[Nicola] Sturgeon remains blinkered: she has ignored female victims of male violence, treated the concerns of the UN special rapporteur dismissively and failed to listen to young people who received appalling care from NHS Scotland and now regret their transition. Her implausible mantra remains that no man will abuse the system, women's rights are not affected and evidence reviewed by an English paediatrician has no relevance to Scottish children. Scottish Labour could still try to amend the bill to make clear that a GRC does not change someone’s sex for the purposes of the Equality Act.
But the most likely outcome is that Sturgeon, a self-professed feminist and nationalist, will leave the door wide open for a Conservative government in Westminster to step in to protect Scottish women, by updating the Equality Act to clarify its sex-based protections for women apply only to those who are biologically female.

Like other ministers, [Shirley-Anne] Somerville is keen that voters forget what the Scottish parliament's gender recognition reforms actually meant. They would rather you ignore the reality that the bill created a situation in which, as a legal matter, someone might be one sex in Dumfries but a different one in Carlisle. If Scotland were an independent state, a rump UK government's disinclination to recognise gender recognition certificates in Scotland might not matter much but — at the risk of saying something dangerous here — it does seem sensible for the definition of a "man" and a "woman" to be consistent within and throughout a single nation state.

The law Nicola Sturgeon is trying to pass in Scotland will harm the most vulnerable women in society — those seeking help after male violence/rape and incarcerated women.
Statistics show that imprisoned women are already far more likely to have been previously abused.

As a woman, I fully understand the threats to dignity and safety that the Bill poses, because it will change the social contract. In this country, we recognise that in toilets, changing rooms and public spaces, there are areas where only women are allowed.
In a restaurant recently, I had an experience where a man dressed as a woman walked into the toilets where I was on my own. He stood behind me and stared at me in the mirror, looking me in the eye. I have no idea whether he intended me any harm, but my evolved instinct as a woman was to be frightened, because unlike in almost any other species, women are far less powerful than men and we cannot defend ourselves. [Interruption.] No, it is a fact. The difference in strength between men and women is phenomenal, which is why we have separate sex categories for sport. Women are evolved to be wary of men in intimate spaces, which is why we have single-sex spaces and why they must continue to exist for the safety and privacy of women. The Bill threatens that social contract.

The Scottish Bill tears up the UK’s criteria for awarding a gender recognition certificate based on medical assessment, and allows anyone to get a GRC based on a declaration, with no medical treatments or safeguards.
This means there will be many more people able to get a certificate, and organisations will never be able to feel confident excluding someone who is clearly male from female-only spaces and services.
A key question for the UK Government is whether they will accept people who have been through the Scottish system but were born in England and Wales to change the sex on their birth certificate. Scotland would in effect act like a 'haven' of light regulation that would then spill out across the UK.
For schools there would be huge problems. Single-sex schools are allowed by law, but now schools would face having to admit a child of the opposite sex, and would be threatened with criminal penalties if teachers and staff 'disclose' the child’s actual sex to other staff, pupils or parents.
The UK Government does not have to accept this outcome. It should refer the Bill to the Supreme Court and make sure that the Scottish Parliament only legislates within its own domain, and does not ignore women’s rights and child safeguarding.

It may infuriate Nicola Sturgeon, but it seems that JK Rowling's political judgment is superior: the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill will be Sturgeon's poll tax. Sturgeon is not in control of this. She allied herself with zealots, ignored public anxieties, denied biology, produced a bill that most can see is deeply flawed, rejected sensible amendments such as barring sex offenders from self-identification, and cannot hide from the people that predatory males, if the bill becomes law, can manipulate it to invade women’s safe spaces. The recent rapist case will not be the only one that will haunt her.

How absurd, she thought, that the sight of a man’s naked breast should be more objectionable than to see him possibly blown to bits.

A discriminatory and shameful piece of legislation that was imposed on Scotland by Westminster will today be repealed by the Scottish parliament ahead of other parts of the UK. That says something about the state of Scotland that we can all be proud of.

David T. C. Davies [then Conservative MP for Monmouth]: I hear what the hon. Lady is saying. May I bluntly ask her whether she would be happy sharing a changing room with somebody who was born male and had a male body?

The evidence for bias in STEM is mixed: Although some studies find bias against women, others find none or bias in women’s favour... The mixed findings suggest that narrow-sense anti-female bias is less ubiquitous than sometimes assumed – or that different people have different biases, and these sometimes favour males but sometimes favour females.

A study in the Washington Post says that women have
better verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the
authors of that study: 'Duh.