This post is not about Ash Regan

This post is the opposite of journalism: the important paragraphs are all at the end. I just thought to mention that now, in case you’re in a hurry.

I was born in Scotland. My parents never lived there in my lifetime. It is the country of my birth because my mother followed (probably unwittingly) an ancient tradition of going to be with her mother for the birth of her first and, as things turned out, only, child. Her family lived in Argyll, a shire of the western highlands, fissured by ocean lochs carved out by the retreating glaciers of the last ice age.

Once I had been christened, our home was where my father worked at that time: Canterbury, in the south of England. Still, Scotland was for me always more than just a beginning. The summers of my early childhood were spent there, with my grandparents, in their house by the deep waters of Loch Long. I have resided in Australia since I was five, but I went to school in a Scottish village for a term when I was nine; and stayed there for another term when I was fifteen. I spent three months with my grandparents when I was 23, the year before my grandfather died, in that same house by the loch. I have been back since, to farewell my grandmother and to bury my uncle and, finally, my aunt.

All of which is to say, I am not a Scot, but, also, I am. I have the roots of the expatriate, rich in sentimental anachronism. I am an outsider to Scottish life and culture, but every time the plane lands, I feel as though I have come home.

So it was that, when I decided to change my legal name, I sought, not just a certificate from my local government, but to be recorded in the registry of the land of my birth.

In Kafka-esque style, after delays lasting over a year due to Covid, the Scottish records office wrote advising they had processed and recorded my name change to Hannah. The letter addressed me under my old (and no longer legal) name. How does the joke go? “You had one job…”

Anyway. I am Scottish Hannah.

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Changing my name was simple. Were I to want to change my recognised gender in Scotland (or the rest of the UK), that would be altogether more difficult. The procedure is governed by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. It would require two registered medical practitioners or psychologists, at least one of them a specialist in gender-related care, to supply evidence that I experience gender dysphoria. I must have lived in the gender for which I seek recognition for at least two years before I apply. And, with heroic confidence, I must attest that I intend to continue living in that gender “until death” (yes, the Act really says that).

It is a ridiculous system, bureaucratic, offends people’s rights and, with a shortage of relevant medical specialists, can be incredibly challenging to even obtain the necessary paperwork.

What were the legislation’s authors so afraid of, that they decided to construct such barriers? We can find that out simply by reading the news. But I don’t mean the news back in 2004. I mean from last week, and the week before that, and the week before that. Scotland has been infected by the same neurotic panic about trans people (specifically, transwomen) as so much of the rest of the western world.

This has a long history in Scotland, associated with the government’s attempts to modernise the country’s gender recognition law. In 1999, Scotland had regained its own legislature, and with it the power to make laws about a wide array of policy fields, including sex and gender. In the 2007 Scottish election, the Scottish National Party (SNP), which had been the official opposition up to that time, won government – and it has been in government, either in majority or minority, ever since.

Creating an easier process for gender recognition began in 2016 when the SNP, in its election platform, committed to change the laws. Nicola Sturgeon, who had been First Minister (their head of government) since 2014, championed the reform. There followed a long process of community consultation.

Sadly, this process exposed division within the SNP, with a debate about whether the Bill was going to threaten the safety of women who had been assigned female at birth. Change stalled in the face of this debate and because of the effects of the Covid pandemic. When a Bill was finally introduced into the Scottish Parliament in March 2022, it revealed the deepest split in the SNP in over 15 years. Toward the end of 2022, as the law came to a vote, seven government MSPs stood against their own party’s Bill, including the only SNP Minister ever to resign from Cabinet over a policy matter: Ash Regan. One other MSP, Kate Forbes, who was on maternity leave at the time, did not vote. It was a bitter debate for the party. It dominated the news until a few weeks later in January 2023, when the Conservative government in Westminster managed to upstage all sides, by issuing an unprecedented veto under the Scotland Act 1998: British legislation that determines how Scottish self-government operates. It was an extraordinary moment: by some accounts, this was the first time in three hundred years that Britain had experienced post-legislative veto of a bill.

Seemingly unrelated to all of this, in February 2023, after nearly a decade at the helm, Nicola Sturgeon announced her resignation as First Minister. She was exhausted; she did not anoint a successor.

What followed was a three-way contest for the SNP leadership. One of the candidates was the Health Minister, Humza Yousaf. Who were the other two? Ash Regan, and Kate Forbes. Ash Regan was best known for her opposition to the gender recognition bill. Kate Forbes is a socially conservative member of the evangelical Free Church of Scotland. During the leadership campaign, she said she did not support the gender recognition reform, and that she would have resigned her ministry over it, had she not been on leave. She had previously also said she would have voted against allowing gay marriage, had she been in the parliament when that was decided in 2014 (she was first elected to parliament in 2016).

These are disappointing (and minority) opinions that these parliamentarians hold. But my issue is not so much with the views of these two people. It is with the tens of thousands of members of the SNP who voted for Forbes and Regan during the leadership contest. After years of discussion about what it means to be transgender, there should be no-one who can profess ignorance about the harm these sorts of campaigns do to trans and gender diverse people. Yet here were two supposedly educated parliamentarians of an allegedly progressive political party, and they were apparently seen as fit to be leaders in one of Britain’s most progressive regions.

For me, it was a reminder of the many problems with nationalism. The cover it provides for unsavoury policies because as a movement it is preoccupied with just one thing: the identity of the mob. The shelter it gives for people who may hold all sorts of awful, or ignorant, or dangerous views, who are able to ride a wave of anger about being ruled by ‘others’. The subordination of actual policy to a feverish desire to be in power for oneself and against those one sees as oppressors.

Charles de Gaulle wrote: “patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.” Watching the SNP from halfway around the world, it seemed to me that it was a party at risk of being taken over by nationalists, not patriots. Here were so-called leaders spending more time and energy facilitating hate of trans people than in finding ways to support them.

The SNP leadership was decided on 27 March 2023. None of the three candidates got a majority in the first count. Ash Regan was eliminated as the least popular and her votes were redistributed. By a margin of just 52 to 48 percent, Yousaf squeaked in ahead of Kate Forbes.

Yousaf’s past performance as a minister has been the subject of debate, and with Scotland facing many challenges, he has been handed a demanding job. I’m overwhelmingly happy to see him tackle the role: Britain’s first Muslim leader of a major political party, and first leader of a government in any of Britain’s devolved Parliaments to come from a culturally and linguistically diverse community. He is an explicit supporter of LGBTIQ+ rights.

Mainly, though, I am deeply sad that almost half his party members voted for a leader who was openly opposed to gay marriage and transgender recognition. They can talk as much as they want about needing ‘fresh faces’, or about the candidates’ positions regarding the pathway to Scottish independence: at the end of the day, they were all pro-independence people, and a fresh face is no use if it comes with ugly baggage.

It is hard to believe that it took six years for the Scottish government to modernise gender recognition laws, only to have the Tories in Westminster destroy that good work in six weeks, with a first-ever veto. Harder still to believe that what gave the British conservatives the political cover to take that step was the foolish actions of Scots from an allegedly progressive political party: particularly Ash Regan. This was transphobia covered by a feminist fig leaf of concern that violent men would start turning up at women’s refuges, waving their recently-acquired gender recognition certificates in the air, demanding entry.

Hardest of all for me to believe, is that thousands of SNP members thought these attitudes were consistent with having the stature to lead their country.

Sometime soon, I will fly back to Scotland, wearing a skirt, to scatter my mother’s ashes on Loch Long. As I walk through customs and baggage claim, I will have to wonder what people think of me. My mother did not have an issue with my gender identity. Why should any of them?