioned to Sean at the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow, which advises young people on gender identity. She then detransitioned when she realised she had made a terrible mistake.
Her story is beyond distressing — it is a terrifying warning of what can go wrong.
A troubled young person, Sinead was suffering from depression and had a history of sexual abuse when she fixated on the idea that all her problems stemmed from being in the ‘wrong’ body.
Protesters are seen during a candle lit vigil tonight outside the Scottish Parliament, over what they believe is a loss of women’s rights in Scotland
In 2014, aged 23, she referred herself to Sandyford, and now claims staff there did not heed any of the alarm bells and urge caution.
‘I had cosy chats with my doctors where I was asked how university was going, but I was not given any therapy or counselling,’ she says.
‘At the time I was delighted to get treatment quickly.’
Sinead travelled to England for ‘top surgery’ — a double mastectomy. She has since revealed that the pictures of her chest, which she now regards as mutilated, were used in a brochure shown to other young women considering surgery. The hormone treatment she underwent was devastating. There was a brief period of elation, but it was followed by depression, and the realisation that transition had not solved anything.
She quit her degree course just two months before her final exams, and even tried to take her own life. Her only way forward, she concluded, was to detransition.
She began the process in 2019, joining the ranks of ‘hundreds of detransition women across the world’.
‘It was my only option,’ she says.
Sinead believes she was the victim of a ‘social contagion’ — a specialised form of peer group pressure — and she regards aspects of the proposed new legislation as ‘dangerous’. She is now considering legal action against Sandyford, and has joined the calls for the clinic to be shut down.
As our sister paper the Scottish Daily Mail reported, revelations have emerged that children as young as nine there have been treated with puberty blockers — powerful drugs which delay the onset of puberty.
The use of these drugs on children is questionable at best, according to Dr David Bell, the whistleblower whose concerns led to the damning Cass report on the Tavistock clinic.
‘There is a lack of evidence worldwide on the effects of prescribing puberty blockers for gender dysphoria,’ he said, ‘and there is significant concern that they may interfere with brain and bone development. A child’s development, in any case, is not like a video that can be paused and then played.’
Where are the Sandyford whistleblowers? They do exist, it seems. Information released last month under Freedom of Information legislation confirmed that the clinic does ‘hold information relating to concerns raised by staff under whistleblowing policies’.
It confirmed there had been 89 complaints about the clinic investigated over the past five years, of which 67 were either upheld or partially upheld.
Also concerning is the sheer explosion in demand for Sandyford’s services. Referrals increased from 37 in 2013 to 521 last year.
This is in line with the upsurge in demand for specialist transgender services across the UK — a phenomenon Stephanie Davies-Arai puts down to the ‘indoctrination of young people, particularly on social media’. She, too, is concerned that this ‘normalisation’ of gender transition is being pushed in Scotland by Nicola Sturgeon.
Trans people in the UK have been able to acquire Gender Recognition Certificates — which legally change their birth gender — since 2004, but the process requires two years living as their chosen gender, an assessment by a medical panel and a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
The Scottish Bill, which passed its crucial first stage at Holyrood, is a mere administrative issue, say trans campaigners, designed to simplify a process that many feel is too convoluted and demeaning.
But many in Scotland vehemently disagree. Mary Howden, a retired social worker and member of the Women’s Rights Network, warns that the Bill’s implications both north and south of the border are ‘huge’.
‘In England the brakes seem to have gone on. People are rightly asking about safeguarding issues,’ she says. ‘Up here we are going full steam ahead, on a path that seems to just ignore all the concerns.’
Under the Bill’s proposals, the only requirement to legally change sex is to live in the chosen gender for three months (six months for 16 and 17 year olds), with a further three-month ‘reflection’ period, and to have been born or be ‘habitually resident’ in Scotland.
What does this mean? No one knows, but campaigners are concerned that anyone who rents a property in Scotland, even on a temporary basis, would be eligible.
The cross-border implications are unfathomable — critics say Scottish-born prisoners in English jails could demand to be housed with members of their new sex.
Of course, these proposed changes have not been sprung on anyone. The streamlining of the gender recognition system is a part of the SNP election pledge, designed to bring Scotland into line with countries like Ireland, Norway, Malta, Belgium and Denmark. The first public consultations happened in 2017.
But it was Dr Hilary Cass’s interim report for NHS England, published in July, that led to the closure of the flagship Tavistock clinic and changed the landscape of the gender identity debate.
The established ‘gender-affirming’ model had led to teenagers being rushed down a path towards life-altering puberty blockers and surgery. The clinic was deemed ‘unsafe’ for children and its closure was immediately announced.
The new treatment model will be more cautious, and will see children — at least in England and Wales — treated more holistically. Problems with self-harm and eating disorders — common in those presenting with gender distress — will be considered, too.
This is not the approach in Scotland, which angers campaigners.
Dr Antony Latham, a retired GP and chair of the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, says alarm bells sounded in the interim Cass Review have ‘not been heard’ by the authorities in Scotland.
‘There should be a proper review of the four gender clinics in Scotland. At the Sandyford (the only one to treat children), the model is identical to Tavistock — the very establishment in the process of closing down because it was deemed to be dangerous.
‘But there is a sort of head-in-the-sand approach from NHS Scotland, who are aware of the Cass Review . . . They are just not responding, and the Government is pressing ahead with a policy I believe is based on ideology, not science. This is dangerous.’
Given this backdrop, he has grave concerns about the Gender Recognition Reform Bill making it easy for young people to head down a certain path.
‘The evidence is that 85 per cent of young people who present with gender dysphoria will “desist” — become more comfortable with their biological sex — if a wait-and-see approach is adopted. If you go down the route of puberty blockers, 98 per cent will continue on to cross-sex hormones (testosterone or oestrogen), with many then going on to have surgery.
‘Once you are on that track it seems almost impossible to get off. It is really important to give them that time, rather than just affirm straight away and put that person on a potentially irreversible path.’
He is particularly exasperated with the push to ‘de-medicalise’ the gender ID process. ‘At the moment, there is proper process in Scotland, with a panel of doctors and psychiatrists, but if this goes through there will be no medical diagnosis required. I would never refer anyone to one of those clinics.’
Such is the grip in which the trans lobby has Scottish healthcare, new NHS guidelines under discussion could rename certain gender-specific treatments — for example, a transgender man may feel uncomfortable attending a ‘woman’s health care clinic’. Thus the word ‘woman’ would be expunged.
Back on Twitter, the trans group What The Trans? was live-streaming its jubilation as the Bill passed its first stage, with one (English) presenter draping herself in the Saltire, celebrating with Irn Bru and declaring herself Scottish, while ‘preparing for her escape from England’.
The headstrong liberalism of the SNP should be an issue for Holyrood only, but as many a married couple returning south from Gretna Green will attest, borders are no match for a rash decision.
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