Why Scotland's men need to join the Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht in gender debate

It is women who identified the significance of the issue; women who have suffered the abuse; women who have compiled an excellent book about it, called The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, and so the list goes on. By and large, they were left to fight these battles, not least at Holyrood and in the courts, without much help from the other 49 per cent of society.

With honourable exceptions, men were only too willing to wheesht rather than be caught in the ferocity of fire directed against those who dared resist the new orthodoxy of a supposedly progressive Scotland. For the avoidance of doubt, I include myself in that deficiency.

One of the strengths of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht is that it charts the history of a lobbying exercise which got us where we are, over a couple of decades. It quotes, for example, the case of Ayrshire and Arran Health Board which, in 2003, faced criticism from one Nicola Sturgeon, then SNP health spokeswoman, for the fact there were still wards in which men and women shared facilities.

“Another example of a broken pledge by Labour on health,” she cried. Two decades later, when Ms Sturgeon was First Minister, the same health board issued guidance that a female patient who expressed concern about sharing the ward with a person with male characteristics would be advised first that “the ward is indeed female only and there are no men present” and “ultimately it may be the complainant who is required to be removed”.

As a former Ayrshire MP, I like to think that I would have created a commotion if this absurdity had been drawn to my attention. Who knows? Certainly, the reality is that Holyrood was too full of nodding donkeys who either didn’t understand what was going on or were anxious to be on the right side of wokeness.

No party was exempt but, since the SNP were running the show throughout this period, the primary responsibility was theirs (again with honourable exceptions). There is no member of the current Scottish Cabinet who did not go along with it, any more than they disputed coalition with the Greens which turbo-charged the whole agenda.

There are no excuses left for anyone with any position of responsibility in Scottish public life to turn their backs. What was clear to many admirable women years ago is now an inescapable societal reality – that freedom of speech and expression in Scotland is threatened and constrained by the aggressive zealotry of a deeply intolerant interest group.

The liberalism of the great majority who are content to to see rights and respect extended rather than denied has been exploited by the insatiable demands of a lobby who show no respect for the rights of others including, in many cases, those for whom they purport to speak.

This week’s episodes are, or should be, shocking and demand the intervention of the same government that has done so much to create the climate in which they occur. The fact there should even be a discussion about the place of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht in an exhibition of influential titles in the National Library of Scotland is bizarre.

The resultant decision to withdraw it due to “the potential impact on key stakeholders and the reputation of the library” is then indisputably shameful. Almost as depressing is the fact that the chair of the National Library’s board, Sir Drummond Bone, a grandee of academia, assented.

Would he have done so in his previous gigs at Liverpool University or Baliol College, Oxford, or is it only on returning to the “goldfish bowl” (copyright, Nicola Sturgeon) of Scotland that pressure to conform to whatever prevailing madness avoids confrontation becomes the safest course of illiberal action?

The case of Summerhall events venue, awash with Creative Scotland subsidy, is equally craven. How could any sane board or administrator give house room to the contention that inclusion of Kate Forbes in a discussion series should be (a) prohibited or (b) apologised for?

Summerhall’s chair, Deborah Christie, was a documentary producer who made programmes for Channel Four and BBC. Would either organisation have denied the right of Ms Forbes to contribute to a documentary, or apologise retrospectively for her inclusion? Or is it only within publicly funded fiefdoms of Scottish intolerance and/or cowardice that censorship becomes acceptable?

This has moved on from being a debate around the efforts to re-write the rules and, as now amply confirmed, the law on gender issues – with the Scottish Government suffering reverses that it still seems defiantly reluctant to accept.

There can be no more wheeshing. Men and women alike have an interest in calling out the pervasive symptoms which persist, as well as the crusade which underpins them.

For example, the Scottish Government and its quangos routinely include utterly irrelevant questions about race, gender and sexual orientation in questionnaires and consultations. Can anyone explain why I should be asked to declare whether “I identify as a gender other than the gender I was assigned with at birth” when communicating with government? Did Holyrood ever discuss or approve this nonsense which Mr Swinney could stop with the stroke of a pen?

Instead, there could be one new box to be ticked for any organisation applying for public funding. It should say: “We offer an absolute commitment to freedom of speech and expression within the law and understand that any breach of this undertaking will lead to the immediate withdrawal of funding”.

That would stiffen a few backbones, both male and female (him/her).