Cherry says gender critical views have ruined SNP leadership hopes

“I didn't believe him, but I think he was right, actually," she told a debate on free speech organised by the Reform Scotland thinktank. 

The event was organised following the Stand Comedy Club’s decision to cancel a booking involving Ms Cherry because key venue personnel were “unwilling to work on this event” due to the politician’s belief that sex is immutable.

Others taking part included Kate Forbes, who said MSP and MP supporters of her leadership bid had abandoned her because they were "fearful of being hounded.”

Her bid to replace Nicola Sturgeon as first minister was left in chaos just hours after she launched her campaign when she told press she would have voted against gay marriage had she been an MSP at the time of the vote. 

Backers including Richard Lochhead, Pete Wishart, Gillian Martin, Clare Haughey, and Tom Arthur all walked away. 

READ MORE: SNP politicians drop Kate Forbes support after gay rights opposition

Ms Forbes - a member of the socially conservative Free Church of Scotland - was also criticised by a number of prominent SNP politicians and activists.

She told the debate: “I was really struck during my own situation that those who knew my views and came out instinctively in support of me, and then withdrew support, were fearful of being hounded themselves in the same way that I was being hounded and they had to abandon public support for fear that they too would be subject to the same treatment.”

Ms Forbes said that there was an attempt to shut her down. 

“It's not about debating and disputing somebody's views. It's about using tactics, like boycott, like isolation, like sacking somebody, like employing accusations that are not founded in reality, to ensure that somebody doesn't have a voice.”

The MSP pointed to the complaint made about her to the SNP’s ruling NEC because she called trans rapist Isla Bryson a man. 

Ms Forbes told the debate: “Scrutiny of public figures really matters. That scrutiny takes the form of querying, questioning, debating. It's accountability, but you can't scrutinize that which will not be heard. And it's so important, for the truth to out when there is that fair, respectful debate.” 

She added: “I didn't quite follow the intricacies of the news. I think I was subjected to a complaint for saying that Isla Bryson was a man. And that's another tactic of trying to shut people down. 

“But scrutiny matters. And I think defending scrutiny means defending freedom of speech, especially if you believe in the truth.” 

She said there was a “culture of fear that is suppressing the opportunity to have a fair, free debate” and “stymieing good discussion.” 

Ms Forbes added: “It will inevitably stymie art, comedy, journalism, all the different occupations that rely on that freedom to foster good ideas.” 

The MSP said the treatment of concerns raised by MSPs over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was "just completely unacceptable."

"Therefore it meant that there was no hope of building a bridge that we could have built at the beginning."

READ MORE: Joanna Cherry threatens legal action over cancelled Fringe show at Stand

Also on the panel was the poet Jenny Lindsay, who said she had been “hounded out of a livelihood” because she believes women are “materially definable as a category of human being” and “that women are legislatively important on the basis of that category.” 

She said those set of beliefs “have been allowed to become so toxic that not just politicians like Joanna Cherry, and famous authors like JK Rowling, but individual poets, skint poets like myself, have been permitted to be hounded out of a livelihood.”

Ms Lindsay found herself coming under attack in 2019 when she criticised The Skinny magazine for printing a comment calling for “violent action” against gender critcial lesbians at a Pride March. 

“My publisher was harassed. People who worked with me were harassed. Now, bear in mind, I'm not a public figure and all of this was kind of bubbling under the surface for about seven months. 

“People trying to get me fired from things, my income tanking and me not really 100 per cent knowing why. 

“And then it burst onto Twitter in February 2020, quite a febrile time just before a lockdown when a young poet I've never met called me a terf and tried to harass a small publisher to drop me from their programme. 

“I retaliated of course, and then the Scottish Poetry Library got involved issuing a statement. opposing calls for no platforming, they fought against other poets, which led to almighty hell and the SPL accused of institutional transphobia and all of the time this has been reported in the papers with my name sort of attached to it, but people weren't 100% sure what I'd done, just that you got to avoid me now.”

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Ms Cherry said despite being an out lesbian since the 80s she was no longer able to attend Pride because of fears for her personal safety. 

“I think universities, employers, political parties, have all been captured by a misrepresentation of the Equality Act,” she said.

"This is not a debate about trans rights. I'm not interested in debating trans rights. I accept that trans people have equal rights. 

“It would be surprising if I didn't, as a lawyer and chair of the Human Rights Committee. 

"But equal rights for trans people are protected under the Equality Act’s very broadly drawn protected characteristic of gender reassignment and no one I'm aware of is asking that that be removed. 

“But there's no human right to self-identification. The Strasbourg Court have been very clear about that, and so have our courts of our domestic legal systems in the United Kingdom. 

“There's no right for anyone to self-ID as the opposite sex with minimal safeguards, that just doesn't exist in law as a right and so that is up for debate. 

“I first stuck my head above the parapet on this issue in May 2019. And Fraser, my fantastic political adviser, warned me that when I did so it would probably damage my political career and ruin any chance I would ever have of putting myself forward for the SNP leadership. 

“I didn't believe him, but I think he was right, actually. 

“And I found it absolutely appalling. The onslaught on the views of me and other feminists and lesbians like me over the last few years, but I think it's really important for me as a politician to speak out. 

“It's quite hard to get rid of me unless my constituents kick me out. But people like Jenny are losing their livelihood. And so it's really important for people like me in public life to take a stand against not just no platforming, and an attack on free speech, but fundamentally discriminatory action against lesbians and feminists who don't accept gender identity ideology.”

READ MORE: Adult Human Female: University of Edinburgh cancels second screening

Katie Nicoll Baines, from Edinburgh University’s Staff Pride Network, who organised a protest against a screening of the Adult Human Female, said there was a lot of call for debate “without any real sort of practical mechanism or suggestion of how it's possible.” 

She added: “I think it links back to this culture of fear that people experience when the type of views or discussion or the topic of debate is experienced as an attack on somebody's rights and attack on somebody's right to be who they are safely in society. 

“A lot of this happens on a sort of philosophical level of like, you know, what is gender? What is sex? What are our beliefs about that? 

“But the actual material reality for people living their lives in Scotland and in the UK, and the rest of the world is to me what really matters. And so how can we build towards that kind of shared understanding of what's possible?”