Nurse's tribunal over trans doctor in female changing area may be red line for public over gender ID

While government ministers and influential lobby groups have argued in favour of tearing up basic equality law in favour of allowing male-bodied trans women into female single-sex spaces, those opposed have stood resolute, insisting that to do so is both wrong and dangerous and believing that, once others understand the implications, they will come to agree.

For daring to dissent, these women have been traduced as bigots. Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, whose obsession with introducing self-ID for trans people played a significant part in the backlash against her that forced her resignation two years ago, went so far as to say some who oppose changes to the law to open up women’s safe spaces to men who declare themselves female are racist.

But, despite the personal abuse campaigners have received, the majority of people remain opposed to self-ID.

Ideologues, still mourning the decision to stop prescribing powerful, life-altering puberty-blocking drugs to emotionally distressed children, may wish to dismiss opponents as bigots. They may wish to accuse those who reject gender ideology of being dangerous and cruel. But the point when those words might have stung has long since passed.

When well-funded lobby groups began pushing the mantra “trans women are women” a decade or so ago, much of the political class was instantly seduced. Here was a “civil rights” movement they could get behind.

However, if elected members bought into this ideology, voters did not. While the majority held a live-and-let-live view, the implications of self-ID were – and remain – unpopular.

Sturgeon and others angrily dismissed the concerns of feminists and other sceptics but people will insist on believing their own eyes. While the former First Minister was telling us self-ID would have no downside, we were reading of male sex criminals being sent to female prisons and of trans women taking medals in women’s sport.

When, early in 2023, the then Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland Alister Jack blocked the Scottish Parliament’s reform of the Gender Recognition Act to allow self-ID on the basis that it would negatively impact on the UK-wide Equality Act, the nationalist backlash was muted. Some senior SNP figures wished us to believe that we’d witnessed a “full frontal assault” on democracy but their hearts weren’t in it. Many ministers, having read polling showing significant opposition to self-ID, privately concluded that they’d dodged a bullet.

Today, the leaders of parties which most enthusiastically backed reform of the gender recognition act are remarkably silent on the matter of self-ID.

When a tribunal ruled last year that the trans woman running Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre had overseen a culture of bullying which saw a counsellor victimised for her belief that biological sex is both important and immutable, there was no condemnation from First Minister John Swinney, Labour’s Anas Sarwar, or the Liberal Democrats’ Alex Cole-Hamilton.

These man have all previously ignored the words of feminist campaigners. Swinney stayed silent when his colleague, the former MP Joanna Cherry received death and rape threats, Sarwar said nothing when colleagues – including former Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont – were singled out for attack by ideologues within his party’s ranks, Cole-Hamilton dedicated his vote in favour of self-ID to a trans woman with a history of posting violent images and threatening messages online.

The Scottish Greens are now the only party loudly fighting the inevitable backlash against the impact of gender ideology.

The Scottish Conservatives, under Russell Findlay, are quite clear that nobody born male should be permitted into safe spaces created for women.

But, so far as the parties of what we still describe as the centre-left are concerned, none of the chaos and division wrought by the push for self-ID ever happened.

Swinney, Sarwar, and Cole-Hamilton, the three cowardly monkeys, look the other way while the rest of us watch the consequences of adherence to gender ideology play out in increasingly troubling ways.

Over the past week, a tribunal in Dundee has been hearing a case brought against NHS Fife and Dr Beth Upton, a trans woman, by nurse Sandie Peggie.

Peggie argues that allowing Upton to share a changing room with women amounted to unlawful harassment under the Equality Act.

The proceedings have, frequently, been quite extraordinary. Many, I believe, will share my sustained disbelief that a woman should have to defend her right not to get undressed in front of someone born male.

We’ve heard Upton, who graduated from medical school as a male but began identifying as female two years ago, was distressed by Peggie’s reaction his presence.

You will have your own opinion, I’m sure, over whose feelings should have carried greater weight: Those of the middle-aged woman who felt uncomfortable undressing, during a heavy period, in front of someone born male or those of the person who recently declared herself a woman after spending most of her adult life as a man.

There will be more to say about this case (and questions for First Minister John Swinney, Health Secretary Neil Gray, and the management team at NHS Fife) in time, but I do not for a single second believe voters will have to wait until this tribunal concludes to form a view.

Opinions harden every time another detail of this astonishing case emerges.

In a way, the result of this tribunal is irrelevant. Yes, there will be implications for women and their right to single-sex spaces if Sandie Peggie loses but, in raising this case, she has exposed the way in which women’s rights are blithely trampled over by gender ideologues.

When feminist campaigners against self-ID welcome a new ally, they say that person has been “peaked”, that they’ve learned so much about the dangers of gender ideology they feel compelled to oppose it.

I wonder whether the case of Sandie Peggie has peaked Scotland.