Scotland’s Hate Crime Bill would have a chilling effect on free speech

Among the encroachments on Milton’s three supreme liberties contained in Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Bill is a cloturing of the debate on gender identity and the law. Proposals to remove medical expertise from the gender recognition process have either stalled or been shelved, but not before their radical scope prompted a lively dispute about the ethics of gender identity, sex-based rights and the freedom to dissent. That freedom will be meaningfully reduced in Scotland if the Hate Crime Bill becomes law because it is a piece of legislation that begins from the position that all legitimate debate has already concluded.

The Bill creates an offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ against a list of protected characteristics, including ‘transgender identity’. That term was defined in Scots law a decade ago in the Offences (Aggravation by Prejudice) (Scotland) Act 2009 as referring to:

‘transvestism, transsexualism, intersexuality or having, by virtue of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, changed gender, or any other gender identity that is not standard male or female gender identity’.