HUMZA Yousaf has said the way the SNP handled legislation that would have made it easier for people to switch gender was "clearly a mistake".
The former first minister supported the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would have allowed people to legally switch sex from the age of 16 by simply declaring they had lived in their acquired gender for six months.
He accused the UK Government of “a power grab” when it ruled the bill was incompatible with the UK Equality Act.
Yousaf has now said the handling of the legislation by his party was poor but maintains trying to make life easier for trans people was the right course of action.
He told Times Radio: “The way we handled that, it clearly was a mistake. There’s no two ways about it.
"I still stand by the fact that trying to make life easier for trans people who have had so many dog whistles against them, have, I think, an over-medicalised process when it comes to gaining a gender recognition certificate, was the right thing to do.”
Yousaf said the Supreme Court ruling that the term “woman” referred to biology “of course should be respected” but he warned against using its provisions to impose tough restrictions on trans people.
He said: “When a court makes a judgment, it should be respected. But I would urge people to take time to understand the interpretation. I think some of the interpretations don’t actually align with the judgment.
“I think we just have to take some time as public bodies to make sure that we are not inadvertently making our workplaces, for example, more unsafe for women.”
He said: “I’ve lived my whole life as a minority in this country, and my rights don’t exist in a vacuum. My rights are completely interdependent on everybody else’s rights and if they are attacking the rights of our trans community or anybody who is in a marginalised minority community, then they’ll come for me next.”
Over the weekend, Yousaf's predecessor Nicola Sturgeon said the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman had been “massively misinterpreted”.
The former first minister was speaking at the How the Light Gets In festival in Hay-on-Wye on Saturday, and said she would “always be an ally of the trans community”.
The Sunday Times reports that Sturgeon told the festival the Supreme Court judgment set out “what the law is, there is no gain saying that”.
But she added it was the job of politicians to “decide what the law should be or has to be”.
Lady Hale, the first female president of the Supreme Court, also said the ruling had been “misinterpreted”, and that there was “nothing in that judgment that says that you can’t have gender-neutral loos”.
In the weeks following the judgment, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) released interim guidance that banned transgender people from using the bathroom of their acquired gender.
Sturgeon referenced Hale’s comments, adding: “That judgment, I think, has been massively overinterpreted in terms of some of the immediate reactions to it."
