Nicola Sturgeon blames transphobes for her downfall (Free to Read)

Yet under her watch male rapists were placed in women’s jails while raped women were counselled by natal men

Nicola Sturgeon has finally conceded what everyone already knew: transgender debate, and the controversy over Self-ID legislation, was a major factor in her decision to step down as First Minister so precipitately in February 2023.  Not the only reason of course.  Her failure to “move the dial” on independence and her crackpot plans for turning the next general election into a “defacto” referendum contributory factors.

But the scandal in January 2023 over the double rapist, Isla Bryson (aka Adam Graham) being placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison, where a number of male bodied sex offenders were already housed, was the proximate cause of the downfall of Scotland’s most successful politician. It confirmed that the policy of Self-ID for transgender people, which had been piloted by the Scottish Prison Service, could be used by natal men to gain access to women’s spaces. Ms Sturgeon had repeatedly claimed this concern was “not valid” and that her flagship bill to allow men to become legally female merely by declaration posed no threat to women.

In her talk to the Charleston literary festival - book events have taken the place of parliament as her platform of choice - she complained about the “unprecedented abuse” she’d received over the trans issue and cited the "polarisation of politics” as the reason for her decision to resign. It was all about me: “If I take myself out of that” she said,” maybe the politics, the discourse and the debate in Scotland will be a bit more healthy”. This was a puzzling mea culpa because it inadvertently conceded that she had been part of the problem even as she insisted she wasn’t. She blames the “bad faith” actors who criticised the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (GRRB) for debasing political discourse.   

Yet it was Nicola Sturgeon who insisted, and continues to insist, that “trans women are women” and that if anyone disagrees they are, as she put it during the passage of the GRRB, not only transphobic but: ‘deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well’. That portrayal of women such as the author JK Rowling and Ms Sturgeon’s own former colleague, Joanna Cherry KCMP, is about as polarising as you can get. There is nothing more “toxic” in progressive Scotland than comparing people to racists.

She has repeatedly claimed that it was not possible to conduct a “rational debate” about the Gender Bill while being unable to see the irrationality of her own belief that people can be born in the wrong bodies. There is something about this ubiquitous phrase, “trans women are women” that seems to rob politicians, public bodies and private corporations of their common sense and political nous. Gender ideology is deeply embedded in the education system at all levels, even in primary schools where children are indoctrinated in the gender jargon.   The network of government-funded LGBT advisors embedded in the state and corporations have sought to demote women to the offensive label “cis”, while language has been doctored in NHS maternity wards to remove sex-specific terms like “mother”.  The gender craze also led to an almost mediaeval witchhunt against women who refused to accept it. In 2019, the judge in an industrial tribunal, involving the researcher Maya Forstater, actually said that believing in the reality of biological sex “is not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.  That not only beggars belief it ransacks reason itself.

Fortunately, attitudes are beginning to change, in the UK at least. This week in a landmark case, the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre has been censured by a tribunal for its treatment of a gender critical employee, Roz Adams. The judge, Ian McFatridge, said that she had been subjected to “heresy hunt” that was “reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka”.   Ms Adams explained that she’d first heard the mantra “transwomen are women” when she was out for a walk with the chief operating officer, Maggie Chapman. It was made clear there and then that it was not possible to question this proposition because to do so is transphobic.  Ms Adams continued to be concerned about how traumatised rape victims would react to being counselled by someone who was obviously male-bodied. That led to a cloud of suspicion being placed upon her and then a length disciplinary procedure which ultimately forced her out of her job.

The boss of the government-funded Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre was herself a trans women, Mridul Wadwha. The tribunal found that she had authorised the discriminatory procedure against Adams on the grounds that she was transphobic.  Wadhwa believes that “sexual violence happens to bigoted people as well” and that rape victims should “reframe their trauma”. In other words if they are uncomfortable being counselled by trans women they should just get over it.  Wadhwa even insisted that the very word “trans woman” is transphobic because it suggests the person isn’t a fully-fledged woman. As it happens, he lacks a gender recognition certificate and is therefore legally male.

The irrationality of this dogma is so obvious, even to people who support what is called “trans rights”, that it has become totemic of what has become a catastrophic intellectual and moral failing on the left. It has rightly brought public obloquy and suspicion on the so called “progressives” who have been parroting this slogan for the last decade. It is not only the left that is in the dock for genuflecting to the trans dogma: conservative politicians like the leadership contender, Penny Mordaunt, and the current education secretary, Gillian Keegan, are on record for using mantra that “trans women are women”.  They insist now that they didn’t really mean it and don’t use the phrase any longer.  But it is the progressive left that has most to answer for. The theorists and leading popularisers of gender ideology have almost invariably come from the left - like the US academic, Judith Butler, and the Guardian columnist, Owen Jones. Butler argues that people who don’t accept that trans women are women are essentially fascist while Jones has spent years equating criticism of gender ideology with homophobia.

The negation of women has been the most extreme dimension identity politics that has largely replaced the old class politics of the industrial era.  But environmental politics has also been infected by this intellectual virus. The Scottish Green Party has recently expelled 13 members, including their former leader, Robin Harper, for arguing that “sex is a biological reality”.  It is hard to imagine a more self-destructive posture for a democratic political party aspiring to government.  Yet until last month the Scottish Greens were were actually in coalition with the SNP in the Scottish Parliament. It was the failure of their leader, Patrick Harvie, to accept the scientific validity of the Cass Review into gender services that precipitated their unceremonious ejection from that coalition.

Dr Cass has finally exposed the dangers of telling confused young people that they are born in the wrong body and need puberty blocking drugs and/or  surgery to align their physiology with their gender soul. It will hopefully draw a line under what has been the definitive intellectual passion of the age of social media. Gender ideology led to a situation where male rapists are placed in women’s jails while women who have been raped by men are expected to be counselled and consoled by men who say they’re women. The feelings of men who want to be treated as women have been given precedence over the rights and sensibilities of actual women. This is now being successfully challenged by women who will not stay silent, or “wheesht” as they say in Scotland. But it has placed the left, not only on the wrong side of history, but on the wrong side of human biology.  Women will not forgive or forget.