There are now exactly two weeks remaining of the Scottish Government’s second fake “consultation” into its proposed reforms to gender law.

We say “fake” not out of cynicism or mad paranoia, but because the cabinet minister responsible for the reforms has already made it explicitly, publicly and repeatedly clear that she intends to press ahead with them regardless of the responses, and that the only purpose of the “consultation” is to try to persuade people to agree with them.

Shirley-Anne Somerville reiterated this position just days ago, telling Scotland Tonight that she was “absolutely determined” to enact the bill and only interested in silencing opposition and removing any “medicalisation” of the process of gender transition.

While the Scottish Government has met literally hundreds of times with transactivist groups with regard to the reforms, it has refused to meet women’s groups critical of them, and frequently lied about that refusal.

(It also funds transactivist pressure groups with hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayer money to create a “feedback loop” supporting its position. Gender-critical women’s groups receive no such funding, largely because the conditions attached to Scottish Government funding specifically and deliberately exclude them.)

The consultation document and the draft bill leave enormous logical and legislative gaps which are likely to cause untold chaos if the reforms are implemented. The Scottish Government has apparently learned nothing from the shambolic fiascos around the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act and Named Person legislation, both of which have collapsed despite widespread public support – something the proposed gender reforms emphatically do NOT enjoy.

We’re obliged for the sake of sanity to assume that at some point the First Minister, the Cabinet Secretary or both will have to undertake at least one proper interview on the subject of these extremely serious and potentially catastrophic proposals.

For the consideration of whoever may conduct these interviews, we submit below some questions which a very considerable number of people in Scotland – primarily but by no means exclusively women, and encompassing a majority of every political and social demographic – urgently want answered.

1. “What is a woman?”

The big one. It seems extraordinary that a bill entirely concerned with whether people are legally men or women makes no attempt whatsoever to define the meaning of those terms. The existing dictionary definitions are both clear, and unambiguously exclude any possibility of people changing from one sex to the other.

No “transwoman” ever has produced or ever will produce an egg. No “transman” ever has produced or ever will produce sperm. The definition of “woman” absolutely and categorically excludes any man from ever meeting it, and vice versa.

(This article applies to transition in both directions, but will chiefly focus on male-to-female both for readability and because it’s the main issue of contention. Very few men feel at risk of any kind from transmen.)

The Scottish Government proposes to destroy these universally-accepted terms which have been in use for as long as human language, but is wholly unable to state what definitions it proposes to replace them with.

This is a self-evidently ludicrous and unsustainable basis for any legislation. You cannot make law on the basis of undefined terms. You may as well pass an act mandating a 25-year prison sentence for anyone caught froogsnorgling, even though nobody knows what that word means.

(Almost as basic is the fact that nobody can actually say what the word “gender” means either. Birth certificates and passports record a person’s SEX, not their gender, and gender is not in fact recorded in any legal document, yet transactivists insist that the two words do not mean the same thing. Vague circular gibberish about “it’s about your sense of yourself as a person”, with at least 178 variations available and new ones invented every day, is not the stuff of lawmaking.)

2. “The proposals require any person who proposes to transition to live in their preferred gender for a period of at least three months. How can this be verified? What does ‘living in a gender’ actually constitute?”

The Queen and an immigrant cleaner in Hackney working three jobs to try to keep her head above water live in the same city but do not, by any discernible measure, lead similar lives. We further suspect that the life of the pop star Lady Gaga is not at all like that of the average Hindu or Aboriginal tribeswoman forced to cower in a “menstrual hut” for one week of every month, or that of an African teenager subjected to female genital mutilation, or a Chinese woman covertly aborting her baby because it’s a girl.

(But how can they even tell, when sex is only “assigned at birth”?)

The only thing linking those women is their biology. Which of them will the Scottish Government require men wishing to “transition” to emulate? Which stereotypes will be deemed to be acceptable evidence of their new “femaleness”? Wearing pretty flowery dresses? Sewing and cooking? Getting paid less? Giggling?

How exactly do you “live as a woman” when all women are different? Once again, you cannot make law which refuses to define its own basic terms, so how could this law possibly be upheld or enforced or safeguarded against abuse? Which reminds us:

3. “The sole safeguard offered against abuse of this law is that people must make a solemn declaration to live in their chosen gender for the rest of their lives, on pain of a two-year jail sentence. What will happen if – as many people with gender dysphoria do – they subsequently change their mind and wish to revert to their birth sex?”

The draft bill, astonishingly, makes no provision at all for detransitioning. A person who alters their legal gender is expected to do so for their entire life. Even if they decide within a year that they’ve made a mistake, the proposals allow for no escape – they MUST remain imprisoned in what they now consider to be the wrong sex until death, on pain of actual imprisonment.

The implied reality, of course, is that in such an event the government would simply allow them to make another solemn lifelong declaration in the opposite direction. And then, if need be, another and another and another, back and forth, ad infinitum, making a mockery of the whole idea.

(Alternatively, the First Minister or Cabinet Secretary will be obliged to specify a limit on the number of do-overs allowed. Perhaps interviewers could also ask them if they favour such a limit and where they would set it. Odd or even number?)

This, we should note, is something that already happens elsewhere – half the people who get married make notionally lifelong vows then break them. But marriage is not a state that permits abusers special access to places normally reserved for vulnerable women. A man who marries a woman isn’t suddenly entitled to enter women’s single-sex changing rooms or refuges.

As a safeguard against abuse, the requirement for a solemn declaration is quite obviously completely meaningless and ineffectual.

4. “How could you ever prove a false declaration had been made?”

Let’s imagine for a moment that a rapist obtains a Gender Recognition Certificate via self-ID deliberately in order to gain access to vulnerable women, and commits rapes. He would then face conviction and sentencing for the rapes, and would in theory be subject to an extra two years for the false declaration.

(Which we’re sure would be a huge comfort to the victims, but hey.)

But if women can have penises – and under gender laws they can – then they can be rapists. So how could a court possibly determine whether the perpetrator was a man pretending to be a woman in order to more easily rape them, or simply an actual penis-wielding female rapist?

Plainly, short of a confession there is no possible way to make such a distinction. The “safeguard” is once again a meaningless nonsense. Which brings us conveniently to our next problem.

5. “You claim that convicted transgender criminals would be subject to risk assessment before being incarcerated in women’s prisons, and if judged a danger to women would instead be held in the male estate. Does this also apply to biologically-female offenders?”

The insistence of Shirley-Anne Somerville and Nicola Sturgeon that transwomen are actual literal women is plainly inconsistent with treating them differently in any way to biological women. So if we’re to accept that dangerous male-bodied “women” may be held in the male prison estate, there can be no justification for not doing the same with dangerous female-bodied women.

And yet everyone knows that will never happen. There would quite rightly be an outcry if a biological woman, no matter how violent, was ever placed in a male prison. On this alone, the entire premise of the reforms – and indeed the whole core fiction of the 2004 Gender Reform Act – collapses utterly. Transwomen CANNOT be women, because if they were you couldn’t treat them differently for any reason and they’d all have to be put in women’s jails no matter what they’d done.

6. “Does your risk-assessment process for prisoners also apply to any other situations, such as biological males being placed in women’s hospital wards?”

Safeguards which only apply retrospectively are not safeguards at all, merely retribution. So women are entitled to know whether there will be any efforts made to determine the potential hazard represented by a male-bodied person being admitted to a place where women are especially vulnerable to attack or fear of attack.

Both the Scottish and UK governments have publicly committed for many years to end mixed-sex hospital wards for this and other reasons, and the practice is publicly abhorred and castigated by all parties both in government and opposition, yet the draft bill proposes no way to prevent abuse of self-declaration in this field.

Indeed, as with all other aspects of the reforms, patients complaining about having someone of the opposite sex placed on their ward are likely to be called a bigot by staff, accused of perpetrating a “hate incident” and questioned by the police.

(The law already makes it a crime to disclose, and in most cases to even ask, whether someone you suspect is not the sex they claim to be has a GRC or not.)

Almost none of the exceptions that the Scottish Government says will protect women’s rights to safe single-sex spaces can in practice be exercised without breaking the law by challenging a person’s apparent sex.

This, it should be noted, is already a problem with the current law, but the massive expansion in the numbers of people able to legally declare themselves the opposite sex will render a difficult situation impossible.

These are just a few of the most obvious and concerning questions that the Scottish Government has until now flatly refused to address regarding its proposals. We’ve put them here because frankly we’re not at all sure how long they’ll survive on Twitter under transactivists’ continual assault on gender-critical views on the platform.

We sincerely hope that at SOME point a representative of the Scottish Government will be asked to answer them, and that someone is on hand with a broom to sweep up all the wreckage after they do.