One might imagine that Scotland’s political class would have seen the light by now. Its endless kowtowing to the demands of trans-identified men has exposed elected officials, NGOs, and even courts to international ridicule. It’s even played a role in ending the careers of two leaders of the governing Scottish National Party (SNP)—which recently lost 39 of the 48 seats it previously held at Westminster. Yet the campaign to let men self-identify into the ranks of women appears to exercise a death-like grip at the highest levels of the Scottish political establishment.

The current occupant of the First Minister’s official residence is John Swinney, who can barely conceal his irritation as he faces the same questions that undid his predecessors: What is a woman? Do you support single-sex spaces? Why did you vote for legislation that would have permitted men to pass legally as women? Last month, after days of issuing contradictory statements, Swinney finally threw his lot in with the old SNP dogma. Asked whether he believes self-described trans women are, in fact, actual women, he answered, “I accept that to be the case.” Whether Swinney truly, genuinely accepts this view—whether anyone believes it is possible for human beings to literally change sex—is another matter. But the fact that Scotland has had three First Ministers in a row who profess to believe such nonsense should fill all rational people with dismay.

Swinney still believes transwomen have the right to female facilities

John Swinney has confirmed that he supports transgender employees being able to use the toilets and changing rooms they feel most comfortable with.

Daily MailMichael Blackley

Swinney’s public embrace of this core tenet of gender ideology came just days after Scotland (and the rest of the UK) became transfixed by the case of a nurse, Sandie Peggie, who was suspended by a hospital in eastern Scotland after she’d objected to having to share a changing room with a male doctor (named “Beth Upton”) who claims to be a woman. Peggie subsequently lodged a complaint of harassment regarding Upton’s changing-room behaviour, while Upton has launched his own (thinly substantiated) claims against Peggie.

In one of many confusing pronouncements that followed the case’s adjournment, Scotland’s Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Shirley-Anne Somerville, appeared to embrace common sense, saying that the SNP government “stands firmly behind” the provisions of the 2010 Equality Act. This is the legislation that allows organisations (such as Peggie’s employer, National Health Service Fife, better known as NHS Fife) to operate single-sex spaces as a means to protect (actual) women. In Scotland, however, such pronouncements inevitably attract the wrath of trans activists. And so Somerville’s statement was followed by ritualised assurances that she and her colleagues all “continue to support the trans community.”

Scottish government ‘firmly’ backs single-sex spaces amid equality watchdog warning

EHRC raises issues from tribunal brought by nurse who objected to sharing women’s changing room with trans doctor

The GuardianLibby Brooks

Swinney added to the confusion by confirming that he supports the Scottish government’s guidance for trans employees, which indicates that they “should choose to use the facilities they feel most comfortable with”—and so presumably allows biological men to use women’s toilets at work. If this sounds to you like it’s a direct contradiction of Equality Act provisions that permit women to exclude men (whatever their pronouns) from protected spaces, you’d be right.

Making matters more complicated still, Swinney’s deputy, Kate Forbes, has offered “unequivocal” support to Peggie. And one of the foremost constitutional-law experts in Scotland, Michael Foran of Glasgow University, responded on X that the Scottish government’s guidance regarding trans employees, as cited by Swinney, represents “a clear breach” of workplace regulations that have been around since the 1990s, which mandate separate toilet facilities for men and women.

All of which to say: Swinney appeared to be encouraging Scottish employers to ignore the law, digging the SNP deeper into the quagmire that consumed the party under his predecessors, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf (more on them below).

The Scottish Labour Party, too, remains at odds with itself over the issue—with its leaders backing the right of women to their own spaces, even as Labour activists voted down a policy of providing separate toilets for girls and boys in schools. Among Scottish political parties, only the Conservatives and Alba (a small breakaway party from the SNP) have offered unequivocal support for women.

This issue has consumed Scotland since 2022, which is why these ongoing scenes have a Groundhog-Day quality. In some cases, gestures of ideological obeisance to trans activists have become so bizarre as to resemble satire—as with the recent revelation that Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS) had given a temporary contract to a former politician, the SNP’s Alison Thewliss, who appeared at a 2023 Glasgow trans rally in front of a sign bearing the message, “Decapitate TERFs.” The latter acronym is a term of abuse used by activists to denigrate women who assert their biologically-based rights as women.

Secretive SNP try to hush up ‘decapitate Terfs’ MP being hired by rape charity

Failed former SNP MP Alison Thewliss has allegedly been hired by Rape Crisis Scotland which has already been embroiled in a transgender row.

Scottish Daily ExpressDavid Walker

The head of RCS, Sandy Brindley, has faced repeated calls to resign due to her oversight role at the scandal-plagued Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, which infamously employed a trans-identified male (and former SNP candidate) named Mridul Wadhwa as Chief Executive Officer. Wadhwa, who’d publicly enthused that rape-crisis counselling provided her staff with a great opportunity to propagandise women about the need to accept the presence of penises, resigned last year—though only after a scathing employment-tribunal decision exposed the abuse and gaslighting that Wadhwa’s “trans-inclusive” policies had served to inflict on rape victims and rape-crisis counsellors. But there’s been little in the way of accountability: When Tess White, a Conservative Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP), tried to question the Scottish government’s Equalities Minister, Kaubab Stewart, about the apparently cozy relationship between a former SNP politician and the taxpayer-funded RCS, her microphone was turned off by the committee convenor, Green Party MSP Alison Johnstone.

Rape centre worker wins tribunal over gender-critical beliefs

A tribunal found Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre had unfairly constructively dismissed Roz Adams.

BBC NewsBBC News

In 2023, Stewart herself was photographed standing next to Thewliss in front of that infamous “Decapitate TERFs” sign. Both women insist they weren’t aware of the ghoulish messaging on display. At the very least, however, the scandal demonstrated the close working relationship between Scottish politicians and the most militant fringe of the trans activist movement. “This [Rape Crisis Scotland] is a government-funded body, and SNP ministers must be held to account when taxpayers’ money is being used to support it,” White properly declared. “Women have already been badly let down by Rape Crisis Scotland, and this appointment [of Thewliss] will ring alarm bells that the damaging culture which has become embedded in the organisation will not change.”

Alas, it’s far from unusual to see placards advocating violence at events organised by Scottish trans organisations—even when politicians are present. It’s symptomatic of an atmosphere in which hatred of women has been normalised, as long as the people shouting the threats claim to belong to the world’s most “oppressed” minority. Trans activists have blocked film screenings, and demanded that male criminals (rapists and murderers included) have access to women’s prisons—as well as women’s toilets and changing rooms, of course. They’re so accustomed to being indulged that they naturally expect women such as Peggie to be shamed and punished if they speak up for their rights.

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The TelegraphDaniel Sanderson

This movement became influential in all Western nations during the late 2010s and early 2020s. But Scotland has distinguished itself by the relentless fervour with which its elite class embraced it. Recently, Britain’s rights watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, even felt the need to remind the Scottish government of the legal obligation on employers to provide separate toilet and changing facilities for men and women. This highly unusual intervention came in late February, when NHS Fife was publicly seen prioritising the “right” of the aforementioned “Beth” Upton (who grew up as a man named Theodore) to share a dressing room with Peggie and other women at their Kirkcaldy hospital.

The case has attracted enormous public attention and done Upton no favours—as his arrival at the tribunal each day has demonstrated that no amount of make-up can conceal his typically male features (including a receding hairline). His arrogant courtroom performance embodied all of the toxic qualities that critics of gender ideology have been highlighting for years. At one point, Upton even insisted that he is “biologically female.” He also insisted that sex has “no defined or agreed meaning in science, as far as I’m aware.”

By his claim, the very idea of biological sex is just a “nebulous dog whistle” used to persecute people (such as himself) who exhibit gender dysphoria—a delusion that raises questions about how this doctor responds when patients present with sex-specific conditions such as, say, pregnancy. (It must have been an awkward moment for his alma mater, Dundee Medical School.)

And yet Upton’s claimed membership in the female sisterhood has hardly imbued him with sanguine (or even humane) attitudes toward fellow females. Peggie had found herself in a situation familiar to most biological women—needing to change blood-soaked underwear during a heavy period, preferably in an environment free of men. Upton, who is 6’ 2” (1.88 m) and so towers over Peggie and his other female colleagues, claimed to have experienced “distress” and felt “unsafe” when Peggie (accurately) compared his presence in the changing room to a man demanding to be housed in a female prison.

The case has been adjourned until July—which means several more months of Swinney and his ministers signalling their annoyance and embarrassment every time they’re asked by reporters to say where they stand on the issue. The First Minister has boxed himself into a corner by continuing to support the notorious Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, passed by the Scottish Parliament in December 2022. The bill would have allowed men—even criminals accused of rape—to change their legal gender to female through mere self-identification. Thankfully, the legislation was blocked by the UK government, which pointed out that it would have created a conflict with Equality Act provisions that protect female rights. But both the SNP and the Scottish Greens (the latter caucus containing some of the oddest people ever to sit in a UK parliament, it should be said) have never renounced their support for the Reform bill. And Patrick Harvie, co-leader of the Greens, recently attempted to smear its critics as agents of the “far right” and peddlers of “toxic rhetoric.”

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Scottish Daily ExpressMark Connor

For their part, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and his deputy, Jackie Baillie, have expressed regret for voting for the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. Back in 2022, Sarwar actually whipped his MSPs into supporting it—but now says that “knowing what we know now, we would not have supported the bill.” Sarwar feebly explained that, back in 2022, he hadn’t understood how the GRA conflicted with the Equality Act—but had simply accepted governmental assurances that no such conflicts existed.

It’s hard to believe that a politician who aspires to be Scotland’s First Minister could be so gullible. A more credible explanation would be that Labour wanted to be on side with its traditional activist constituencies—including the Scottish Trades Union Congress, which condemned Sarwar’s recent volte-face on gender self-ID as a “betrayal” of the country’s LGBT community, which “inflict[ed] hurt on some of our most vulnerable in society.” As noted above, Labour conference delegates ignored their party leadership, and instead voted to oppose the right of girls to have their own toilets in schools.

This is hardly a niche issue. For years now, thousands of schools across the UK have followed misleading advice from organisations such as Stonewall, which have pushed for toilets to become “gender neutral,” typically against the wishes of both parents and children. Mixed toilets are a key demand of trans activists because they allow boys to access facilities where teenage girls are undressing and changing sanitary products—a male power play that teaches these children, at an impressionable age, to accept violations of instinctively understood sex boundaries.

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The TelegraphSanchez Manning

The safeguarding risk is obvious. In December 2024, parents were horrified when a fifteen-year-old boy faced charges relating to voyeurism after a girl found a mobile phone hidden in a toilet at a secondary school in Dundee. While there is no evidence that the suspect in question is trans-identified, the fact that many girls are no longer allowed to express concerns about sharing their bathrooms with male students means they are unable to pre-empt such grotesque invasions of their female privacy before they take place.

From the United States to Australia to Europe, the rest of the world is pushing back against trans activism. In the UK, most notably, Hilary Cass’s landmark Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People has led to welcome limits on the use of drugs and surgery to “affirm” the dysphoric beliefs of trans-identified children. Yet in Scotland, Labour activists have persisted in condemning the Cass report—despite its acceptance by no less an authority than the British health secretary, Labour’s own Wes Streeting.

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A landmark report properly emphasises the application of science, not slogans, in establishing treatment protocols for trans-identified children.

QuilletteThe Quillette Editorial Board

It seems reasonable to ask, at this point, what is wrong with Scotland’s political class. Privileging the demands of trans activists isn’t even a popular cause: a YouGov poll in January 2025 showed growing support for single-sex spaces, with 58 percent opposed to allowing trans-identified males to use women’s changing rooms. The figure rises to 63 percent when (as is usually the case) the “trans woman” in question hasn’t had his equipment removed. Why do most Scottish politicians side with the tiny proportion of men who claim to be women, instead of sticking up for the hard-won rights of half the population?

The question is timely. While the Gender Reform Act has been blocked, the British Supreme Court is poised to deliver a crucial judgment in what’s become known as the For Women Scotland case, after the name of the group that’s filed suit. What’s at stake is nothing less than the legal meaning of the word “woman.”

For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent) - UK Supreme Court

Is a person with a full gender recognition certificate (“GRC”) which recognises that their gender is female, a “woman” for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010 (“EA 2010”)?

UK Supreme Court

When the Equality Act was rushed onto the statute book at Westminster fifteen years ago, during the dying days of Gordon Brown’s UK Labour government, no one imagined that the word “sex” was imprecise or contentious. This was before men’s-rights enthusiasts launched a full-scale assault on language—a revolution that’s been especially successful in Scotland. Even criminals such as the double rapist “Isla Bryson”—whose 2023 trial in Glasgow did much to hasten Sturgeon’s political demise—have been referred to by jurists with female pronouns, despite the fact that their sex crimes related directly to their status as fully intact males. With some exceptions, editors have cravenly followed this trend, resulting in court reports concerning Bryson that refer, ludicrously, to “her penis.”

UK transgender rapist Isla Bryson gets 8 years in prison

“You see yourself as the victim in this situation,” Judge Lord Scott told rapist Isla Bryson. “You are not.”

New York PostLee Brown

The For Women Scotland case turns on an egregious example of such linguistic manipulation. Specifically, Scottish courts have ruled that some trans-identified males are women for purposes of the 2018 Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act, a well-meaning piece of legislation intended to increase the proportion of women who oversee public authorities. The Scottish government’s position is that “women” must be taken to include men who have acquired a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), under the terms of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, declaring their legal gender to be female. By this interpretation, a board consisting of three men and three “trans women” with GRCs—six men, in other words—would meet the Act’s required baseline of 50 percent-plus female representation.

For Women Scotland (FWS) lost its appeals against the guidance in Scottish courts in 2022 and 2023, and it’s now up to the UK’s highest court to decide the issue. If the court rules against FWS, the effect will be seismic: Women seeking to run single-sex services, such as refuges for victims of domestic abuse, will no longer be allowed to consider whether the welfare of biological women will be harmed by the presence of trans-identified men who’ve acquired GRCs.

In the twenty-first century, the idea that a country’s most senior judges would be asked to rule on whether some men must be treated as women, insofar as they have a piece of paper that falsifies their legal sex, should defy rational belief. It’s particularly ironic that this country happens to be Scotland, which remains closely associated with the Enlightenment. It isn’t difficult to imagine the reaction of Thomas Reid (1710–96), founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, to the proposition that we should ignore everything we know about the way humans (and all mammals) are biologically organised, in service of superstitions concerning “gender identity.” But that’s what we are being asked to do by men such as Upton and their political enablers.

In truth, the country has been something of a pioneer in terms of legislation that damages women. Like the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, the 1563 Witchcraft Act—which made both witchcraft and “consulting with witches” capital offences in Scotland—was ostensibly neutral in terms of sex: Men could be witches, too. But the vast majority of the accused (84 percent) were female. Records dating to what historian Hugh Trevor-Roper has called “a century of terror” show that at least 3,837 people were accused of witchcraft, two-thirds or whom (2,558) were executed. The preferred method was strangulation followed by burning at the stake, although some victims were burned alive.

As Scotland’s example shows, the ‘marginalised’ people most likely to be targeted during gender-based social panics are women—not the men who enjoy dressing like them.

No Scottish politician is suggesting that “TERFs” be burned at the stake (even if, as we’ve seen, some government-allied activists show up at protests where such sentiments are seen as acceptable). But this historical precedent does provide a stark warning of the need to resist irrational ideas. It also shows us that the “marginalised” people (to quote another faddish term) most likely to be targeted during gender-based social panics are women—not the men who enjoy dressing like them.

While some women, such as Sturgeon, have been happy to act as maidservants to this men’s-rights movement, there are plenty of feminists who recognised its misogynistic undercurrents early on; and who also foresaw the witch-hunt-like tactics that would be weaponised against them.

A popular piece of dark humour posted on social media shows two women tied to a stake. “What are you in for?” asks one. “Retweeting Julie Bindel,” says the other—referring to one of the UK’s leading critics of gender ideology. Another specimen, this one by the American cartoonist John McNamee, shows an executioner about to set fire to a wood pile below an anxious-looking woman. “Let me start by saying no one is a bigger feminist than me,” the witchfinder says. McNamee wasn’t referring to the trans-rights issue specifically. But the sanctimonious posture of the man in his image does channel the self-righteous nature of the trans activists who demand obedience from women. For they regard their cause as literally impervious to challenge (“I’m Trans, and I’m Not up for Debate,” is how this rhetorical stunt gets expressed.)

No One Is A Bigger Feminist by John McNamee

No One Is A Bigger Feminist by John McNamee

Conde Nast

Indeed, disagreement is framed as nothing short of a call to eradicate trans-identified people, on the lurid claim that referring to biological sex is tantamount to denying their very “existence.” Sturgeon—a self-described “feminist to her fingertips”—dismissed critics of her gender legislation as “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.” It is simply assumed that if you don’t believe a man can transform into a woman, you must be a bad person in other respects, too.

Sturgeon recently announced she will stand down as an MSP next year, effectively marking the end of her political career. The announcement followed a telling moment on International Women’s Day, when the former First Minister was booed and heckled by gender-critical women (the more polite term for “TERF”) as she arrived at an event in Edinburgh. Fulsome farewell tributes from SNP colleagues glossed over her disastrous legacy, but Sturgeon will find it hard to distance herself from the fiasco she brought upon herself when she embraced the men’s-rights cause. (This week, she was cleared of criminal wrongdoing following a police investigation into the SNP’s finances. Her ex-husband Peter Murrell, the party’s former CEO, was charged in 2024 with embezzlement of party funds. In January, Sturgeon announced they were getting a divorce.)

Holyrood will be better off without Sturgeon.. but I thought she’d already gone!

Scottish Conservative Deputy Leader RACHAEL HAMILTON delivers her withering assessment on the former SNP leader (and now frequently AWOL MSP) who has made Scotland a more divided place

Scottish Daily ExpressRachael Hamilton

Sturgeon’s resignation as SNP leader in 2023 offered a good opportunity for her successor, Humza Yousaf, to revise the party’s gender policy. Instead, he went double or nothing by pressing ahead with legislation that made it a criminal offence to “stir up hatred” against people with a range of characteristics—including those asserting a “transgender identity.” As documented in Quillette, the government even designated an apparently random set of venues, including a fish farm and a sex shop, as “third party reporting centres” where individuals could snitch on (former) friends, neighbours, or colleagues accused of allegedly transphobic utterances. Just over a month after that passed into law, Yousaf followed Sturgeon into SNP’s leadership dustbin.  

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To this day, Sturgeon herself continues to defend her dogmatic approach to trans rights—claiming (improbably) that she was never as vested in the issue as her critics claim, while also (even more improbably) casting herself as a Mother Teresa figure who possesses a saintly desire to help all those poor oppressed men. “If people are talking about trying to deliver greater dignity and respect for that tiny, tiny, tiny proportion of the population who are trans, I didn’t spend much time quantitatively on that,” she told an interviewer earlier this year. “But do I regret trying to reduce stigma and discrimination and trauma and heartache for that tiny number of people in our society? No, because one of the things that burns passionately in me is a belief in equality, a hatred of discrimination and prejudice.”

Sturgeon failed to explain why trans people still supposedly suffer “stigma and discrimination and trauma” in a country where the advocates for this “tiny, tiny, tiny” constituency have had such a wildly disproportionate influence on public policy. Nor did she address the “stigma and discrimination and trauma” suffered by (again, actual) Scottish women such as Roz Adams, who was constructively dismissed from her job at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre after enduring abusive workplace conditions imposed by the aforementioned Mridul Wadhwa and his clique of enablers—an environment that an employment tribunal (which awarded Adams almost £70,000 in penalties) would later describe as “reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka.”

In a sign that things are changing at the grass-roots level, Edinburgh Women’s Aid has just announced that it will not allow “trans women” (or men who call themselves “non-binary”) to access the services it provides to survivors of domestic abuse; and that it won’t be hiring such men to work on staff. And Peggie’s case, if she prevails, could prompt other employers across Scotland to reassess their “trans-inclusive” policies—especially if she is awarded a large amount in compensation and legal fees. As Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser notes, such a legal victory could open the door for numerous other female employees at NHS Fife who’ve endured similar behaviour by trans-identified men. (Win or lose, it seems unlikely that many Scots, especially the hundreds of thousands languishing on NHS waiting lists, would regard NHS Fife’s decision to fight Peggie at the tribunal as an appropriate use of public money.)

It’s taken a while for the Scottish public to recognise the extent to which women’s rights have been compromised by trans activists. But they’ve now woken up to a world where it’s impossible to visit museums, theatres, or bars without being confronted by “gender-neutral” toilets and smug announcements from management about being “trans allies.” The Peggie tribunal hearings have demonstrated to millions of appalled observers that even Scotland’s hospitals aren’t immune from this ideology. Suddenly, the theoretical harms that feminists have been warning about for years are evident for all to see.