Nicola Sturgeon may be departing Scottish politics but the deeply damaging legacy of many of the divisive reforms unleashed by her and the SNP will live on.
That is clear from the debacle which Dundee City Council is embroiled in over a city school’s unisex toilets, which are a potential threat to the safety of pupils.
Former First Minister Sturgeon is completely culpable in the ongoing battles over gender and sex which continue to afflict and divide Scottish society, and which have permeated and captured whole swathes of our public life and institutions.
But Dundee City Council is also equally guilty in this instance of slavish devotion to Scottish Government guidelines on the issue – instead of exercising some independence of thought and judgement.
And the arrogant disdain which those in power evince towards anyone feeling unsettled in such situations is perfectly captured by the council’s contemptuous and dismissive response to concerns over an incident of voyeurism in one of the city’s secondary schools.
‘Vulnerable and unsafe’
As The Courier reported, a 15-year-old male pupil was charged by police in December after a hidden mobile phone camera was discovered in the girls’ toilets in the school.
Scottish Conservative MSP Pam Gosal brought the matter up in the Scottish Parliament last week and said teachers had told her of boys “slipping their cameras under the stalls” at other schools.
Young girls are feeling uncomfortable, vulnerable and unsafe.
And the MSP insisted the Dundee case should be a wake-up call.
There have been warnings that unisex toilet policies were being exploited by male pupils filming girls without their knowledge.
Yet the council’s response to calls to review their approach was to trot out the hoary old excuse: “It wouldn’t be appropriate to comment on an ongoing legal matter.”
They aren’t being asked to comment on an ongoing legal matter.
They’re being asked to reassess and reconsider their decision to install unisex toilets which flies in the face of common sense.
The Scottish Government proposed unisex toilets in schools eight years ago but privacy and safety concerns were raised after public consultation, and the existing requirement for separate male and female facilities remained unchanged.
However, some local authorities introduced them and one of Dundee’s largest secondary schools, Harris Academy, has 18 such toilets alongside separate male and female facilities.
The council decision to install them smacked of the high handedness and arrogant authoritarian approach which has marked so many of the issues surrounding matters of sex and gender in Scotland.
And it didn’t involve any formal discussion with parents.
‘Ideological zealotry’
If the SNP ruling council group in Dundee had been in possession of any integrity and common sense, they’d have recognised the inherent potential problems with unisex toilets in schools and not installed them.
But they went ahead at Harris anyway, brim full of ideological zealotry.
So much of the bizarre flight from reality which Sturgeon, the SNP, and councils like Dundee have become dangerously enmeshed in, is wrapped up in the woolly idea of being kind.
Kindness is good – but their kindness mantra has been aimed at only tiny sections of society and in the process has been enormously unkind to the majority.
In this case it’s teenage girls who have been left open to potentially dangerous behaviour.
Ms Gosal said: “The SNP’s reckless gender reforms have become embedded in Scotland’s public sector, and this is just the latest example of one of them just not getting it when it comes to protecting access to single-sex spaces.”
Not only do the SNP and councils like Dundee not get it, but their inaction also shows they don’t care what we think.
Conversation