The legal battle over how Scots define ‘woman’

The law on gender is a mess and could either be about to get much clearer or messier still. The Scottish government is being taken to court by feminist campaigners over its plans to increase women’s representation on public boards. That’s not the sort of thing feminist campaigners typically take governments to court over so you might have already guessed what’s coming next. For Women Scotland (FWS) believes the SNP is using the Gender Representation on Public Boards Act 2018 (GRPBA) to change the law on gender recognition by stealth. That’s already too many acronyms, which is always a sure sign that a given law is a bad idea.

The GRPBA is, on its face, standard feminist fare: a law to correct what is seen as an insufficient number of women on public boards in Scotland. The problem comes, as it seems to do with extraordinary regularity these days, with how the Scottish government is choosing to define ‘women’.