Sturgeon: trans women are still women whatever the court says

She upstaged John Swinney's Programme for Government with her dramatic challenge to the Equalities Commission.

You’ve got to hand it to her — Nicola Sturgeon is still a virtuoso when it comes to dominating the media. Choosing the day of her successor John Swinney’s Programme for Government speech as an opportunity to get her retaliation in to the Supreme Court and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission was as cheeky as it was effective.

Her intervention underlined the threadbare nature of Swinney’s legislative programme — she would never have delivered something so devoid of content and drama. It also allowed her to make best use of the press contingent who had all turned up to report on Swinney’s legislative agenda. Holyrood is so boring these days that many members of the press don’t bother to turn up. It only sits three days a week and is pretty dead in the afternoons thanks to those family-friendly hours.

Nicola Sturgeon is clearly not going to stay quiet on trans issues. It remains a key issue for her, unlike any other. She is evidently still not reconciled to the loss of her flagship Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which — as she pointed out today — was passed by an overwhelming majority of MSPs in December 2022 and then blocked by the UK Tory government. The Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, actually whipped his contingent to vote for it unamended — something he now accepts was a mistake.

The GRR Bill would have allowed anyone to change their legal sex by declaration alone, without any medical intervention. Any man could simply sign a document and become a woman under so-called self-ID. It was an astonishing measure which would have allowed natal men unrestricted access to women’s spaces such as changing rooms and domestic abuse refuges. It led to the emergence of one of the only genuine grassroots movements of recent times, in the shape of the ‘gender critical’ group For Women Scotland: The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, as the book of the same name has it.

The GRR Bill collapsed almost as soon as it was passed. In January 2023, a double rapist, Isla Bryson (aka Adam Graham), was placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison. It became a huge scandal as it emerged that other male sex offenders were being placed in the women’s estate. It was also revealed that the Scottish Prison Service had, for most of the previous decade, been allowing men to transition to women by self-ID.

The NHS and other public sector organisations were also implementing the policy even before it had become law. This led to the recent case of nurse Sandie Peggie, who was suspended from a hospital in Kirkcaldy last year after she objected to the presence of a male-bodied trans woman, Dr Beth Upton, in the women’s changing room.

The Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not women under the 2010 Equality Act should have made Peggie’s suspension by Fife Health Board a manifestly unlawful act. It is astonishing that they have still not reinstated her or apologised and offered compensation for the distress caused by her suspension. For them the fight is not over. Most of the public sector, and especially the public sector unions, still regard trans women as women.

Sturgeon is clearly of this opinion too. That the health board was correct in ruling that trans women have a right to access women’s spaces. She says that the EHRC guidance on the ruling — to the effect that trans women should not be allowed access to women’s changing rooms, hospital wards or sporting events — “makes trans people’s lives almost unliveable” as she put it in her TV interview today. She insists the matter is not over and that the EHRC guidance should be revised.

She did not spell out what she would regard as the correct guidance. But she presumably means that transgender people who have received a Gender Recognition Certificate under the 2004 Gender Recognition Act should still be regarded as women. They have changed their birth certificates and can claim that they have a right to be regarded as women “for all purposes”, as Lady Haldane put it when the matter was before the Scottish Court of Session in 2022. If they have legally changed their sex, how can they not be regarded as female?

Well, I suspect the ship has sailed here, and biological sex will — as the Supreme Court ruled — be regarded as defining “women”, not just in equalities law but for all purposes. The idea that men can become women is such a patently absurd proposition that no law can be based on it, whatever the 2004 Act says. People are free to adopt any lifestyle they choose, but putting on a dress and lipstick does not make a woman. Nor does ingesting hormones or undergoing surgical removal of breasts or penises.

People wish no ill towards trans women — live and let live — but they will never subscribe to the quasi-religious dogma that trans women are literally women. So why is Nicola Sturgeon flogging this manifestly dead horse? Why does she not devote her media profile to combating poverty, child abuse, or domestic violence? Why is the former First Minister unable to move on from trans issues?

I can only speculate that she has never got over the circumstances of her precipitate departure from office in February 2023. She evidently had become “scunnered” and decided to throw in the towel. The GRR Bill was a major factor in her downfall — those excruciating TV interviews where she couldn’t call Isla Bryson a man, even as she ordered the SPS to send him to a male prison. It was a huge mistake to go as she did. Perhaps her attempts to revive her flagship bill — which is still in limbo — are a way of reclaiming lost ground, of revising history, achieve closure.

She just can’t let sleeping trans lie.