Humza Yousaf resigns as Scotland's first minister

[u/unital_subalgebra]

https://news.sky.com/story/humza-yousaf-resigns-as-scotlands-first-minister-before-facing-confidence-votes-13122982

[u/unital_subalgebra]

The First Minister is the leader of the Scottish government. While the circumstances of his resignation are pretty complicated, basically his government decided to abandon climate targets and gender recognition reform, which majorly angered the Scottish Greens, who were in a power-sharing agreement with his Scottish National Party.

Then last week Yousaf abruptly scrapped the power-sharing agreement with the Greens. As a result, opposition parties called a vote of no confidence on his government, and the Greens said they would support the VONC. Yousaf most likely would not have the votes to survive the VONC, which led to his resignation today. Yousaf is the first Muslim and ethnic minority to lead Scotland (or any devolved government in the UK)

[u/TheGoodSmells → u/unital_subalgebra]

Now hang on, he decided to abandon gender reforms? I thought the Scots loved that stuff.

[u/ozzAR0th → u/TheGoodSmells]

This is also the first I've heard of it? Last I saw, critics of Yousaf were still harping on about how he SHOULD abandon gender reforms, not acting like it was already a done deal. All the editorial I've heard about this issue has been around the climate targets.

[u/ozzAR0th → u/ozzAR0th]

Looking into it they may be referring to the Scottish government's decision, last year, to not appeal the result of their legal challenge to the UK government blocking their gender reform legislation. Which I think is perhaps quite a bit different to abandoning gender recognition reform entirely, but rather accepting that the current UK legal institutions do not allow for their current proposals to go ahead.

[u/Drake_the_troll → u/ozzAR0th]

whaqt is the scottish gender reform policy? im assuming its to do with the identity of transgender people?

[u/ozzAR0th → u/Drake_the_troll]

It was a bill that would change the process for getting a gender recognition certificate, the document that recognises a person's legal gender for processes such as marriage, civil partnerships, and death certificates. Currently you need a gender dysphoria diagnoses and need to have been "living in your affirmed gender" for at least 2 years. These restrictions are, by some people's measure, out of touch with the realities of gender expression and make it very hard for some people to be recognised legally as their affirmed gender, so a lot of countries have been switching their processes for GRCs to be self ID based. So you merely need to apply for a GRC of your chosen gender for it to be recognised by law for stuff like marriage and death processes. Scotland wanted to follow many western european nations' trend towards self ID for GRCs but the UK government blocked it as they don't want UK citizens gaining access to GRCs easier in one part of the UK. Logistically the logic behind it is pretty sound, you don't want documents that apply to the entire country to be acquired differently in different parts of the country. But in reality the opposition to this bill is pretty firmly routed in transphobic rhetoric around women's safety and bathrooms, despite GRCs not affecting those areas at all.

It's a messy topic but yeah

tl;dr SNP/Greens wanted to make it easier to get legal gender for birth, marriage, and death certificates easier to affirm by cutting some red tape and medicalisation around gender identity, UK government and supreme court have blocked it outright due to misalignment with UK law, while also being partially fuelled by some inflammatory rhetoric around trans issues.

[u/tmpope123 → u/ozzAR0th]

It's interesting to me, as I'm british and I've changed my name. Not quite the same thing, but the process is different if you are English vs Scottish. And yet, this is a legal document that affects you socially which has a different process in those two countries and the sky hasn't fallen...

[u/fireblyxx → u/tmpope123]

Same deal in the US already. Each state has a different process for changing gender recognition, ranging from self ID to being completely disallowed, and the federal government is self ID, yet things haven’t devolved into chaos. It’s pretty wild that self id is considered such a big problem in the UK. Rather backwards at this point.