TRASHFUTURE - We Have You Surrounded! State Your Pronouns! feat. Beth Douglas

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Activist and campaigner Beth Douglas joins the gang to discuss Scotland’s decision to make transing your gender a more dignified, simple experience, and concomitant decision by the U.K. government to retaliate by launching Trident on its own position. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello everyone and welcome once again to this free one before turning the free one on himself. Yeah, that's right. You're doing you're doing the martial mothers now tell them something they don't know about me strategy but for the free one. You can get out ahead of it, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to confuse my let's how you do a running good business is you identify with his partner and can get my little confusion. Yeah, it's cross-cross casting. Yeah, that's right.

And we are here today in our in a very large capacity. We have myself. We have Milo. We have Hussein. We have Alice and we are very pleased to be joined by Beth Douglas, a queer activist from Glasgow who has campaigned for gender recognition reforms in Scotland for the last seven years to discuss exactly what the fuck has gone on between Scotland, England and the gender recognition laws. Beth, welcome to the show. Thank you so much.

You know, well done to trans people for finally doing what most of the world couldn't do in breaking up the UK. So yeah, let's get this show on the road, baby. That's right. What a what a week it's been. Hey, you know what? It's been a whole week of extremely, I would say, sensible reactions to quite quite minor transformations. Honestly, like just I'm still, I don't know, I just keep on rethinking back and I'm just like, I can't believe this is like going on right now. And this is like just the plan that they have taken because it's another another victory for normalcy.

Once again, British politics. It's consecutive week of being normal. Yes. World's most regular country yet again, topping, topping the charts in the regular off. I was going to say that like topping never not Britain. No, no, no. Now, now. So we are going to be talking in some detail about exactly what the new Scott proposed Scottish reforms for gender recognition are, why they're important.

And exactly why the Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have been triggered and owned by them. Yes. Yeah. Well, and they and their UK's two gay dads Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are in full parental alignment. And they're both very disappointed with us. I know. No, what is happened is in fact, there has been a broad consensus from the top of UK politics, shockingly that the lives of transgender people should be made more difficult to appeal to, I don't know, two hundred syphilitic columnists.

However, before we get into that, we have some news. Number one, I need every thank you, Beth, for doing the news stinger. Yeah, I need everyone. I think that was the Intel inside theme music. Well, this is Intel and it's going inside your ears. This is important. You sponsor everyone. Yeah, that's right.

Thank you to Intel. Thank you to Taiwan Semiconductor. Yeah. No, look, so I need everyone listening right now to join hands. If you're listening near someone else who's listening, join hands with them. Otherwise, ask someone nearby to join hands with them as well. Go out the street and like clasp the hands of the nearest person. Unprovoked.

Because we need to do a prayer thunderclap for we need to get God's attention. You need to clasp hands and also make it clap simultaneously. That's right. We need to all pray for the, you know, bow your heads, put your hands together, make it clap hands freestyle. Get some Mongolian throat singing going. We are all need to pray for Trash Futures' favorite Republican Florida congressman, Greg Stubbe, who has apparently fallen off of his roof.

The woke globalists have failed in their attempt to assassinate our special boy. And, you know, we can neither like forgive nor forget this act of aggression by woke roofs. He was so shocked by the lack of engagement on his latest Facebook post that he fell off his roof in shock. I mean, this whole leaf to me opens the question. What do you think Greg Stubbe was doing on his roof? Do you think he'd like set up a lawn chair up there? Raising hand very strongly, trying to clear gutters with a fork, like an ordinary table fork. He's getting the iron brew out of there.

Tony has coded behavior from the start. In my opinion, he was trying to set up a roof terrace by just taking some lawn chairs up there and nailing them to the shingles. And actually did work, but he forgot to nail down his table. And he tried to grab his beer as it slid off, overbalanced and tumbled to the floor. Look, I have no evidence for this, but I'm assuming what happened is Klaus Schwab in the World Economic Forum, removed the nails from the table, knowing it would cause him to overbalance himself while reaching for his beer. Honestly, falling off your roof is like a great American tradition that no one talks about. I'm not even joking.

My sister lives in America and almost all of her adult male friends have fallen off of a roof at some point. Whereas a British man would call a guy to fix the roof. He'd be like, I can't get up there. I don't know what I'm doing. American men are like, I will fix the roof. I'm going to get up there. It's interesting that when you rewrite Joseph Campbell's hero's journey for an American audience, you do actually have to include, before crossing the threshold, the fixing of the roof.

Well, what is a roof except a kind of throne to oversee your kingdom of suburbia? That's right. He has lost the Mandate of Heaven by falling from his roof throne. No, no. We've got a lot of stuff to get through today, so I don't want to spend too long on Greg Stubbe. One of my besties loses the Mandate of Heaven. Yeah, it's awful, but... One of my least favorite things to tell any of my friends is I got to keep it real with you,

but you have lost the Mandate of Heaven. We're shedding a shingle tear for Greg Stubbe. I just want to call out the podcast right now to all two listeners, because I'm seeing visual video and I don't know if I just... Everyone said they were praying, but I don't know if I saw enough praying, but I don't want to suggest anybody was lying, but I just want viewers to know. My hands were together. That's important to know.

So, another couple of things before we get to our course subject. We would be remiss if we did not talk about the fact that Twitter's first bond interest payment, which is, of course, at enormously inflated rates at a time when no one seems to work there or spend money there either, is coming due. And Elon Musk, world's greatest champion of free speech, has nothing but horrible options that either involve bankrupting Saudi Prince Al-Awid bin Talal, or himself. That sounds healthy.

The good news is that already doing the auctioning or the furniture off out of the office, and people who follow me on Twitter may be aware that I was very keenly following the progress of a three foot tall Twitter bird logo statue that they were selling out of the office. That has already gone up to like $25,000 and rising. That's sold. It's sold for $100,000, which... God damn! Based on the fact that that's a lot for a bird statue,

if we extrapolate that to basically everything else they're selling, they should be fine paying this gigantic interest coupon on their bond. Another name I didn't expect to see brought up beside this company was brought up, which is Wirecard, which is of course... That's always a sign of quality when Wirecard come up. When you're brought up next to Wirecard. Yeah, so they have the risk of just missing its interest payment. It would join a very ignominious club, which includes Wirecard now.

We need to bring in some consultants from a company which has expertise in not being able to pay a very large bill. Apparently the solution is you write down the number that you want. Elon Musk is like, I need someone who can shave me a poodle. Apparently it was a Pomeranian. We just made up the poodle. Close enough. Yeah, what is a poodle if not a spiritually a Pomeranian?

So it's now the... I say some sentences on this podcast. A technology equity analyst is from the FT. Technology analyst Dan Ives at WebBush Securities estimates that Twitter is no longer worth the $44 billion Elon Musk has paid for it. No. Anyone want to, in fact, starting with our lovely guest here, anyone want to guess what it's now worth?

Half, hopefully. Oh no. You're so optimistic. Oh my gosh. It deserves it so much. Tell me we're in single digits. Please tell me we're in single digits. We're not far off.

Yes. We're at... $11 billion? We're at $15 billion. Nice. That is not considering the amount of money involved, the amount of other people's money involved, the amount of Saudi Royal's money involved. That is not a very big number.

The number of bones in Elon Musk's body. It's not a good value for Twitter to be if you're Elon Musk and you're looking to not climb into a suitcase. You're not looking to be found on some railings. The other co-investors, including Prince Alawid bin Talal, are Sequoia Capital, who you may remember as being totally dazzled by Sam Bankman-Free, like barely paying attention while gaming and talking to them. The Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, among others of Musk's friends,

and other banks who are just invested in this project, just say, yeah, I assume he'll do well. He's always done well before. So his bad options include basically selling more of his stock to buy the debt so that it doesn't go out of business, which would trigger the stock going lower in price and cause him to lose even more money, having already lost a record-breaking amount of money. Or try to get someone else to buy the debt, but no one's going to buy it

because it's not performing, basically, or has risk of not performing. So the same analyst who estimated Twitter's value at $15 billion says that all of the holders of Twitter stock at this point are ultimately betting on Musk to do what he did with SpaceX and Tesla. That is to say, turn around the business and make it profitable. Massively overvalue them. We need to turn the infinite money sheet back on immediately. That's the only way not to have Morgan Stanley present Twitter.

Yeah, I think the thing is right. Elon Musk was hoping that he was going to be playing the Sims, i.e. you've got the blue gnome in front of your house that gives you the infinite money, whereas Elon Musk is actually playing the Sims and his cereal is on fire for some reason. Like if Sims had a nightmare mode. Like an extremely hard mode. So what's happening is, yeah, with SpaceX, all he did was just take what the government used to do with Space Launches

and then bought the company that just does that privately now. And with Tesla, mostly what he did was fleece rubes. Yeah, buy a car company and make it more annoying. So I don't know if you're going to make Twitter more annoying. Good luck. I mean, he's trying. He's trying all the time. Doing his best. But the good news is that all of the sort of conservative voices that he did this for,

like most noticeably, cat-turd too, once again, back to bitching and whining that no one is engaging with their content, unable to fathom the idea that people might not be interacting with their content because their content sucks and convinced that the cathedral has gotten to Elon and now he's turned all the algorithms back on. How can that be? We only launched cat-turd 2 due to the popularity of cat-turd 1. I actually see this sort of asset stripping like quite literally and selling off of Twitter as just a guy digging around in a bin

trying to find the cathedral and just throwing stuff out of it. Anyway, congratulations to Elon continuing to break the only record I would like him to break, which is amount of money lost. We wish him a very continued life. And we hope that he is every day found to be alive. That's right. There's one article on the... Not like in a location or a configuration that could be described as stuffed into

or concealed within or dissolved in a substrate of any of these things. Or distributed amongst. Definitely spread across. Built into perhaps. He could be part of the Twitter statue. He's considering a new career option as part of the vital structure of the new freeway just outside Los Angeles. If Elon Musk wants Twitter so bad and loves it apparently so much,

just put him in the concrete of the statue. We don't think that should happen. We are just concerned that some of his investors may do that to him. Yeah, a sort of wicker bird situation. There's one other thing I wanted to read about the Twitter thing before. So moving on to a little bit of us being right in our core subject. So this is from an article published on The Verge about the employee experience at Twitter. A site with a very distinctive logo.

Twitter might have had a reputation for a left-leaning workforce, but there's always been a faction that disapproved of its progressive ideals on Slack. Some of these workers had formed a channel called iDescent, where they asked questions like why dead naming a trans colleague was considered to be bad. When Musk announced he was buying the company, one of the more active iDescenters was thrilled, saying, Elon's my new boss and I'm stoked. He wrote on LinkedIn, so I decided to send him a Slack message.

I figured you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. That employee was cut in the first round of layoffs and all prominent members of the iDescent Slack channel were then fired. So even the brown noses are just... Yeah. You could just really be like, totally so far up his ass, you're inside him and he's still like... He's kind of like Trump in that way.

All the people who love him the most, he does sort of despise. Yeah, it's like if... The problem is, right, is that he can't extend that to basically everyone, except like a small core group of real estate friends. It's why he was never able to get the sauce. Stan Charo, you know? That's the only guy to whom Trump was loyal. And he was loyal to be fair.

He was very loyal to Stan Charo. Stan Charo, like his name was on his lips when he thought he was going to die, you know? I hope I one day have that good of a real estate friend. So, two more things. It was a beautiful condo, Stan. You just know you've been too poisoned by the internet and then in, you know, 80 years time or whatever, and God forbid you're dying, you're going to think,

am I going out like Stan Charo? The thought will come to you whether you want it or not. Oh, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to curse you with this knowledge, but it is true. You will think, oh man, I'm going out like Stan Charo. I hate to have such clear foreknowledge of my own death in that way. Would you like me to tell you the exact date and time? I'm good for now.

I have two little other bits if we were right. One of them has to do with Elon Musk, which is apparently full self-driving the video that launched the whole thing. Fake. It was fake. Awesome. What? That picture from Moscow? That's fucking Moscow city in the background. I'm so surprised with the guy who prototyped his automated robot

by having a guy in a morph suit come out. Would fake a video about auto, like, yeah, fake a video about AI driving or whatever the fuck it's called now. I'm really shocked by this. Was the video actually just like a guy pretending to be a car? What if your car was just a guy? That Pierce Brosnan lying on the back seat with an Nokia 6610. At the time of the video was released, this was the first sort of full self-driving

or allegedly full self-driving video in 2016. It said, Tesla drives itself with no human input at all through urban streets, to highways back to streets and then finds a parking spot. However, the employee involved in creating it clarified that the video was a mock-up which was supposed to portray what it was possible to build into the system. The only word of a lie there is the word possible. It is not possible to do all of that. So showing, going into the boardroom and showing them an episode of

Gundam Wing and just being like, yeah, I can build this. Give me lots of money so I can build this. My favorite detail is that the car that they used in it then crashed in Tesla's parking lot in like a sort of a team of belcher situation. For the life of me, I can't figure out how you do that. It's like when a robot finds out what they are, they just like immediately kill themselves. Find out your creator is Elon Musk. Yeah.

One of the like failed attempts at Robocop too, you know. And another quick thing about us being right. Netflix, apparently, wouldn't you know it in an environment that's not conducive to its flourishing, you know, the economy being real. They're having a lot of trouble posting revenue growth. And in fact, have reported their slowest quarter revenue growth on Thursday because wouldn't you know it, their ad supported plan has failed to attract customers because all of their high growth markets are completely fucking saturated.

Cancel more series renewals. That's the only answer. You get a season one of everything, nothing else. More seasons of the crown is coming. So anyway, who could have guessed that that would happen except once again us like a long time ago. So it's time for Spencer Confidential 2. It's time for Bright 2. It's time to bring out the hits, baby.

Bright 2, my new script could be My Star Wars if filmed well. It should actually be Spencer Confidential 2 and Bright 2 as a combined movie where the universe is mixed. But like Mark Wahlberg and Will Smith, like they work together and it's like there's like a portal. A portal is open and we have to go in fantasy Boston. I was never supposed to be in our cup. I was supposed to sell Hondas. I'm so excited. I'm so excited to get more into like my favorite.

At least I'm a real fucking robot unlike the Tesla one. My favorite part of the guy. My favorite part of the Boston doorstop or fantasy novels is like the map at the beginning of the first few pages. Like you really get to be absorbed in the politics of fictional Boston. So anyway, the back bay lands. This is all been some fun and games, but let's move on. Jarring shift of time. And yeah, I hope you enjoyed the comedy portion.

Now it's time for the comedy portion has now ended. Well, I mean, I mean, we're dealing with some really like, I don't know. Like the UK government's badly triggered and is melting down. So I think I give people's permission to laugh about this. It's deeply farcical. Definitely cry. Like it's bad, but it's like it's very comically bad in terms of the execution. Like you can in terms of the UK government response.

Insane. I'd say there's quite a bit of mustache twirling going on in Westminster on both sides of the aisle. But just to give us a little bit of level setting here, basically, for those of you listening internationally as well, the British government has, I've written here, decided to fire a trident nuclear missile at a computer programmer and cat ears who just wants to program in order to appeal to a generation of diseased columnist and terrified boomers. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

Yeah. Don't forget the knee. Of course. Those socks help the blood pressure and, you know, that helps. Say what you will. Jeremy Corbyn would have never done it and that's why I'm glad. That's why I'm glad that someone had the bravery to fire a trident missile at the cat boys. That's true.

That's true. He did famously say on question time that he would never. That's right. Would you nationalize cat boys? Yeah. So, Beth, why don't you start out with giving us a little bit of context about what Scotland has done, the Gender Recognition Reform Act, and then GR and just remind people what a GRC is, why you'd want to get one,

what it lets you do, what it doesn't let you do, and so on. Sure. Sure. So basically what a GRC is, is called a Gender Recognition Certificate. It simply allows trans people to do three very specific things. Pay taxes in the right gender, which is okay. And then getting married, which is a little bit more important, obviously, if it's the most special day of your life.

You don't want to be misgendered when you're getting married, which would suck, to be quite frankly. And then the last one's a little bit dark, actually. It's like, when you die, your death certificate in the UK, at least, is informed by your birth certificate. So if your birth certificate still says male, you'll be worried by, like, literally the UK government as a male. And those records will, you know, just be there.

For a lot of trans people, there are some trans people that are just like, I'm not really concerned about that. Raising hands here. I don't have one. I don't care. It doesn't make a huge difference to me. That's totally fair. But for a lot of others, like, it's just like,

they would like that document to sort of be accurate to how they live their lives. And I think that's a very low bar. Like that is not, it's not even a new right, really. So the reforms essentially to this just de-medicines the process. It's very annoying to get a GRC. That's the other thing. Yeah. You have to, it's really, it's up there with like some of the DWP stuff

in terms of seeing the state with its clothes off in that it fully is like, you will need to send in like an A4 binder of all of the evidence that you have ever changed your gender. That goes to a panel. Can you meet the panel? No. Can you know who's on the panel? No.

Do you have to pay the panel? Yes. And then they will think about it for a bit and decide whether you are transgender enough to get one of these certificates. And if so, you get it in the post and your taxes get a lot more complicated. You're in a room with the state and actually you've both got your clothes off. Yeah. You've used the term de-medicalize.

Yeah. Also what you need is a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Which I would say that doesn't really exist, controversial trans opinion. I think it's just body dysmorphia for trans people. Like you could literally call it the mad tranic disease. And it's like, it still does the same thing, right? It's sort of like, functionally, it's you need a doctor to sign off on this.

Yeah. Two doctors in fact. And they want you to tell that sort of story of like, oh, I grew up and I hated every minute and, oh, it was an agonizing experience learning that I was trapped in the wrong side of the body. And it's just really regressive stereotypes. Not just for like trans people, but for gender in general. Like, so Britain's always been like really weird about gender.

But we fucking erased like tons of, you know, different genders all around the globe in different cultures and different ways of life. And now we're sort of seeing genders starting to destroy the UK. So it's like kind of like sickly and very. This is one of these colonial methods returning to the metropole. We have gender now. We did. We did export like a binary system of gender at gunpoint in a lot of places.

And, you know, I think any trans person who's like, tries to like medically transition in the UK will be intimately familiar with having to perform a sort of 1950s gender role where it's like, is my dress short enough to like make a clinician go, yeah, it seems like a woman to me. But also you can't be an AGP, right? You've got to be a HTST. You can't be getting off on this.

No, no, no, no, no, no. If you're getting off in that way, in Sandyford, and they'll be waiting room. And I finally understand why I've been baking us all cookies and saying, there you go, pop it. Yes. So that's right. So it's.

It's also my understanding that, and this is basically looking at like the Lady Haldane outer house judgment is that in addition to all of that, the other thing a GRC does is for the purposes of the Equality Act, make you functionally a woman for all of the way places where it applies and for all of the places where it applies common sensically. Let me let me let me dive into this. So there's protected characteristics in the Equality Act of which there are two

gender reassignment and sex or gender. Like it uses those two interchangeably, which is something that really annoys TERFs. So as a trans person, you have right not to be discriminated against based on gender reassignment. You cannot discriminate on someone based on the fact that they're transgender. However, there are certain circumstances where you can discriminate based on sex or gender, right?

You can create a space that is women only or men only in certain circumstances, which are enumerated in the Equality Act. And another thing that really annoys TERFs is all of the Scottish charities that provide services have never really asked for that exemption. They're like, no, we're actually fine. It doesn't come up that much. But plus also like, see, if you're a cis woman, right, running away from like, you know, a horrific abuser, the last thing you want to do is like, well,

get your genitals and get your eyes here. Yeah, exactly. That's what we're eventually kind of coming to is like, well, you don't have your ID. Do you have your birth certificate then? And it's just, it's really, it's farcical that we're actually even debating that. All a GSC does is like, it moves you from being in sort of like one protected characteristic of gender reassignment to two,

of gender reassignment and gender. Which doesn't really, you know, you were already protected. It doesn't really. Yeah. You can't, for instance, like ban trans people from a bathroom. Like if like your self-identified gender reassignment is enough to like legally immunize you from going into whatever bathroom you want, right? Like it's these very specific cases of like, this is legally a like a same sex space.

Yeah. Where there's very few of them too. The reason I bring that up is only because it's going to become relevant as we talk about the actual operation of this law. And we find the flimsiness upon which the Westminster government's objection to it rests. Now, I think we sort of... As something that like I learned very quickly in law school, the quality of like the way in which we draft legislation in this country

borders on the negligent. There are a lot of laws where the thing that we're trying to legislate for, the thing that we're trying to express is implemented incredibly clumsily, because it's just been left to like the three MPs who show up to a session that's running into like, five o'clock in the morning to like hammer this thing together. And it just sort of like, you end up with this, this sort of bodge together thing. And that's, you know, the equality act is in part like that. Which is really weird because like it's almost like an entirely different story with this bill,

because like MSPs have sort of designed it or tried to design it in a way that would have avoided all of this. So they've kind of realized because it's essentially, you know, we have a coalition, not a coalition government, but a government with two parties that have an agreement. Call that what you will. And therefore, you know, Nicola Sturgeon very much wants to keep that majority in the Scottish Parliament because she wants enough MSPs to call that saucy referendum, right? Whenever that may or may not be.

That hot, sexy referendum. Exactly. So she really needs to keep like the Greens on site, which is very much in favor of pushing the gender recognition reforms. So she can't necessarily like compromise on this, if that makes sense, because it would essentially collapse a government. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why the SNP, not the SNP, but Westminster have really tried to sort of use this and tackle this for political reasons, as well as just culture war and all that jazz.

The SNP historically had been, you know, it's wavered on this. I was one of my favorite stories about this is when I went to the Sandy Food, when I went to the gender identity clinic, I was like, do I need a gender recognition certificate? And the psychiatrist I was talking to went, I wouldn't bother, they'll change it next year anyway. That was seven years ago. That's what happened to me.

That's what happened to me, too. So many people. And the reason why this happened is because the SNP wavered and hesitated and did like these two and then well, two and a half long public consultations about all of the possible impacts of this. And then like kind of stalled and stalled and stalled until the Greens had to like sort of like drag them into it. And so the result is this piece of legislation,

the gender recognition reform bill, Scotland 2022, I think it is, which is like sort of intended to be bulletproof. It's like highly scrutinized both by choice and also by the SNP being as a result of all the delays and everything. This is the most scrutinized and consulted upon bill in the history of the Scottish Parliament. And all it does is it makes it easier to get a GRC if you want one. You have to like, you can just identify as whatever gender you want.

And then you put that in like a formal declaration like an affidavit. There are like legal consequences for lying about it. And you go through like a waiting period to make sure you're extra serious. This is already sounding pretty fucking onerous. You don't have to do this shit for like changing your name, for instance, right? You also don't have to do this shit in comparable jurisdictions. This is still more restrictive than in comparable jurisdictions. I'm given to understand.

Yeah, this is not. So this may be self ID, but it's not world leading in the slightest. It's not the best form of self ID. So if this became law, it would require you to be the acquired gender for three months. You don't really need to supply any evidence of that. You just need to sign the state that you have been doing that. And then you get your GRC, a kind of interim one, and then you have a three months reflection period. This is all very like stuff that's not needed, but it's kind of just being taken by the sort of like trans movement in Scotland to just be like,

right, if that's really going to like help you, then we'll take it. Also to note that another thing that this bill does is it lowers the age of which you can get a GRC. Between Scotland and the wider UK, Scotland is slightly different with what rights it gives people at what age. So for example, the right to vote for the rest of the UK is 18. But in Scottish elections in Scotland, it's 16. 16 year olds can vote here. I think for the whole of UK, you can get married at 16 and you can join the army. You can start combat training and die for that classic country.

This is actually relevant, by the way, from when we talk about the Westminster's decision to block it. It's actually 18 that you get married in England without parental consent. Sorry, without parental consent, you can get married at 18. In Scotland, however, you can get married without parental consent at 16. Keep those numbers in mind for later because this is going to come up. Hence, Gretna Green is often seen as a very romantic place because people used to literally come up to Scotland to get married as teenagers. Gretna Green would be a pretty good drag name, actually. We'll file that under drag names.

Now, I think the other thing to remember here, I'm just going to give a quick introduction. This is mostly for non-UK listeners who might not be familiar with how devolution works. When you hear about Scotland, you might think, for example, the relationship between the UK and Scotland is similar to, for example, the relationship between Washington DC and Idaho. Extremely incorrect buzzer. Allow me to reiterate my first year constitutional law course. There is one fount of law in the United Kingdom, and that's the Crown and Council in Parliament, which amounts to a doctrine that's developed of parliamentary sovereignty, which means that Westminster can do whatever the fuck it likes. It can create a Scottish Parliament.

It can respect the things the Scottish Parliament does. It can dissolve a Scottish Parliament. And Westminster can't bind itself going forward. It can't say, we have created a Scottish Parliament. Therefore, we can't abolish it. If they had the votes, if they wanted to, Westminster could abolish any of the devolved administrations tomorrow for no reason other than they feel like it. Because we don't have a written a codified constitution. We have this exchange, this fankle of customary stuff and unwritten traditions that you can choose not to respect when you don't want to.

And so that's the key thing to understanding all of this, is the Scottish Parliament exists as a legal creation of Westminster. It is entirely at its mercy in that sense. The thing to remember, right? It's just historically as well, right? Think about the US, right? US federalism was the result of an agreement between those territories. Whereas British federalism was kind of a fudge that came from the late 1990s and the Blair administration. Yeah, it's classic Blair shit.

It's like, what's the least thing I can do to get people to stop yelling at? Instead of, I will pay you $100 to fuck off forever. I will pay you control over things I don't care about to fuck off forever. And also a lot of money. And we may get into this a little bit later. And this is why Keith Starmer's response is just kind of really weird. It's not surprising in a way because he's like classic, I'm not moving from the middle of aisle, like at all. He's in the middle aisle.

He's finding toasters that are also an alarm clock. Yeah, but you know, Labour's supposed to be the party of devolution. It's set up as you said. It's also the party of the Equality Act. They wrote the Equality Act. It's also the party of the GRA as well, the original gender recognition reform. And they say they're quite proud of that, that they did that. But they were actually only, they didn't do that willingly.

Oh, they were actually mandated. Doing something vaguely progressive, come on. Yeah, they were sued by the European Court of Human Rights. Yeah, yeah, yeah, basically. And that's because originally our laws around if a trans person wanted to be legally recognised, they would have to sterilise themselves. That's the only way that we used to do it. Seems very normal.

A lot of countries like did this until pretty recently. I think it persisted in some of the northern countries for a while too. The northern ones. Goodwin in the United Kingdom where the European Court of Human Rights made them go back and change this. It was a breach of Article 8 and Article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights. And so they, you know, did this thing that was just good enough. So let's, I mean, let's sort of then go through a little bit of the,

now that we sort of have all that level set, we know what's happened, we know the relationships between the players. Let's talk a little bit about what Westminster has done. They are issuing what's called a Section 35 order, which is, as Alice alluded to earlier, where they can just look at Scotland and take the toys away, basically. They can say, okay, laughing time is over. It's time for Westminster to take control back.

And stop you from, you know, doing these things that you like, because we are either a combination of inveterate culture warriors, or we have seen an opening to break up the Scottish government, either one. And it's interesting because in some ways this is a complement to like the drafting of the recognition reform bill, in that there could have been other ways to do this had it been written more poorly. A lot of the like debate that happened in the Scottish Parliament was, so the Scottish Parliament has fairly strictly delineated responsibilities.

If it goes out with them, that law is not valid. It's ultra-weirace, right? And it's not just part of the law, it's all of it. So even if you just get something minorly wrong in one of the sections, it's not like, well, we'll pull that and replace it later, it all goes. There were lots of, no, it's fine. There were lots of like sort of wrecking amendments where they were trying to like weld bits onto it

that would have made it out with the competence of the Scottish Parliament. Most coming from the Tories, but a surprising amount from Labour as well, which makes it weird because when Keith is like, well, not all of the Labour amendments got voted through, so therefore I'm not really in favour of it. And I'm like, well, Keith, if you actually like put all those amendments through, it would have been easier to just fire this bill down. It would have been came as it was known as a section 32 order,

where it just goes to the Supreme Court instead almost instantly. But with a section 35, it's just kind of stuck in limbo. It's just, it's never happened before. For the entire time that, you know, the unions existed, you know, a section 35 has never been offered, which isn't, even though I'm saying like for the whole time, the entire union, devolution is still quite young in the UK. The Scottish Parliament hasn't really existed for that long.

It is still relatively quite, it's a new building still. It would be section 35 of the Scotland Act, which is only in 1998. Has anyone noticed in this call or maybe listening that in this country, we tend to say the phrase has never happened before quite a lot recently? Yeah. So we're breaking new boundaries in the UK. There are lots of, yeah, I mean, there are lots of unprecedented things and I would just really like to grow.

That's my feedback. I just want to grow. The statement of reasons has to, a statement of reasons issued by the government has to accompany a section 35 order where they say... Yeah, it obliges an absolutely sort of unnotable man, Alistair Jack, the Scottish Secretary, to issue like, to explain himself in formal terms, which he has done. Yeah. And this fucking document, man, I...

So, again, a little praisey to this as well. Bear this in mind as we're going through the statement of reasons. The statement of reasons, it's supposed to be talking about the things that will happen, right? It's supposed to be talking, restricting itself to not things that might happen, not things that are positive, possible, but it is things that will occur in law if this thing passes. Yeah. And also sort of like part of the reason for doing this is,

in the spirit of the Scotland Act, the idea that you would do this is to make the Scottish Parliament go back and fix the bits of it that Westminster doesn't find acceptable with a view to getting something passed. And I think Westminster has sort of like tentatively offered that compromise knowing that Nicola Sturgeon was never going to accept it. And so, Holyrood in general has like remained absolutely firm that like you passed this or nothing. And so, the reason for this document existing is now sort of a legal nullity practically,

but you've got to do it and so this is what we have. And so, the statement of reasons begins by saying, look, there is an overall effect of the bill and the effect of the bill is going back to the Equality Act. It is essentially saying, by making it quicker and easier for Scottish applicants to obtain a full GRC, removing a number of measures which the UK government regards as important safeguards, such as, as we said, removing third-party influence in the process,

living for two years instead of three months as your gender, reducing the age from 18 to 16, that the Equality Act will now apply differently throughout the UK. But more importantly, I think like it's already here in the first paragraph of the statement of reasons, you can sort of see that what they're implying is it's important that it should be difficult to get a GRC even though it doesn't say so in the Equality Act, everyone just seems to kind of agree about that.

Yeah, or in the Gender Recognition Act. And we can get into sort of like some of the expressed intentions of Parliament making that, but no, it's not supposed to be difficult to get a GRC, it just has been made so. And a lot of the reasoning that you'll hear for this is just quite simply that this bill is different from what we do already, which is the purpose of reform. It's also the purpose of devolution as well,

like to have different laws and different parts of the country. I love the idea of just being like, well, some people, they get in this gender too easily. I had to grind for this gender, you know? There's got to be like a travelator involved or something. Well, like the devolution angle is interesting to me too, because on the face of it, this is one of the only practical objections to the bill is that doing equalities legislation like a devolved basis

will lead to this weird patchwork where you get some inconsistencies there and it's more efficient to do it nationally. Problem is, we really fucking do that. There's a ton of shit that we've already devolved where it's just been more practical, most notably in Northern Ireland, where all the time Westminster is like, we're not touching that. It's just that in doing that in this case, that would sort of lend more credence to the idea that Scotland should be able

to sort of govern things that would more sensibly be governed as a separate country by itself, which might make it more likely to become a separate country. So we're not going to do that. Also, we're very transphobic. Yeah, the reaction to like whenever Westminster or Tory Westminster does something really bad, the instant reaction in Scotland is almost to go like, shit, is that issue devolved? Is it devolved?

Let's quickly check. Is it devolved to see if we're impacted or not? And as a result, sometimes even our Parliament pays away, when I say our Parliament, I mean the Scottish Parliament, pays away the negative effects of the UK Parliament. So for example, bedroom tax is a classic example. Scotland like literally like paid part of like the bedroom tax. So like its citizens wouldn't have to pay it.

So that's just money like, you know, going from Westminster Scotland and then Westminster simply charging Scotland money for not having... Or trying to mitigate its awful law. So let's focus on this as well, right? We talked about the actual differences, right? And we say the idea of a patchwork of the qualities legislation, that's one of the objections that was raised in the statement of reasons, right? In a sort of high sense beyond its adverse effects sense,

which we're going to go into next. And this is where I think it's worth going back to the idea that, you know what else is a protected characteristic is marriage, right? And you can get married without parental consent in Scotland at 16. Very funny to discriminate on marriage. No married people in this bathroom. But, you know, I haven't seen a convincing explanation yet. Fucking Marows coming in here.

I haven't seen yet a convincing explanation of the fact that having two different... Not again, not even two different marriage acts existing in the between Scotland and the rest of the UK, causing some kind of Equality's headache, but rather the fact of just two different ways of getting to a commonly recognized status as causing an Equality's headache. I'm not saying there aren't bureaucratic hurdles.

Most notably, for instance, for me, I have an English birth certificate. I have no idea if a Scottish gender recognition certificate would like affect that if it would be allowed to affect that. So, yeah, basically, anyone who is kind of classed as an ordinary resident in Scotland, so, aka, you either rent or you live here properly, can apply for a Scottish GRC. We'll come on to it a little bit later down these reasons, but the rest of the UK, maybe just England,

maybe the rest of the UK, won't recognize that. So, I mean, I think there's also an interesting thing about this Patrick Equality's thing. Kind of like you were saying, Alice, you could make the argument that, given that this isn't a special Equality question that only applies to Scotland, like trans people exist all over the UK, and given that they might like to move from one British jurisdiction to another, it might be nice to have a kind of harmonized Equality's legislation. But then, of course, that quite simply raises the question for Westminster.

Well, go on then. Say to the Scottish Parliament, fine, we'll consult with you on a national bill and do one. And then that kind of completely negates that whole problem. Exactly. There was a gender recognition reform bill, no bracket Scotland, like an English one, that would have done for the whole UK.

And they quietly killed it a couple of years ago, I think. Theresa May wanted to do a nice one for the trannies, and then fucked Brexit. This one time, I will do the Theresa May nostalgia and post a picture of her at the cricket with a big can of lager or whatever, and be like, based. Because that's the other thing, right? Fundament, and again, there are lots of practical reasons

why Westminster's objections are insane, and we are going to go through them beyond this. But at the same time, I think there's fundamentally, right, Westminster's statement of reasons says, well, no, we need to make it hard to get a GRC because trans people should naturally be treated with suspicion. That's what the statement of reasons implies. Secondly, the corollary of that.

Part of the reason why it's so bad is legitimately just, Alistair Jack is very bad at his job. Like, he is a guy who you don't really need to know about unless you're thoroughly into Scottish politics, and it kind of shows in that, like, it's really funny that the Tories have put someone so unserious into such a sort of, like, constitutionally important position because it just doesn't come up.

Man, so unserious. He has the names of two boys. Well, if anything, it's like making, I don't know, Matt Hancock Health Secretary just before a global pandemic. So, just making Alistair Jack... It's just, it's never going to come up, right? You know, the Scottish secretary is like a joke job, doesn't have to do anything, so whatever. I was going to say, the corollary of what I was going to say, though,

the making it very... About the GRC process being that, like, valorizing the idea that trans people should be treated with suspicion is the idea that, well, is that the UK has to have a very difficult, a very difficult way to sort of affirm your gender legally, even in the way we're talking about, and the idea that it could be harmonized to be more easy, for example, as opposed to just must be draconianly difficult everywhere

as enforced by the dead hand of Westminster is, again, an unstated assumption. It's supposed to be shit if don't like it, you can fuck off. Precisely. Yeah. The most fundamental British constitutional maxim. That's right, yeah. Do you have a license for that gender?

I do, actually. But that's as far as I want to sort of discuss, right? That is the overall discussion of the sort of overall effect of the bill is the objection is it will produce a patchwork of a quality's legislation and then silently unsaid, which should be bad, by the way. Even though I think you can say, according to precedent, it won't. And according to, I don't know, your basic human decency, it shouldn't. But as, and Beth, is there anything else you want to sort of go into on this level?

Just that there's already kind of a patchwork, different standards of equality, like across the border. So for example, for a brief time, England actually had equal marriage before Scotland did. And they're just, there's several matters relating to equality. Abortion laws are slightly different, believe it or not. So believe in Scotland, even though it doesn't really matter because they don't perform late abortions anyway,

and that's a whole different podcast if you ever want to get into it. But there's lots of patchwork already in equality law that currently exists, is what I'm trying to say. And never before has it required a Section 35 order. So the other... So this is some kind of excuse or pretense. No, come on. What?

That would require this, the governing class of this country to be psychotically transphobic and deeply cynical and also very stupid. Come on. Do you know what the worst thing is? I think they're not even that psychotically transphobic, they're just deeply cynical, which is kind of worse. At least if it was there sincerely held, yeah. Like it's just, it really is like the dumbest game.

Yeah. It's like five guardian columnists are all leading the government around on this. Yeah. And it's like, weirdly, like this is one of the things they're able to like, the guardian is able to influence policy on. It's like, I haven't had any success on making fucking wild swimming mandatory. And that's something they write almost as much about. Yeah.

But... So you've got to complete a wild swim to get your GRC. You've got to swim after it. No, Kath, Katharina doesn't want wild swims. You know how England just put like, you know, sewers all into their rivers and stuff like that, because they wouldn't pay for the plants. So that wild swimming is just going to be, it's going to taste lovely.

Pushing turds out of the way with a breaststroke, you know. The next bit discusses, essentially, as we've been talking about, right, is that we would create this patchwork of Equality's legislation. Now, it gets into the practicalities of it, which is where it gets quite, I think, as Milo alluded to earlier in this episode, rather farcical, by trying to come up with adverse effects that it sort of... Yeah, imagine if someone who changed their gender stood on the border between Scotland and England

and like danced back and forth really quickly. Yeah. What if they did one of those half and half cabaret acts where half of them was wearing a dress and the other half was wearing a tuxedo on the border? That would be a good bit, actually, someone should do that. If you were listening to us and you're in between the Scottish and English border, get in touch with us.

We have an idea of what you should do. We'll set up a tripod and video of that. Do you live in the northern suburbs of Barrick-upon-Tweed? Are you considering transing your gender? I mean, what you could do is you could jump from one side to the other with the power of your gender flipping back and forth. So this is from the statement of reasons itself regarding adverse effects. It says,

It is clear that there are a number of specific adverse effects caused by the creation of a dual system as outlined below. Again, clear is not the word I would use. As well as the overall adverse effect created by a general lack of clarity for both GRC holders and service providers. Again, this lack of clarity is not applied when you're asking questions about, say, marriage. You get married to that parental consent in Scotland at 16, you're just married.

That's just how it works. And yet it seems to be fine. Is that then a genuine question? Does that then apply in England? So if you get married at 16 in Scotland and then say you moved to England, do you then legally married in England? Is it recognised? You are just married.

Yeah, so you would produce that marriage certificate and it would be recognised by Scotland. So even though it's an English certificate, other countries should recognise that. No, I'm talking about the opposite thing. So if you're married in Scotland at 16 in a way that wouldn't be allowed in England because you didn't get parental consent and then you moved to England,

would that be recognised by that? So I have to rail the podcast for the question. No, no, no. Just deploying fucking law brain once again. I believe in that case, English and Welsh law like yields to Scots law and yeah, you would be married. But what I'm sort of driving at here is that regardless, you are able to have these parallel systems

actually operate in the real world. Now, the statement of reasons goes on. It's going to come up with like some more and more contrived shit. Like what if, right? Okay, I'm going to do this here, mind zone. What if I'm being searched by the police in a way that requires them to have an officer of my gender, but then I break out of the handcuffs,

hop across the border, change my gender and they have to get other cops. What if that? Which has happened before. It happens all its life, actually. Maybe you have to get someone with the exact same in between Scottish gender as you. They have to find that one.

It's actually just Alice. They find you chopping wood. It's like, come on, we need you to search one last teen. Very specific set of duties as the Police Scotland Transgender Nonsense Officer. Fleeing the bank robbery in Glasgow. I'm an abandoned building somewhere outside Carlisle. I'm in an armed standoff with the police yelling out of the window,

you'd better have a non-binary officer down there or there's going to be a constitutional law debacle. A debacle! We have you surrounded. State your pronouns. The adverse effects they set out are included but not limited to the examples of the impacts of the Equality Act on the following. Single sex clubs or associations. UK wide single sex club or association.

My single sex club or association. I can't get into Scottish bootles anymore. It's a really boring sex party. Only one person can have sex there. Whoever gets to it first. Could have different membership in different parts of the UK. Most loads refused. The Public Sector Equality Duty.

One load accepted. That means that a cross-border public authority such as the DWP would have to apply their duty of your equality different as regards Scotland versus England or UK wide employer. The government might have to do a bit of work. How terrible. I'm going to have to get not paid by a different agency. It's such a fucking diversity win.

The notice that sanctions you for not attending the meeting with your work coach genders you correctly. And also it says a UK wide employer who would have employees who could not use that colleague as a comparator make an equal pay claim for a brought in Scotland but not England. Now the thing is right and I'm going to go dive into this around the Public Sector Equality Duty and the government IT infrastructure which is given as a reason says existing IT infrastructure

allows only one legal sex on any record and cannot change the marker for 16 to 17 year olds. Why don't you just change? Compute infrastructure. No, we know that once you make a program that's it. It's concrete. You can't change it. Actually in British IT infrastructure this is kind of true because the IT infrastructure is so bad.

This is probably actually the best argument they've put forward. I'm old enough to remember when Rishi Sunak said that he couldn't give benefits claimants an inflationary increase because the computer system wouldn't allow him to do it. Do you remember that one? I have a fun trans story about this too which is that NHS numbers, like your Chi number, that's gendered.

I forget which way round it is but odd and even numbers are assigned male and female. Like in French? Like your NHS number has a gender? Like a French word? Yeah, the number has a gender. Yeah, so it'll be like a zero zero will be like, I don't know, male and zero one starting with zero one

will be like male. That's the only way they could think to define a database that large by gender. And so if you trans your gender, one of the things that you can do, you don't have to, I also haven't. But one of the things you can do is change your number so that you get the like,

it recognizes you in the right gender and you get sent all of the right screening things and stuff. It's weird as hell. And it's like something that you would not expect anyone to design a database that way. Alice, if a trans woman gets a GRC, they can go to that screening appointment and they can demand to be screened.

That is actually, that is sort of one of the reasons that is stated, which is more trans... Get out at the pap smear screening. More trans people may use services. Oh no. Oh my gosh. This is the computer says no. Well, this is 0.5% of the population.

This is what I'm driving at, right? Where they say, look, it would be taking considerable time and expense to build a system with a dual identity for the same individual if someone's legal sex could be different in Scott's law and the law for England and Wales. It would only have other benefits. Let me say the rest of this fact.

Now, the expected annual increase in people obtaining Scott's gender recognition certificates is expected to be to go from 30 to approximately 250. This is 220 people. It's doing the numbers. They are actually... All of these responses, right? Because remember, right, that the section 35

is considered to be a constitutional nuclear weapon, a devolutionary nuclear weapon. And so one of the reasons is that they would have difficulty with the records of a couple hundred people a year. And I mean, that's low enough that you can do one of the fudges that other government departments already do.

Another fun trans story about... I'm just going through all of my sort of bureaucratic woes. If you get a gender recognition certificate, one of the things that it does is it makes it catastrophically illegal to access any of your old records in the wrong gender, right? That's one of the things in its favourites. It's a very British way of doing these things.

It sort of unpersons the wrong gender you. And so one of the things is that it literally seals all of those documents. So if you get a gender recognition certificate, your taxes then go through the same section of HMRC that does anyone else who has sealed records, which is mostly intelligence officers.

It's Special Section D, which is a great name for it, does MI6, MI5, GCHQ and trans people. And that's the dumbest possible way of... MGBT GCHQ, yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, personally, I find that very convenient. It's the dumbest possible way of doing it. And it still works.

It turns out that sometimes the answer is just you employ a transgender nonsense officer and they just handle it. It's 200 people a year. It's just not that much work. Do you know what has 200 rows? Excel. Yeah, easy.

They kind of afford the license for Excel. They kind of do that. They say, this is part of the argument like, look, if we let this through, it's going to cause administrative chaos via Equality's legislation. Again, the assumption being that tons of people are just waiting to jump on this

to spuriously make Equality's claims, right? Again, that is riven through this entire document. And yet, this is... I'm not sort of talking about hypocrisy here, but just be aware of the fact that the Retained EU Law Bill means that a bunch of formerly settled answers to basic questions such as,

holiday paid is my employer, Omi, or do part-time workers have the same rights as full-time workers? Settled questions in law that lots of other things are built on. Those are going to be obliterated. They're scheduled to be obliterated and the government has already admitted

that it's not going to be possible to replace them in time. Those questions are going to get unanswered and new answers are not readily available. And they are... And they're basically going to use a nuclear bomb on the constitutional settlement of the UK

because a few hundred people will need a slightly different form on the computer that tells them they can't have any money. You don't understand. Thousands of Scots every year are suddenly going to be like, I want spy taxes.

I want the spy guy to do my taxes. This episode, this episode's going out alone. We'll just trigger that. Everyone's going to be like, right. I've never had spy taxes. I imagine it may be quite unconvenient. Like, secret. And then some of the other reasons,

I guess I've sort of collected under Malin actors and spaces. Yeah, what if criminals decided to change their genders? Because we say... We can't arrest the gentlemen. Sorry, I lied. Yeah, you misgendered the perp.

They got to walk. So, the Secretary of State for Scotland, Alistair Jack, does not believe that the bill retains or creates the safeguards to mitigate the risk of fraudulent or Malin applications and believes that the reform system will be open to abuse and malicious actors.

Malin gender is such a funny concept. But abuse is stashed. Also, incidentally, when it was in the Scottish Parliament, a lot of amendments were, like, focused on this. Some of them were wrecking, some of them weren't. And, like, people did, MSPs did propose in earnest,

I want this bill to pass, but only if making, like, a false declaration on this is punishable by, like, flensing or whatever. Yeah. So, we've technically, which is weird because fraud is already a crime. So, we've kind of, like,

the Scottish Government to appease so-called legitimate concerns has created, like, almost, like, a special gender fraud on top of the use of gender fraud claim. And then that's also on top of making a false declaration,

which is also ready another crime as well. So, it's just, we're layering it on top of all of it. Yeah, but I guess that's still not sufficient, I suppose, somehow. Because, like, if you do crimes with gender, that's, like, especially heinous. Yeah.

I don't think there's, you couldn't, you could have promised a keel hauling and it still wouldn't have been enough for these people. He says, for example, they might erode confidence in the Equality Act as a credible framework to protect the rights of individuals and advance equality of opportunity for all.

Adverse effects identified are of particular concern in relation to the 22 acts provisions regarding sex-segregated spaces, service, sports, occupational requirements, etc. These allow for the exclusion of people with a protected characteristic of gender reassignment, including those of the GRC, where their exclusion can be objectively justified.

Given the significantly increased possibility, this is the key line here. Given the significantly increased possibility of someone with malicious intent being able to obtain a GRC as this risk will be widely known, there's a related risk of people no longer feeling safe in any sex-segregated setting and self-excluding from such settings,

even though they could significantly benefit from them. Remember at the very beginning of this segment, when I said this has to confine itself to things that will actually happen. Yeah, yeah. You will be too scared by the possibility that you see a trans woman doing something that she would have already

been legally allowed to do, that you won't take up women's rugby and go and win the World Cup for England, you know? Also, the other thing to draw out here is that in terms of the exceptions to the single-sex spaces that we talked

about earlier that I mentioned here, that objectively impacted is a really fucking high test. Every time it comes to court, it is like, no, you really do have to show you're working, you do have to explain why this has to be a single-sex space and it's difficult to do,

it's intentionally difficult to do and that doesn't matter at the same time. But also, to just reiterate, all of Scotland's rape crisis centres has never really fought for that in a setting before.

They've never had a spat with a court or whatever because they've just never felt like they've had to do that. And now what we're seeing actually in the moment in Parliament today, we're seeing Tories go full magma because they're

literally like, well, if they agree with you, they should all be defunded because the only reason why rape services are agreeing with the government is because they're funded by it. Which is just, it's getting into weird-ass territory. Like really weird-ass territory.

It's getting into the realm, I think, of the same kinds of fantasies that are peddled in like, you know, time's op-eds, where it's just, it's become an entirely circular conversation that is hung between conservative politicians on both sides of the border,

between the op-ed writers that they like, between the think-tankers that gas them up. I mean, you know, you wouldn't be surprised to know that the policy exchange wrote a basically... What's their address again? It's the same as all the other right-wing think-tanks, weirdly enough, right near Downing Street.

Yeah, that the... 55 Tarft and Street? No, that's right. You know, that the policy exchange has basically an identical PDF saying Section 35 is justified, saying all the same stuff. I actually read all of these reports, by the way, so you don't know if you will have to. Riley likes to damage his brain.

Well done. Well, it means we don't have to, so that is... Sorry. Riley is like the Christ of podcasting. He is like, he's suffering crossings. Like I say, people say I torture Nish Kumar with the books, but he only has to hear about them for an hour. I read the fuckers.

Regardless. That's totally circular conversation is that the answer is predetermined and any other working will always be just focused on this answer. This is a circular conversation can keep going. It's like, well, you know, if a rape crisis center in Scotland is

not going to... We're going to have the answer that we want basically, which is that, oh, well, this is no true Scotsman, essentially. Well, quite. Yeah. And also, like... No true Scotswoman, no.

So, the adverse effect, right, is basically that there is going to be a higher awareness of the existence of trans people and the statement of reasons suggests that this might make cis people feel unsafe. That is to say, and if you take that all together, the reasoning

that it should be hard to get a gender recognition certificate is basically, and this is because it makes cis people feel unsafe, is basically the statement of reasons boils down to there are already too many trans people and we think that there should be no more and preferably less. I've read The Guardian.

I can boil it down further than that. It's, you know, X number of pages, which amount to... Yeah. That's all it is. At the end of the day, if people in government are that concerned about keeping Alice away from the England women's rugby team, they could have achieved the same result

with a spray bottle. But also, like, half the premise is just that more people will be protected by the Equality Act, but they say that we don't want that. Yeah, no, we don't care for the Equality Act. He's protecting too many people as it is. We're gatekeeping the Equality Act. And, you know, and so what they're talking about

throughout this statement of reasons, which we're going to move off of shortly, is basically just worrying about tiny fractions of tiny fractions of numbers. How many people, like, a few hundred people in a government database, a few hundred people who would be wanting to go to a single

sex school with a Scottish gender recognition south of the border who had to have been trans their gender at a particular age after a particular time. That might be what? Me trying to get into bootles. Yeah. Me and two friends trying to get into bootles.

Yeah, yeah, the Scottish affiliate of bootles. Scootles. Bear that all in mind. All those reasons. They're still, like, after publishing those reasons, they're like, oh, why don't you just come to the table and negotiate? Even though you did this

totally the normal way, it's all inside devolved framework. But by reading this, what can you then negotiate on if the whole statement of reasons is, like, well, the whole bill's bad. There's really nothing you can do. Keith Starmer was just like,

well, let's play about with the age, but literally not going to happen, because if you remove the age, there's not a lot of the bill. The more you remove, the less it does, and it already doesn't do a lot. That's the basic objection to the bill,

which is that the bill, excuse me, the statement of reasons, which is that it's enormously out of proportion to the problems that it's pointing out, many of which aren't problems. That's putting aside the fact that it itself is, like,

a deeply bigoted piece of writing. But remember, even putting aside the astonishingly low numbers of people that make all of the, like, substantive objections, like government IT systems, or whatever, totally meaningless, you have to also remember

coming back to marriage. It's not even just about different ages. It's about different people who can marry you. For example, in Scotland, you can get married by a humanist society in England, you can't. Does that mean that the Scottish marriage doesn't count? No, of course not. Because in England...

Just because you're married by a crystal mum? Yeah, exactly. But really, it's the same thing. That's the different way in which you come to that particular status. It's just, in England, they don't treat the status of marriage with inherent suspicion, whereas they treat the status of being transgender

with inherent suspicion. And that is one of the reasons that, if you take away that suspicion, then you wouldn't raise any of these other points, like the fact that, like, more trans people have a chilling effect on cis gender single sex organizations or what have you. Right?

Trans people are actually endothermic. It just wouldn't make any sense. And it's actually remarkable how much of the jurisprudence in Scotland and England is about marriage is when you have a legally difficult marriage, when you have

a marriage that has been formalized incorrectly, basically, so long as that isn't fraud, the state will go to, it bends a lot in order to make a marriage like valid and in order to make it work. And it does that with the expressed intent that

people getting married when they choose to is a social good that the government and the law should be facilitating. That's not a difficult thing to do. It's a very deliberate choice not to repeat that for gender. And I say, you know, let's just for the sake of argument,

let's strengthen the government. When you get married by a guy who pretends he's a priest and he actually wasn't and then he, like, at the end of the thing drops the cassock and flees, you're probably still legally married at the end of that. So long as you believed he was a priest.

He actually identified as a priest. He got his priest recognition certificate. So we've taken the actual statement of reasons, looked at it on its own merits, and found that it falls apart for a bunch of reasons, including the very small numbers of people sort of under discussion here.

We strengthened their hand a bit and we said, okay, well let's remove that consideration and let's compare it with something. And we can even strengthen their hand a bit more. Let's imagine that somehow the marriage comparison is solved and that's sort of no longer an issue. Fundamentally, as this goes back to what Alice was saying,

the constitutional problems regarding the consistency of gender for the Equality Act are only problems because we've decided that it's necessary to create a unified regime with friendly circumstances for transgender people in the United Kingdom and to treat them with suspicion from the off.

And if we created less restrictive circumstances, then there wouldn't be humming and hawing about how the restrictions apply unequally because quite simply there wouldn't be restrictions. And if you say the Equality Act suffers from a lack of clarity regarding sort of gender and transgender status and so on,

A, does it really? But B, why hasn't it been clarified? Why haven't these things been made easier? Does it really only end up coming back to the same answer, which is that it was either a deep-seated belief or a cynical belief?

Regardless, the effect is the same. So who cares about the difference? That life ought to be difficult for transgender people because it makes some of the worst people in this country very happy. You've got to keep those guys happy. The good news is we can talk about

Labour's response to this because... So this is something that's been done by a Conservative government. It's parliamentary procedure. Labour had the opportunity to not block it because they don't have the votes to,

but they had the opportunity to confront, delay, annoy... Raise a hue and cry. Potentially try to split a relatively fractious Tory party? I don't know. Anything? Yeah, any number of these things. Something? How about something? The thing is, Keir Starmer,

we may be aware of this, is bitch-made. And so, irrespective of what he personally believes... Hard to get a certificate for that in England. Just on a tactical, political level. Yeah, just... Need to do two years of...

Something like 11 Labour MPs even showed up for this vote. A couple of glaring emissions, most notably Diane Abbott didn't show up, which is a disappointment. John McDonnell, though. John McDonnell, who I used to worry about. Back in the day,

I used to have a couple of concerns because he met with a couple of turf organisations, but no, he came through in the end. Corbyn was paired, so he voted against it, but didn't have to show up personally, and a lot of people got very mad at him on Twitter. The Labour response for this is just

I hope no one notices. Let's turn off the lights and pretend we're not home. I believe the initial response was that Labour wasn't going to oppose it until they saw fundamentally what the government were going to do. Again, which means

confusing kind of what you might see as strategic acumen in yourself for let's say, tactically being unable to see the forest because you're tactically looking at the trees. The other thing is, just on a sort of a partisan level, at a time when

everybody is criticising UK Labour in Scotland for treating Scottish Labour as a branch office, it may perhaps have occurred to the leader of a Labour party that this is something that Scottish Labour MSPs had debated,

voted for, and was then taken away from them by the Tories, and that does not appear to figure. It was literally in their manifesto. First of all, it was in all of their party manifestos seven years ago, even the Tories. But Labour

literally had, like, we want to lower it to 16. And now you're having, like, Keir Starmer come in and say, well, I think 16 is too low, even though 16 is the legal age of an adult in Scotland. Like, he's supposed to be a really clever boy.

He's supposed to be a really top-tier lawyer, but I know Scott's Law is technically a different section, jurisdiction, whatever. It's a lot more annoying, I'll say that one. Yeah, yeah. So it's really confusing, especially when

we think about Donald Dure, we talk about Tony Blair, we talk about Devolution, the setup of the parliament. These are all, like, supposed to be Labour successes. So it's a massive open goal. And they're kind of treating this as if you listen to Keir Starmer's lines, it's sort of the same

way he would treat a union. He's like, oh, well, everyone just needs to come back round the negotiating table. People need to make face to face. No, we're not going to back anywhere. We're going to wait and see. It's like just total spinlessness. It's what happens when I think

your entire political philosophy becomes about only remembering the last sort of three news cycles and thinking only ahead to the next three news cycles. It is what happens when you totally supplant any kind of

political program with a media management strategy and you confuse the two. I was just going to say, well, yeah, I mean, I was just very quickly going to say that, like, that seems sort of be it, like, not just with, like, this issue, but basically with everything, like, this kind of perpetual fear of being kind of just, like, destroyed, or at least sort of

being seen to be destroyed by, like, British media. And, yeah, it seems like, especially with this one, they seem to have really kind of, like, cornered him in a way that, I don't know, maybe it's kind of... He's happy with the corner, really. He sort of sees his job as to be cornered and to say, thank you

for cornering me. I think it's good that I'm in this corner. I love being in the corner. And... Yeah, and he knows who in action benefits. Like, you can look at the sort of, like, long travails of Rosie Duffield in the Labour Party and conclude that, oh, no, Kirsten Unmond knows perfectly well

that, like, who's staying out of it is a win for, and he's fine with that. What is quite interesting, though, is that the Scottish Labour response is somewhat starting to change. So Pam Duncan-Glancy, who's, like, Labour's representative on the Scottish Equality

Committee that scrutinized this bill sort of very much came in and stuck to, like, the Cure Starmer line that, you know, both governments just need to... This is just a government at another government, blah, blah, blah. They're using trans people as a political football, blah, blah, blah. And then she's... She didn't, like, obviously come along

to today's protest, but her statement that she released to protesters and on social media was very different was, no, we passed the bill. It is fine as is. There shouldn't be a section 38, which is a total change from the previous line.

We also, like, have MSPs like Paul Sweeney who referred to Alistair Jack as Viceroy Jack as well. So even though Labour seems to be sucking at the moment, there's lots of cool, cool, cool exceptions. And I think, you know, this is

something we're actually going to talk about a little more on the bonus episode as we use this as the kind of lens to try and look at what Starmerism is. So do watch out for that on the bonus. I think the one... Suspecting everyone's gender, including

the gender, which is the opinion of the Tory party. That's right. They identify as being against this bill. Yeah. I think there's a few things, right, that come to that are worth talking about here, right? To sort of wrap this up, which is

to come back to, I think, the idea of devolution. Which is that a lot of people are... A lot of columnists are sort of debating with one another about whether or not this is a savvy political move which I think is sort of the least important

beyond the actual impact on people, right? Talking more about the high politics of it. It's sort of particularly unimportant. Whereas, I mean, it's got enormous implications for devolution. And sort of, again, just shows how

rough and improvised and just fudged the entire devolution settlement was, right? It took this... It was an attempt to look at some of the contradictions of the UK as a state

made up as it is of nations that largely have grudges against specifically England, dominated by England, but these nations at the fringes. And devolution was a way to try to resolve those contradictions without really touching English power. And... The UK constitution is sort of

like our get along shirt, right? And there was a time like, I think, if ever there was a time that we could have codified a constitution that resolved some of these things in a reasonably equitable way and probably would also have

forestalled Scottish independence for another few generations. It would have been during the Blair Ministry. He had the ability to do it. He just didn't want to because it was too much work and it was scary. And so we just ended up with this like fudge of, well, a constitutional

convention. And as we've seen, that breaks down. Tony Blair was busy writing constitutions all over the world. He didn't have time for the UK. So... But it does raise a really worrying prospect, right? And I keep on referencing

this in interviews that I would love this just to be about trans rights and trans rights alone. But when you zoom out of it, democracy is at stake because you know, you could... And it was strange enough that Scotland has

different mechanisms of voting as proportional representation. So in a sense, Scotland's more democratic than the rest of the UK in an electoral sense. But then what's the point of that if you're going to elect politicians to make up

laws that will then be vetoed by Westminster because they feel like it? And they very much say that this is a once in a lifetime usage of this section. But I don't believe that. I don't think an unelected Tory government should

or an unelected government of any kind should be making decisions like this. So it raises a serious question about, well, what comes next? What's going to be the next bill that gets section 35? The entire credit bill... Devolution rested on a shared idea that everyone was good

chaps and no one's going to act out of bounds. And as dangerous as this is to the S&P and this is potentially like, lethally dangerous to the S&P, this is sort of a battlefield that is beneficial to them because it's not... like, it's such a minor thing.

It's such an administrative reform and you would rather be sort of fighting should Westminster even have the ability to do this on something relatively inconsequential as opposed to on something that they actually

want to get done instead of getting pushed into by the Greens. And just sort of the other thing right about this is that with the total all with the credibility of devolution pretty much undermined

we can go back to another example of something of a pattern that you see repeating again and again in British politics after the Blair era, which is the Tony Blair administration half asses something or alternatively creates a kind

of sort of intelligence gathering apparatus that pointed at the British people, right? This is something like for example how the Home Office works we talked about that in our episode with Daniel Trilling about the Home Office and then says and then says okay well

this will be fine or Obama expanding the drone war or whatever like this just saying look all of these structures, all these institutions that we're creating will be fine so long as no one else is ever in charge. Yeah, and they won't be. So don't worry about it.

Exactly. I might one day be in charge of them but I can promise you that I won't do anything. My solemn promise to the people of this country is I won't pull any of the levers other than the one that says ban sweet vapes.

That's right. So I just want to say but because again once again it's been a rash of long episodes which I'm aware that you all like but I'm a busy man who gets hungry around eight so I don't care for the long episodes as much but

when the contents go and the content goes. My hungry ass. My hungry ass tries to finish after an hour but could never record an hour and a half episode. It's not every day the UK blows itself up because of gender. Yeah, so enjoy it.

I want to say before we end Beth do you any final thoughts? Really this is very quickly, rapidly just changing and evolving going forward and Alistair Jack got summoned

to the Scottish Parliament's equality committee. It looks like Kemi's going instead. But really what we're looking at is we could be looking at a situation where you know we're seeing trade unions being attacked. We're seeing like crude people being attacked once more.

It's very similar to the 80s and the Tories really just want to relive that years era very very badly. You can sort of very much see that's what they want to do. And there is still a chance even though the statement of so-called concerns

is a farcical document there is still a chance that the courts shoot down this judicial review and this is just a new normal in Scottish politics. That could still be a chance of happening.

So really it looks funny but the repercussions could be huge. I think that's likely in terms of the judicial review just on the basis that yes there are certain duties on how Westminster has to act but both in terms of the Scotland Act

and just on jurisprudence but like now basically I think it's just how it is now because they can do what they want. But then again like Scottish opinion polls like for independence float around 50% and

I am looking forward to seeing what the next opinion pulls from whoever it may be like I don't care if it's Conras Vanna whatever like it's going to be very interesting to see the support if that changes at all and

yeah it's just looking to heat up we're going to see new lines being drawn within the Labour Party which is always great to hear about and see and yeah so rotating the letters of ILP in my head so

with all that being said Beth I want to thank you very much for coming and talking to us about this today I want to also thank the listeners for listening I want to thank Jinseng for our theme song it's here we go you can find on Spotify and I want to remind you that there is a Patreon

you can subscribe to it it is $5 a month this week the Patreon bonus episode is discussing how to apart two of this episode sort of of taking this issue and deriving trying to derive a theory of Starmerism from it with philosophy tube Abbey Thorn

so do check that out in the in other news if you are in Berlin continue to keep the 11th of March free continue to be in Berlin yeah do not leave Milo go to Milo Edwards dot Milo for all the show to Milo dot Milo

slash Milo dot Milo um yeah no my tour dates uh uh soon is Brighton 25th of January tickets available for that there's also Edinburgh there's fucking made in head there's Bristol there's um

other uh Manchester various places various go on my website just go on Milo dot Edwards slash Milo slash Milo dot Milo dot now yeah go on there slash slash Gundam anyway so like I said at the beginning

the most important take away from this episode is prayers up for Greg Stubbe and we'll see you on the bonus episode bye everyone bye