Nicola Sturgeon has learned nothing from the trans debacle

It was an audacious exercise in self-promotion, if nothing else. Yesterday, Nicola Sturgeon chose to make her first significant intervention on the UK Supreme Court ruling on trans rights, on the very day her successor as Scottish first minister was delivering the Holyrood equivalent of the King’s Speech. I bet John Swinney really appreciated that.

It is safe to say that Sturgeon is not impressed with the court’s ruling that a woman is defined by her biological sex, though she insisted she is not challenging it. She is even less impressed with the interim guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which states that transwomen should not be allowed to enter single-sex spaces such as changing rooms and domestic-abuse refuges. She says this will make trans lives ‘unliveable’. However, she did not spell out exactly why this should be.

Is the life of the trans rapist, Isla Bryson, intolerable because he is now in a male prison? Does the exclusion of natal men from women’s sporting events cause them life-threatening distress? And when it comes to it, why were male-bodied transwomen, like Kirkcaldy doctor Beth Upton, allowed into women’s changing rooms in a hospital in the first place?

Nurse Sandie Peggie was suspended from her job after 30 years because she objected to sharing the women’s changing room with Upton. She was experiencing an excessive menstrual flow. It seems remarkable that Fife Health Board has still not reinstated her and apologised following the Supreme Court ruling last month. What about Peggie’s mental wellbeing?

Sturgeon did not comment on any specific case. But she clearly believes in the quasi-religious dogma that transwomen are women and should be treated as such. She was, of course, responsible for the ill-fated Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which would have allowed any man to change his legal sex to that of a woman merely by making a declaration. This was the policy known as ‘self-ID’. It would have allowed unrestricted access to women’s spaces and could even have made it illegal to question their biological sex.

She refused to apologise yesterday for that legislation, which was vetoed by the then Scottish secretary in Westminster, Alister Jack. Instead, she pointed out that it was passed in December 2022 by a large majority in the Scottish parliament and has never formally been repealed. The Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, actually whipped his Labour MSPs to vote for the bill unamended. He now says that was a mistake. Sturgeon doesn’t.

The most obvious question is: why? The Supreme Court ruling that women are defined by their biological sex is supported by the vast majority of voters. The matter is surely settled. The judges did not betray any animus toward people who wish to identify as the other sex in their lifestyle. Indeed, they insisted that trans people are still protected against discrimination under the Equality Act. But they recognised that trying to erase human biology in law was never going to be acceptable – not in a democratic society.

People were genuinely shocked to learn that the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) had been routinely allowing offenders to change their sex by declaration alone, even sometimes after their conviction, in order to gain access to the women’s estate. Sturgeon insists that this posed no danger to women. She accused gender-critical women, who believe that predatory males were clearly exploiting self-ID, of being bigots, ‘often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well’. Yesterday, she refused to retract her condemnation of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, as Scottish feminists styled themselves in the book of the same name.

It seems that Sturgeon simply cannot bring herself to accept that her flagship bill is dead, and that transwomen are not women in equalities legislation. She is determined to lead the campaign against the EHRC’s guidance and the Supreme Court ruling to the bitter end. She has the public-sector unions and the many publicly funded pro-trans NGOs, like the Equality Network, on her side. But emphatically not the voters. And not the law of the land.

So why keep returning to this vexed issue? Perhaps she now realises how unwise it was to resign precipitately in February 2023 in the wake of the Isla Bryson scandal. She insists that it wasn’t the failure of the gender bill that made her decide to quit. But what everyone remembers are those excruciatingly embarrassing media interviews where she couldn’t bring herself to call Bryson a man, even as she ordered the SPS to move him to a male jail.

Is it some kind of closure she is seeking? Does she feel a burning need to prove to herself that she was right about this and everyone else wrong? Why doesn’t she devote her energies to a more worthy cause, like child poverty or social-care reform? Whatever else, we have clearly not heard the last of Nicola Sturgeon and her dogged pursuit of this most lost of lost causes.

Iain Macwhirter is a political commentator and author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won A Referendum But Lost Scotland. Visit his Substack here.