Nicola Sturgeon is in danger of joining the ranks of the tin foil hat brigade with her outlandish claims that “forces” were behind the opposition to the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill which she championed.
Any remaining shreds of credibility Sturgeon had – and those were already thinner than an ice cream wafer – have disappeared into the ether.
She told The Guardian: “Things became so toxic, and opposition became so entrenched and – this is not the case for everybody who opposed that legislation – but there were forces that muscled into that debate who, I think, you know, had a bigger agenda in terms of rights more generally.”
And Sturgeon told Diva Magazine: “There are people who have muscled their way into that debate no doubt because they are transphobic but also because they want to push back rights generally.
“I do think that we need to be very vigilant about that as well.”
These are conspiracy claims.
Sturgeon now cuts a sad forlorn figure desperately craving attention.
She may, of course, be silently seething at her own headlong fall from public grace.
This is a rapid descent which has had many moving parts, but which has been aided in no small measure by the kind of fiercely forensic focussed scrutiny – by various women’s groups – of her deeply flawed stance on the issue of gender self-identification.
Those groups have brought to bear on the issues analytical and interpretative skills which Sturgeon seriously lacked in her one-dimensional approach to debate.
In a scathing open letter signed by, among others, the Scottish Feminist Network, Scottish Lesbians, and the Women’s Rights Network Scotland, they say Ms Sturgeon is “not the first politician to make such a claim”.
But they stress her “prominence as Scotland’s longest-serving first minister, and its first female first minister” means that her comments “carry weight.”
And the independent policy analysis group Murray Blackburn Mackenzie said: “A number of Scottish politicians, most notably former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, have suggested that shadowy forces are responsible for the opposition to over-riding sex with self-declared gender in policy and law.
“The government that Nicola Sturgeon led has just argued in the UK Supreme Court that a Gender Recognition Certificate has ‘far-reaching’ effects beyond personal paperwork.
“A nurse is taking NHS Fife to court for its policy which insists that women share changing rooms with a trans-identified man.
“A tribunal agreed Roz Adams was the victim of a ‘heresy hunt’ at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.
“And Isla Bryson [a rapist who changed gender while awaiting trial and initially remanded to a woman’s prison after being found guilty] is now a global by-word for political humiliation.
“These and other cases make it clear that women were absolutely right to be concerned.”
‘Illogicality and stubbornness’
Every point illuminates the illogicality and stubbornness of Sturgeon’s stance.
Of course, she wasn’t alone in her authoritarian desire to allow men to claim they were women simply by dint of claiming it as fact.
There were plenty of others in Holyrood, in an embarrassing episode in the Scottish Parliament’s brief history, where any opposition was dismissed and denigrated in an insult to democratic discourse.
Many in other parties, the civil service, and in ideologically-captured NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organisations) – whose funding and salaries depended on acquiescence with Sturgeon’s stance – fell readily into line with a policy that left most folk with functioning brains shaking their heads in disbelief.
And what lunacy it was, as we saw in the idea of putting male rapists into women’s prisons as in the case of Bryson.
Sturgeon seems a self-pitying figure desperately seeking affirmation for the furore which she helped unleash, in her desire to pursue the introduction of self-identification, threatening hard won rights of women.
Her dogmatic pursuit of the policy became an anchor weighing down the SNP.
It also did immeasurable harm to those in the transgender community who simply wanted to get on with their lives without the bitter drama which has ensued, through Sturgeon’s narrow-minded and stubborn intransigence.
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