No one would have predicted that such a simple question would cause such anxiety and confusion among our politicians: what is a woman?
There is no clearer sign of a political class that has lost its way – indeed, lost its entire bearings – than the fact that the question throws our leaders into paroxysms of confusion and panic.
Ask the youngest primary school pupil in your local playground if he or she knows the difference between girls and boys, and you will get a straightforward answer.
But our councillors, MPs and MSPs, even trade unions, seem utterly confused by the subject, unable even to discuss the question.
Welcome to 21st century Scotland, where gender ideology has captured and corrupted the political classes to such an extent that anyone who dares offer the obvious answer to the question, what is a woman – an adult human female – is immediately condemned as a bigot, a Terf (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) or, inevitably, a member of the ‘far Right’, if not an outright Nazi.
How on earth did we get here? What kind of political ideology could have such an appeal – not only for our politicians but for civic organisations from the police and prison service to our health boards and the civil service – that questioning or challenging it could risk destroying the careers and livelihoods of those unpersuaded of its virtue?
Row: Transgender Dr Beth Upton was allowed to use female changing room
Let down: Nurse Sandie Peggie was suspended from her job
What we have witnessed unfolding at an employment tribunal in the past fortnight has been nothing short of horrifying – a Kafkaesque nightmare in which a female nurse of 30 years’ standing risks losing her job because she objected to having to share a changing room with a biologically male doctor, Beth Upton.
Sandie Peggie was abandoned by everyone she assumed would be full square behind her in her fight for women’s privacy and dignity.
Instead, those same people – MSPs, MPs, councillors, her bosses and even, staggeringly, her trade union – have ditched her.
Because today, what matters far more than workplace rights, especially for women, is trans ideology.
The cowards and fools in charge of NHS Fife, the simpering handmaidens of the trade union Unison, the lily-livered, backbone-challenged politicians – they were all given a clear choice.
It was to defend and support a woman who, quite naturally, and in common with the vast majority of women, did not want to change in the presence of a biologically male trans colleague, or instead to recite the trans catechism that ‘trans women are women’, pin a Pride flag to their lapel and bask in the adoration of an unrepresentative group of activists whose ideology is counter to all scientific and biological logic.
They chose the latter.
This is the legacy of a generation of politicians across the world who drank the trans Kool-Aid and succumbed to the culture warriors of the so-called Left.
And in Scotland, the plight of Sandie Peggie and many, many more women who have been too scared to take the same stand against their misogynist employers and trade unions as she did, is the true legacy of the SNP and of Nicola Sturgeon.
Her unhinged attachment to trans ideology, her insistence that everyone must agree with her view that women’s rights must always take second place to those of men who self-identify as women, and her egregious smearing of anyone who disagreed with her, eventually led to her downfall as First Minister.
And it looks like it could lead to John Swinney’s too.
This week, the current First Minister doubled down on his party’s enthusiastic support for the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill, a piece of legislation that, had it ever become law, would have enabled anyone in Scotland, including children over the age of 16 and convicted sex offenders, and whether or not they suffered from gender dysphoria, to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate legally recognising their preferred gender.
Scotland’s women’s groups mobilised in 2022 to halt the Bill in its tracks. They rejected the trans dictionary of terms, like feelings, and soul, and emotion.
Instead, they mounted a ferocious, articulate campaign based on logic, facts and reason, pleading with MSPs of all parties simply to give them a fair hearing, pointing out the risks to women’s rights that would result from a law that allowed any man to be legally recognised as a woman at his say-so.
Such concerns were airily dismissed by Ms Sturgeon and her ministers.
Following passage of the Bill, she doubled down on her criticism of its opponents who, she said, ‘cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable, but just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well’.
This was music to the ears of organisations such as the charity Stonewall, which was founded to fight for gay people’s rights but, having comprehensively won that battle, pivoted to trans rights – a fight that, helpfully, guarantees long-term funding and employment within the organisation.
But in dismissing the concerns of so many Scottish women, Ms Sturgeon made a catastrophic blunder that eventually cost her her job.
When Scottish Secretary Alister Jack announced he would veto the legislation, using previously unused powers in the Scotland Act, Ms Sturgeon believed the Scottish people would rise up in rage against such a challenge to the principles of devolution.
But they didn’t. Because they were on Mr Jack’s side, not hers.
Weeks after the veto, Ms Sturgeon announced she would resign.
She cited a number of vague and ill-defined reasons for her decision, but it can hardly be denied that her defeat over the GRR Bill played a central, humiliating role in her decision.
Yet, despite that veto and Ms Sturgeon’s departure from the national stage, civic society seems not to have received the message that self-ID is dead.
Publicly funded organisations, from the police to the civil service, from health boards to trade unions, from charities to sporting bodies, seem to think that anyone who declares themselves to be the opposite gender from their birth sex must be accorded every privilege and right to which those born to that sex are entitled.
In rape crisis centres, female victims are smeared as transphobes if they express a preference to be treated by a biological female rather than a biological male trans woman.
One employee who objected to this insanity, Roz Adams, was last year awarded a cash payout and a public apology from Edinburgh Rape Crisis after she stood up for victims’ rights to be treated by a biological woman, and was hounded out of her job.
In 2023, the Scottish Prison Service sent shockwaves through Scotland by sending a male double rapist going by the name of Isla Bryson to a women’s prison.
Without the resulting public outcry, Bryson might have been left there, free to prey on female inmates who are among the most vulnerable women in the country, most of whom were incarcerated for non-violent crimes.
With the tacit support of ministers, all these organisations, with their highly paid diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) officers, continued blithely on as if the GRR Bill had become the law of the land.
So what if the Bill had been vetoed by those evil, transphobic Tories in London? Scotland was better than that, and they would recognise any individual’s right to be any sex they wished, whether or not they had gone to the trouble of applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate.
And, again with the unspoken but clear approval of SNP ministers, they would dismiss every critic as a transphobe.
This is Nicola Sturgeon’s true legacy. The woman subjected to the attention of the rapist bunking in her cell.
The traumatised woman who has been violated by a rapist and is forced to accept counselling from a trans woman.
The nurse who is threatened with the sack after an unblemished 30-year record of service to the NHS because she didn’t want to have to deal with a particularly heavy period in a changing room occupied by a male colleague.
And John Swinney looks eager to adopt that legacy as his own.
The issue has been particularly problematic for the parties of the left. The Prime Minister has repeatedly got into difficulties
trying hopelessly to balance a desire not to lose the support of women with keeping on board the well-funded and highly vocal supporters of trans rights.
When one of Sir Keir Starmer’s own MPs, Rosie Duffield, insisted that ‘only women have a cervix’, she suffered a deluge of online hatred and threats, much of it from within her party.
She had to cancel plans to attend a Labour conference because she could not be sure of her physical safety.
Sir Keir did not help matters by coming down on the side of Ms Duffield’s critics.
What the Canterbury MP had said – a straightforward statement of the obvious to the vast majority of people – was ‘something that shouldn’t be said, is not right’, said the future Prime Minister in 2021.
Taking this farce to an even higher level, David Lammy MP, in an attempt to curry favour with the vocal trans activists in the London Labour Party, even tried to suggest that it was ‘possible’ a man could have a cervix ‘following various procedures and treatments’.
He is now Britain’s Foreign Secretary.
The Sandie Peggie case was not the first of its kind to hit the headlines.
There is an ongoing dispute in Darlington between a group of nurses who are suing their employer for allowing transgender women – biological males – to use the same changing rooms.
Astonishingly, those nurses are not being supported by the organisations that were set up to protect workers’ rights, the trade unions.
Neither has Unison, the country’s largest trade union, three-quarters of whose members are women, raised a finger to help Sandie Peggie in her fight for workplace privacy.
Last week, even as Mrs Peggie’s employment tribunal was ongoing, Unison gleefully announced a unanimous vote at its conference in favour of a motion stating that ‘trans women are women’ – a slap in the face for women campaigning for changing areas free from biological men.
For the unions have been every bit as captured as the political parties, the police service, the prison service and virtually every other arm of government.
As Sandie Peggie’s tribunal adjourned until the summer, the unions were noticeably and uncharacteristically silent over a nurse battling against her bosses for women’s rights.
Yet the GRR Bill did not become law. So why do so many politicians, trade unions and institutions behave as if it had?
The answer is simply that those same organisations believe, or have been told to believe, that trans rights are so important, so self-evidently correct, so unarguable, that institutions must behave as if self-ID is a fact, rather than a lost cause.
It has become clear in the past fortnight that NHS bosses in Fife had no clear idea about the law of the land, of either the provisions and implications of the Equality Act or the legal requirements imposed on employers through the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, which mandate separate toilets and changing rooms for the sexes.
It is yet another irony of the triumph of transgender ideology and the associated, lucrative fashion for diversity, equity and inclusion, that highly paid DEI executives seem incapable of offering accurate opinions on their own employers’ legal obligations.
We will have to wait some time yet before we know the outcome of Sandie Peggie’s employment tribunal.
That she is entirely in the right, that her arguments are utterly justified, her grievances real, can hardly be denied by anyone who listened to the evidence so far with an objective ear.
And despite the prevarications and shameful dissembling by our politicians, there is no doubt the tectonic plates are shifting.
The ground beneath a once confident pro-trans movement is giving way to a new – and far too long delayed – recognition that women’s rights to privacy matter.
We have the right to be angry at cloth-eared trade unions who continue to reject women’s rights to safety and privacy at work.
And we should be ashamed that it took so long for our politicians to get the message. But thanks to brave women like Sandie Peggie, it’s happening at last.
