After reading For Women Scotland’s exclamation point-laden blog post about how a change to the Scottish Parliament website had effectively made women invisible, I held my breath and thought, we are well and truly cooked.

Essentially, until May 18, if you visited the Scottish Parliament’s official website, you could filter MSPs by several demographic factors, and one of them was gender. The options were previously “male” or “female”, but the recent election returned Holyrood’s first two transgender MSPs – the Scottish Greens’ Iris Duane and Q Manivannan. The government’s IT department briefly updated the filter to include a “non-binary” option for Manivannan while listing Duane in the “female” category.

The filter was then removed entirely, with the official explanation being that the “systems and processes are currently under review” as part of the “Inclusive Parliament Review”. “The online filter function on our website is a legacy system, and we have taken steps to remove it,” they added. “The review will also consider what personal information on members we need to publish and in what format.”

Now, contrary to For Women Scotland’s factually incorrect claim that “the option to search for female MSPs vanished overnight, and along with it, the public record of women’s current and historical representation in Parliament”, the website filter was never the official record of MSP demographics. This kind of data is tracked in the SPICe factsheet system, which is not being dismantled and is publicly accessible. These fact sheets are being updated for Session 7 as a matter of course (the election only happened two weeks ago).

The Supreme Court case won by For Women Scotland in 2025 said that, for Equality Act purposes, “woman”, “man”, and “sex” mean biological sex, but that ruling was about how discrimination law works in specific situations.........

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