Maggie Chapman is an activist not a parliamentarian

Maggie Chapman, like other dogmatists, lacks self-awareness when it comes to how she hurts others while berating everyone else for not being kind. And my conclusion is that she just doesn’t care.

Her imperious demands for her way or the highway, her assumptions about the motivations and prejudice of others, and her lack of any contrition about the damage she has inflicted on the reputation of the body politic by refusing to back down on her Trumpian attack on the Supreme Court is telling. She is not a parliamentarian; she is an activist. Her lack of respect for the parliament reveals her narcissism, a claim, which I am sure she would reject given she clearly sees her pious mission as the selfless, one-woman champion for the trans and non-binary community.

Chapman no doubt believes in her own moral rectitude while marching to her own vainglorious drum, and embodies someone so consumed by their own self-importance that she disregards anything or anyone and won’t countenance facts getting in her way. She sits on a committee that deals with matters of the law yet reveals her ignorance of it. She was so oblivious as to how the Supreme Court operates, or the details of the case which so aerates her, that she questioned why no trans people were heard by the judges when a) that was not the purpose of this appeal and b) the Scottish Government was in court arguing that sex in the Equality Act should include trans people in receipt of a gender recognition certificate. And it lost. End of. 

Ultimately, Chapman, so stuck in her own groove, was only saved from expulsion from the equalities committee by her own vote, having eschewed rational discussion or even an opportunity to show some remorse. 

And in supporting her retention as vice-convener of the committee, her three SNP colleagues similarly failed to scrutinise facts and uphold the integrity of the parliament they were elected to sit in. It was a simple question: had she brought her own position on the committee into disrepute by accusing the Supreme Court of “bigotry, prejudice and hatred” following its judgment in the case of For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers? The answer should have been crystal clear, as should her fate. 

The Faculty of Advocates and the Law Society of Scotland both criticised Chapman’s comments, saying they were not compatible with her role on the committee. They were right. But the SNP members, mindbogglingly, disagreed and voted against the Tory motion that sought to have Chapman kicked off it. And Chapman concurred, adding her own vote to safeguard her position. In so doing, the ability of the committee to scrutinise, particularly legal witnesses, is undoubtedly compromised. 

And while I hate to admit this, because I veer towards supporting the more democratic nature of the regional list in our electoral system, the fact that Chapman is a list MSP worries me no end, because unless her or her party decide otherwise, we are pretty well stuck with her, no matter what the voters say.

Ultimately, no formal censure of Chapman concerns me greatly because in a parliament that is already preparing for the prospect of Reform MSPs, Holyrood could become an echo chamber for intolerance where the zealotry of the Greens is added to by the extremism of Farage’s followers.

This was never about toilets

So, while John Swinney can grandstand with a talking shop about hate, his own MSPs become handmaidens to Chapman whose incendiary language challenged the integrity of the Supreme Court and thus put its judges at risk. These are not the actions of someone fit to hold public office.

But back to the substance of the matter. The knee-jerk and ill-informed reaction to firstly, the Supreme Court ruling that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to ‘biological sex’ and secondly, to the initial update from the EHRC, the statutory regulator responsible for ensuring the Equality Act is complied with, responding to the legal clarification, has led to a furious focus on toilets while ignoring the importance of a rebalancing of legal rights for women and for trans people. The toilets issue is frippery. It’s absurd. There will be no toilet police or genital inspections. People will still go about their business privately and discreetly as they have done, which I presume never involved trans men (biological women) standing at a urinal in full view of other male toilet users, because let’s face it, physically, it just doesn’t work, and believe me, like most little girls, I will have been dared to try.

But the focus on toilets is a deliberate attempt by trans activists and supporters to trash the judgment, to discredit the EHRC (remembering the Greens, Stonewall and the Good Law Project have previously attempted and failed to have the EHRC stripped of its internationally recognised ‘A’ grade human rights rating on the basis of nebulous accusations of transphobia) and to divert attention away from what is important in the clarification about biological sex in the Equality Act, which is to do with real material differences about pregnancy discrimination, single-sex spaces in refuges, rape crisis centres, prisons and hospitals, and the rights of lesbians to exclude men from their associations if they want to.

Oh, I hear you cry, what about trans men, ie biological women, or a 70-year-old trans woman (biological man) who has gone through surgery and lives life quietly as a woman and wouldn’t harm a fly, never mind another woman, where should they pee? I don’t know, work it out.

Women have had to as their spaces gradually became unisex, and not by invitation or statute. This is now about service delivery and how we provide facilities for everyone. And I didn’t hear disabled people scream about apartheid when the requirement to provide adequate toilet provisions for them became legally necessary, so let’s try and inject some sense into this. 

This was never about toilets – it was always about women trying to retain and claw back some of the rights that they had had stripped away from them by men. This is about balancing rights and not simply acquiescing to assumed male privilege.

The events of the last few weeks have done nothing to deal with the misogyny that has run wild through this debate. And don’t give me the old, ‘there was toxicity on both sides’ shtick, because suffragette ribbons, stickers and a refusal to say men can be women is nothing compared with placards emblazoned with ‘decapitate the Terf’, urine being thrown, and women threatened and assaulted by a pitchfork mob wearing balaclavas. And yes, women do deserve an apology for that.