MEMBERS of the Scottish Gypsy Traveller community have warned that a landmark DNA study could threaten their identity and hard-won legal protections.
The University of Edinburgh study, published in July, concluded Scottish Travellers are a genetically distinct population with "deep indigenous roots in Scotland".
However, campaigners, academics and members of the community have questioned whether the findings could be weaponised to undermine the community's recognised ethnic minority status, downplay longstanding cultural links with Romani peoples, or be used to define who is and is not a Scottish Gypsy Traveller.
The concerns come against a backdrop of centuries of persecution faced by Scottish Gypsy Travellers, including the “Tinker Experiments” – decades-long attempts by the UK Government and Scottish local authorities to forcibly “assimilate” travellers into society.
The Scottish Government officially apologised in 2025 for trauma caused by the “unfair and unjust” policy.
Among those raising concerns campaigner is Shamus McPhee, who lives on one of the former Tinker Experiment sites and says his family were directly affected by the policy.
McPhee and others said this history of oppression means many Gypsy Travellers remain deeply cautious about institutions collecting information about them or attempting to define their identity.
He believes the study's conclusion that Scottish Travellers have "deep indigenous roots" risks overshadowing evidence of the community's Romani heritage and centuries-old linguistic and cultural links to northern India.
Dr Bennett Collins, a politics lecturer at the University of Aberdeen who specialises in cultural violence, told The National that genetic research involving historically marginalised communities raises particular ethical concerns.
He said: "When you consider the fact that race and ethnicity are both socially constructed identities, geneticists are providing evidence through DNA testing that these groups are inherently static.
"This is dangerous because these kinds of studies can give a green light to any organisation or individual across Scotland to become a participant in determining who is and isn't a Gypsy Traveller.
"At the end of the day, Gypsy Travellers in Scotland are the first and foremost experts of who does and doesn't belong in their own communities."
One of the principal concerns centres on a landmark 2008 tribunal ruling, which recognised Scottish Gypsy Travellers as an ethnic group protected under equality legislation, following extensive historical evidence. Some within the community fear the study's emphasis on indigenous Scottish ancestry could be seized upon to challenge that recognition.
Professor Jim Wilson, who led the study, rejected that suggestion.
He told The National: "I find this to be a very unusual idea, because the fact that a community is genetically distinct – one of the main findings of our study – is part of many definitions of ethnicity.
"Our work therefore strengthens the ethnic minority status of the Scottish Travellers while at the same time affirming many Travellers' long-held belief that they had deep connections to Scotland."
Critics have also questioned how the study’s participants were recruited.
Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly, a retired community development academic who has researched Traveller history, told The National she believed the recruitment process relied too heavily on people self-identifying as Scottish Gypsy Travellers.
A read of the study’s methods page confirms that Traveller ancestry was “self-reported” and “broadly defined”.
She also questioned whether the sample contained too many closely related individuals to be representative of the wider community.
Wilson rejected those criticisms. He said the study was co-designed with Scottish Travellers and publicised through numerous Traveller organisations, Facebook groups and word of mouth.
Participants were required to have at least two Traveller grandparents, while the population genetic analyses only included individuals no more closely related than second cousins, in line with standard practice, Wilson told the National.
He added that researchers had undertaken extensive genealogical work, that the surnames of participants closely matched those historically associated with Scottish Travellers and that the study recruited almost 5% of the living Scottish Traveller population – a far higher proportion than is typical in genetic research.
"The fact that every single Scottish Traveller with all four grandparents declared to be Scottish Travellers grouped together in genetic space is evidence that if further participants were recruited, they would also plot in the same part of genetic space," Wilson said.
Others have argued the study risks diminishing the community's cultural and linguistic connections with Romani populations and the Indian subcontinent.
Collins said the research had rendered "long-standing ancestral and cultural ties" to the Indian subcontinent "inconsequential to the wider public when determining the Scottish Gypsy Traveller identity".
McPhee also challenged that interpretation of the community's origins, pointing to both the language traditionally spoken by his community and the results of private DNA tests undertaken by some of his relatives.
He added that words used in Scottish Traveller Cant could be traced back to the Indian subcontinent, adding: "I think that this is a bit of a one-sided interpretation, whereby other considerations are not being taken into account, like the fact that people do have Indian DNA, the fact that they do speak Indian-root vocabulary."
He also stressed that he believed the fundamental problem was treating Scottish Gypsy Travellers as a single homogeneous community.
"I don't think they can make sweeping statements that include everyone, because the reality is somewhat different," he said.
"What I'm seeing here is this tendency to just tick a box and classify everybody as the same when, in fact, there are a lot of different elements there."
Wilson disputed that interpretation, saying: "Cultural links are nothing to do with DNA. Our study didn't test for genetic links to the Indian subcontinent, so that is an open question."
Campaigners have also questioned whether the findings could one day be used to define Scottish Gypsy Traveller identity.
Collins pointed to the historical use of "blood quantum" laws affecting Native American communities as an example of why some members of the community remain uneasy about genetics being linked to identity.
Wilson said there was "no precedent in Scottish or English law for using genetic data as a criterion for membership of any group".
"DNA should not be the basis of cultural rights, in Scotland or anywhere else," he said.
He added that the data is stored on secure University of Edinburgh servers and cannot be freely shared.
According to Wilson, any future sharing would require ethical approval and agreement from the study's Scottish Traveller Public-Participant Involvement panel, which is made up of Traveller representatives.
Despite the criticism, Wilson said the response from many Scottish Travellers had been overwhelmingly positive.
"We have been very pleased with the overwhelmingly positive response from the Scottish Traveller community, including people being moved to tears to finally know more about their genetic ties and others deciding to engage with their healthcare providers," he said.
