Late last year, I opened The Herald to find a columnist castigating my organisation For Women Scotland (FWS) for not caring enough about the broader harms and abuses faced by women. The fight, she said, that mattered to her was the one that ensured women didn’t end up strangled by the men in their lives. This was odd because, as a director of the rape crisis centre Beira’s Place I had been involved in a pretty high profile campaign on non-fatal strangulation. Marissa MacWhirter has now written a second piece on women’s issues and, once again, it’s less about substantive problems and more a rant about women who know that sex is a material reality.

The jumping-off point for her latest column is an FWS blog post about the removal of data recording the sex of MSPs from the Parliament website. Until last month, you might have thought that “gender-balance” was something of a goal for Civic Scotland, with support - and money - going to organisations promoting the election of women. At an International Women’s Day 2026 event in Holyrood, the CEO of Elect Her, Hannah Stevens, bemoaned the fact that data is not collected on the number of women elected as councillors.

Yet, as we see with depressing regularity, when women’s rights bump up against the demands of trans-identified men, women’s issues are relegated. It has surprised no one that, faced with two men who object to being categorised according to the law, officials at Holyrood caved and removed the facility to search for MSPs by sex.........

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