Scottish Government Consultation on proposal to add 'sex' as hate crime characteristic
- Oct 3, 2025
- 2 min read
Florence Oulds from Scottish Trans shares information about the Scottish Government Consultation on their proposal to add 'sex' as a characteristic under Hate Crime law in Scotland, including information for organisations who wish to respond. The consultation is open until Friday 10th October.
'The Scottish Government is proposing to add “sex” as one of the characteristics to our hate crime law. They are consulting on their proposals until Friday 10th October: https://consult.gov.scot/justice/ssi-to-add-sex-as-hate-crime-characteristic/
While this may sound like a positive step, there are two big problems. The first is that the women’s sector in Scotland don’t believe this is the right thing to do. Scotland reformed our hate crime law in 2021, and the expert organisations who work on gender equality and violence against women and girls all argued that adding sex to the law wouldn’t protect women.
The second is how they’ve chosen to define sex. The Scottish Government have copied and pasted the Supreme Court’s definition from April’s ruling on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act. This is despite the Supreme Court themselves saying their ruling applies only to that act, and that using the definition won’t at all improve the way hate crime law works when it comes to protecting any woman – cis or trans – from hate crime.
But what it will do is make that Supreme Court ruling have an even wider impact than it already has, or that it needs to. And the Scottish Government will become the first in the UK to specifically write into law that “sex” means “biological sex at birth”. It may also mean that sex could be defined this way in all Scottish law going forward.
We would really appreciate it if you had time to respond to the consultation opposing their proposals to define sex in this way. Attached is a short guide explaining the situation in some more detail, with some suggestions about how you might effectively respond.'
For more information or if you would like to discuss this further, please contact Florence at Florence@equality-network.org.
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