ANAS Sarwar has been thoroughly called out from all sides after trying to claim that he had “always” opposed gender reform – but it is only the latest in a string of flip-flops on the issue from the Scottish Labour leader.
Here, the Jouker looks back at Sarwar’s history with gender reform in Scotland.
Let’s start the story back in 2021, just after Sarwar became Scottish Labour leader.
He went into that years’ Holyrood election on a manifesto that was clear: “We will reform the Gender Recognition Act to demedicalise the process and allow for the recognition of people who identify as neither men nor women.”
This was support for “self-ID”, where a trans person chooses their own gender without the need for a doctor to confirm their identity.
However, that bill was blocked from becoming law by the Tories’ Scottish secretary Alister Jack. He used Section 35 of the Scotland Act – a decision which was challenged in the courts but ultimately allowed to stand.
Once Westminster got involved, Scottish Labour and Sarwar’s position became much harder to pin down. In fact, Sarwar went pretty silent for a while.
Then, Keir Starmer said he had “concerns” about some of the provisions in the bill and was accused of “undermining” Scottish Labour’s position by Monica Lennon, the MSP who had lost out to Sarwar in the leadership race.
Ian Murray, the then-shadow Scottish secretary, framed the Tory block on the bill as an inability for the Tory and SNP governments to get along – a position Lennon described as “really disingenuous”. Nonetheless, it soon became Sarwar’s position.
He started talking about “protecting single-sex spaces based on biological sex” – as his Westminster bosses had been doing, and began raising questions about the same bill which he had supported.
By August 2023, Sarwar was saying that Labour had been “right to support the principles of the legislation”, but refused to say he supported the legislation itself. By this point, the UK Labour position had become the Scottish Labour position.
As 2024 wore on, Labour's anti-gender reform position solidified as they tried to avoid attacks from the right-wing media, who were unanimous in their opposition to the Scottish legislation which had become a UK-wide issue.
Sarwar attempted to lay the blame for having done so at the foot of the SNP Government – claiming he only backed the bill because he had taken it “at face value [when they] said that nothing in the legislation would negatively interact with the Equality Act”.
In fact, as the official Holyrood report shows, this was Scottish Labour’s position at the time as well.
Pam Duncan-Glancy, who led on the bill for Sarwar’s group, told the Scottish Parliament during the 2022 debate on gender reform: “Scottish Labour believes that, as the bill progresses, it should be clear that nothing in it affects the protections of the Equality Act 2010.”
In April, Sarwar then tried to “rewrite history”, claiming that he had “always” opposed gender reform and supported single-sex spaces based on biology.
He was swiftly called out – but then appeared to prepare for another U-turn if needs be, saying he would consider any further gender reform legislation tabled by the Scottish Government.
Those are Anas Sarwar’s principles. If you don’t like them, he has others.
