Isla Bryson : Adam Graham Press cutting Square

Imperious Nicola Sturgeon demonstrates how out of touch she is

A FEW WEEKS AGO the trans rights champion, Green MSP Maggie Chapman didn’t know which sex she was because she hadn’t had a chromosomal test; at today’s First Minister’s Questions Nicola Sturgeon told the Scottish Parliament she didn’t know if a double rapist was a man or a woman.

Has the world gone mad?

These are the absurd knots that Scottish politicians are now tying themselves in as they desperately bat away the realities belying their radical Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) legislation.

The First Minister has had a rocky time ever since double rapist and self-declared transwoman Isla Bryson/Adam Graham, all blonde bob and lipstick in pink leggings proudly boasting male genitalia, has been in the headlines.

When it emerged Bryson/Graham had been remanded to Cornton Vale women’s prison, the Justice Minister first insisted it was a matter for the Scottish Prisons Service.  Public pressure then forced his boss into a humiliating U-turn at last week’s FMQs, where she announced that Bryson/Graham would not be incarcerated in Cornton Vale.

As the furore continued, with another self-declared transwoman prisoner Tiffany Scott/Andrew Burns – described as one of Scotland’s “most violent prisoners” – already planned to go to a women’s prison, the First Minister had to go further and declare no transgender inmate with a history of violence against women would be housed in the women’s prison estate.

This concedes the very objection which Sturgeon had batted away as invalid: that transwomen pose a risk in women-only spaces, particularly rapists like Bryson/Graham who conveniently self-certify as women in order to gain entry to female prisons.

Much worse, though, it explodes the dogma underlying GRR, namely that (self-certified) transwomen are women. In other words, they enjoy the same rights, entitlements and treatment as (natal) women. Plainly, if Isla Bryson and other transwomen with a history of violence cannot be sent to women’s prisons like other women, they are not being treated as women.

It follows then, either that some transwomen are not women, or that transwomen are sometimes not women. Transwomen are only women until they’re not. Consequently, the categorical article of faith that transwomen are women collapses under the weight of contradiction.

For this reason, at Thursday’s FMQs Douglas Ross pressed the First Minister four times whether Bryson was a woman, and four times she refused to answer. She had to execute some awkward linguistic tiptoeing, pointedly declining to use either of Bryson/Graham’s names. Instead she referred repeatedly to “an individual”, used the non-committal pronoun “they”, and insisted on the designation of “rapist”. This led her to the farcical tautology that a rapist is a rapist, as if we now have a third gender category – rapist – to add to the existing two.

Even more absurdly, Sturgeon tried to justify her refusal to answer Ross on the grounds that she didn’t have “enough information” about Bryson/Graham’s “claim to be a woman”. Yet her GRR legislation turns on the very thesis that self-declaration is sufficient to define someone’s gender and sex.

She also implied that Bryson/Graham’s sex was irrelevant: “what is relevant is that the individual is a rapist”. That is true as far as it goes, but it is deeply disingenuous: the only reason Bryson/Graham was now so notorious a topic was because he had been classed as a woman and initially sent to a woman’s prison.

If Sturgeon had admitted that Bryson/Graham was either a man or a (trans)woman, it would have undone the founding premise of GRR. Hence she had to say she didn’t know, and to suggest that she thought Bryson’s claim to be transwoman an expedient ruse. At that point, she again implicitly conceded the point that she had so vehemently dismissed about gender self-ID being used by those with malign intent to gain access to vulnerable women.

At FMQs, SNP members’ support over GRR was distinctly muted. The nationalist women in particular did not look happy. The same was evident on Tuesday when the opposition demanded a statement from the First Minister about the two transwomen bound for female prisons; she sent in her Justice Secretary Keith Brown in her place, a stolid Aunt Sally who played to half-empty and disenchanted SNP benches. He had had no compunction in declaring Bryson a woman, another embarrassment for Sturgeon with which Ross opened his salvo today.

Nicola Sturgeon is too deaf and stubborn, too arrogant after eight years at the helm, to think she should resign over the dog’s breakfast that is GRR, despite the wishful thinking of certain unionists. But there is no way back for her from the unprecedented errors of judgment she has made over the legislation.

She has misjudged the national mood (poll after poll shows that two thirds of Scots do not agree with the central tenets of GRR) and she has misjudged even nationalist support. A perusal of the comments on the most widely read nationalist website Wings Over Scotland reveals many nationalists are pleased Westminster has intervened in the GRR becoming law.

If one aim of GRR was to act as a recruiting sergeant for independence supporters by goading the UK government into revealing itself as Scotland’s “governor-general”, it is liable to have the opposite effect. Many nationalists not only reject extreme trans ideology but see it as a distraction from the SNP’s founding mission. They can’t understand why their leader is not pursuing a second independence referendum with the same energy and urgency.

As for the GRR, after the Scottish Government’s shenanigans in the last week, there is not a cat-in-hell’s chance that such a dangerous and incoherent piece of legislation will pass muster with the Supreme Court.

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