With the government’s announcement on their planned rollback of trans rights expected next week, interesting political things are happening. Some I can’t talk about right now, but a couple I can.

Firstly there was a poll in Pink News today which revealed that 57% of women support the use of so-called “self-identification” in the process of changing your legal gender. (I use scare quotes because the phrase itself utterly fails to convey the extent of legal penalties that will fall on anyone shown to have made a false declaration.) Even more interesting from my point of view is the fact that obly 21% of women were against (the rest were “don’t know”) compared to 33% of men. So the anti-trans cause, which claims to be a women’s rights movement, gets more than 2/3 of its support from men. Odd that, men being so much more in favour of “women’s rights” than actual women.

But the really big news today is that the Welsh Government has come out firmly in favour of trans rights.

As you may remember, Scotland has a GRA reform bill in process. It has been shelved during the pandemic as the Scottish Parliament is busy with other things, but it does pretty much exactly that Theresa May’s proposals for England & Wales would have done.

Wales does not have the right to pass such a law, but it does have the right to complain to Westminister and that is what they have done. In their letter the Welsh government speaks of having consulted with the trans community in Wales whom they say are, “dismayed at the increasing likelihood of a regression in their Human Rights as trans people.”

Furthermore, the Welsh government states:

While the thrust of the Gender Recognition Act may deal with matters which are reserved, we will explore what actions may be open to us to support trans people in related areas which are within devolved competence.

It is unclear exactly what they can do, and will remain so until Westminster publishes its plans. What does seem clear is that if Westminister wants to roll back trans rights, as Liz Truss has promised, then it will have to fight both Scotland and Wales to do so. (For all I know they would have to fight Northern Ireland too, but those folks are way too busy with Bozo’s plans to set up customs posts between NI and mainland Britain as part of Brexit.)

They don’t call it the Untied Kingdom for nothing,