Frankly, those most harmed by Nicola Sturgeon’s gender policies are in for more injustice in her memoir

Asked how he escaped them, wrongly-convicted wizard Sirius Black recounts that, because he knew he was innocent – not a happy thought he could be robbed of –they couldn’t destroy him entirely.

As someone pursued by demented forces unleashed by former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s doomed gender-identity project, in the darkest moments of that experience – the journey to writer, rather than the poet I was six years ago has been a rough one - I’ve long dwelt on Rowling’s prescient metaphor.

Surviving the horror, the depression, of public denouncement based on false premises is a profoundly life-altering experience. Alas, in ‘the gender wars’ there isn’t a simple spell to repel the damaging forces.

Given this, reading Sturgeon’s extract from hotly-anticipated (for varying reasons) memoir, Frankly, published this weekend, was always going to be difficult. I’ll leave detailed reviews to literary critics who’ve read the full book. Unlike gender-dementors, I feel it important to read and understand a book before wishing to burn it or its author. Correction: I’d do neither even in situations of profound disagreement.

But from extracts published, I fear those most harmed by Sturgeon’s gender policies are in for more injustice. Whatever her troubles, Sturgeon still fails to understand the role she’s played here.

Chief ‘feminist to her fingertips,’ she presided over a very Scottish version of a global battle that’s seen women hounded, abused, often destroyed financially. In Australia, entrepreneur Sall Grover awaits finding out if she’ll lose everything due to a man demanding access to her woman-only online app. He’s already successfully sued her for his exclusion in an ongoing, contested, legal challenge.

Also, as reported this week by Reduxx magazine, this movement has led to an unnamed European country offering asylum to Isabella Cêpa, a Brazilian feminist who faces up to 25 years in prison for ‘misgendering’ a male politician wishing to be female.

Writing my last paragraph in Brazil would risk a woman getting the same treatment. So you’ll excuse my struggle to empathise with Sturgeon’s ‘dystopian’ feeling of being a high-profile woman at the centre of a police investigation into alleged criminality in the party she led, while her husband was Chief Executive.

Her role, both as FM and supposedly still-sitting MSP comes with a handsome salary, afforded to roles of profound importance, and necessary media scrutiny. Of course that can put you in a ‘bad state mentally.’ Unlike for Sturgeon, however, for non-public women such as ‘Lara’ (not her real name) interviewed for my book Hounded, there’s no escape from forces that threaten to dement them.

Lara related to me her ex-husband’s sexual abuse, as well as suicide threats if she didn’t call him a literal woman. A wealthy man, who she tried to support initially, caused her, and her children’s lives, to be turned upside-down. Lara specifically raised the horror of hearing her own First Minister prioritise her abusive partner’s desires over the needs of the women of Scotland, in the most difficult interview I’ve ever conducted.

Lara lost most of the couple’s friends, who, despite the abuse, justified his behaviour as his journey was ‘difficult’. As feminist writer Victoria Smith has long highlighted, the entire ‘gender wars’ has been characterised by the deeply misogynist narrative of ‘divisive, complaining women, making everything so polarised, even risking making you feel bad!’ versus ‘the joyful, charming bullies who ask for nothing but your adoration!’

On adoration: someone recently asked when I started to question if I’d made the wrong decision in voting Yes to Scottish independence. It was circa November 2014 when Sturgeon played the Hydro, with a stadium full of acolytes but no real policy plan.

I watched closely since as the vibrant cultural discussions about our future morphed into the banality of propping up SNP pet projects. ‘Oor Nicola’s’ false reputation as a feminist rose, while my hopes that Scotland’s leading literary lights had the stones to question their government, one of the naïve notions that led me to support independence in the first place, were decimated.

What too, of other Sturgeon-era policy manias causing dementors to circle someone? As Fraser Hudghton, Director of the Free Speech Union in Scotland joked following reading about Sturgeon’s ‘terrible experience’, he looks forward to working with her to help those reported to Police Scotland for ‘speech crimes’ under the SNP’s 2021 Hate Crime Act.

Sturgeon also again doubles down on her genderism by saying that sexuality in general is ‘not binary’. For the lesbians and gay men also harmed by her obsession with allowing men to call themselves lesbians, and pushing an ideology that says gay men should be attracted to some females, it really is.

Sturgeon should know this. The Supreme Court confirmed in April that thousands of taxpayers money has been spaffed on her project to end women’s and LGB rights in Scotland, only to be defeated by the tenacity of For Women Scotland, a trio with a thimble of the wealth and resources of their opponents.

Sturgeon’s rebranding as bibliophile, writer, even literary critic, is utterly cynical and wholly unwarranted. To be a writer of any kind involves two things: fierce defence of literary freedom, and the courage of your convictions. She may not be literally criminal, but what her reign has done to Scotland and our reputation as ‘home of the Enlightenment’ absolutely has been.