Rishi Sunak's government has decided to seize the power granted to it by the 1998 Scotland Act, the text that returned self-government to that nation that is part of the United Kingdom.
For the first time in 25 years, London will block a law approved by the Autonomous Parliament, according to the BBC, and will head towards a direct confrontation with the pro-independence Executive of Edinburgh.
This is the Gender Recognition Reform Law, which eliminates the requirement of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria so that trans people can obtain for themselves, from the age of 16, legal recognition of the gender in which they they have chosen to live.
The decision, which is also part of one of the most virulent and divisive "culture wars" that the country has experienced in recent years,
The Minister for Scotland, Alister Jack, will begin the parliamentary procedures this Tuesday, according to the British public news service, for the application of Section 35 of the Scottish Law, which will prevent the endorsement and actual enactment of the recently approved reform and, therefore, its validity.
Sunak's government alleges that the Scottish reform clashes head-on with the 2010 Equality Act, a general text intended to protect citizens against all kinds of discrimination, a matter that is clearly the responsibility of the British central government.
In England, gender determination recognition requires a medical diagnosis.
Former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May wanted to promote a reform similar to the one approved by Edinburgh, but she did not have enough support among her deputies.
Her successor, Boris Johnson, with the pragmatism that characterized him, decided to keep in the drawer a bill that only affected a minority and augured notable headaches with the hard wing of the Conservative Party.
As on many other occasions, Johnson's
liberal
and libertarian streak ended where he glimpsed signs of personal discomfort.
The Minister for Equality of the Sunak Government, Kemi Badenoch, has been one of the voices that has most firmly taken a position against the Scottish reform.
She is one of the favorite political figures of the conservative hard-wing, and her resignation from the competition and express support for the current prime minister's candidacy was instrumental in her election.
Badenoch has made a banner in recent years of its fight against
woke progressivism
, and constantly airs —and magnifies— the fears of all those who think that the new laws can lead to abuses in spaces reserved until now exclusively for women.
The writer JK Rowling, the multimillionaire author of the saga of the young wizard's apprentice Harry Potter, has received virulent attacks and criticism on social networks for pointing out cases of sexual abuse in changing rooms, bathrooms and female prisons by people who in their day they were male and transitioned.
Sunak's government, supported by its legal advisers, has expressed similar fears before the new law passed in Edinburgh, and has gone so far as to expose the hypothetical case of a Scottish prisoner who ended up in an English women's prison.
“I am concerned about the way in which single-sex clubs, single-sex associations or schools operate now, the way in which equal pay is protected from now on or the chilling effects of the new law in separate spaces for sex [changing rooms or bathrooms]”, Minister Jack said.
“If [Downing Street] finally decides to defy our reform, I would see it as a political move, using trans people – already one of the most vulnerable and stigmatized groups in our society – as a political weapon.” , said the main minister of Scotland, the nationalist Nicola Sturgeon, on Monday.
"I think it will be something shameful, indefensible and with a lot of lack of conscience," she added.
The decision, a "nuclear button" in the United Kingdom, but which in Spain would be equivalent to the usual constitutional conflict of powers between the central government and the autonomies, is on its way to ending in a new confrontation in the courts between Edinburgh and London, whose relations they are already tense enough with Sturgeon's decision to go ahead with his independence plans.
Support with shades of Labor
Despite the fact that the majority of Scottish Labor members supported the reform approved by the Autonomous Parliament -only two of them resigned in order to vote against-, the national leader, Keir Starmer, who has decided to avoid a matter during his two years at the helm of the party so thorny and divisive for the left, has shown in recent hours to support, with nuances, the decision of the Sunak government.
“I have serious reservations about the Scottish reform, especially in the reduction of the legal age to 16 years, and in the rejection of the Home Rule Parliament to some of the amendments that Labor presented to the text, regarding its relationship with the Law of Equality," Starmer told the BBC.
Sometimes a specialist in swimming between two waters, the Labor leader has accused London and Sunak of using such a delicate issue as self-determination of gender as “a soccer ball”.
“There are a small number of people who do not identify with the gender they were born into.
There is currently a process to change that, and there are unworthy parts of that process that need to be improved with a modernization of the law," Starmer said, "but I don't want to get dragged into the usual toxic, political game of football in which this issue it ends up becoming”, has assured the leader of a party whose women, as in other European social democratic formations, live their own intense internal debate on this issue.
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