The SNP’s ill-fated gender reforms shaped Nicola Sturgeon’s last days as First Minister, but if Humza Yousaf has learned from the experience, he is not showing it. The SNP’s crown prince – or perhaps clown prince – is tying himself in knots over the sex of a double rapist who has just been sentenced to eight years.
‘Is Isla Bryson a man or a woman?’ Sky News asked him. You would think any serious contender for the top job in the Scottish government would have prepared a convincing response to such a predictable question. Not Yousaf; the best he could come up with was that Isla Bryson was ‘at it’. At what, you might wonder. But, as Yousaf tried – and failed – to explain, it was clear that Yousaf doesn’t know.
With astonishing chutzpah, Yousaf asserted that he didn’t think, ‘they’re a true transwoman’. At the same time, he lamented that the law – for ‘many, many years’, he insisted – allowed Bryson to self-identify as a woman ‘if they wish’.
This – remember – is the leadership contender who, if elected, has committed himself to challenging the Section 35 order that blocked Sturgeon’s self-ID bill, legislation he had promoted enthusiastically as a Scottish Government minister.
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