For the last fortnight, the employment tribunal brought by nurse Sandie Peggie against NHS Fife and Dr Beth Upton has gripped the nation. Nurse Peggie lodged a claim against both Dr Upton and the health board for sexual harassment, harassment relating to a protected belief, indirect discrimination and victimisation after she was suspended for questioning the presence of the transgender doctor in the female changing room. There is much more that could – and will – be said about the case, which will resume in July, but it is the response of Scottish politicians that has fuelled much ire over the past week in particular.
In an interview with the Holyrood Sources podcast, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and his Deputy Jackie Baillie revealed, after a prolonged silence on the matter, they support nurse Sandie Peggie ‘absolutely’. Sarwar added that he thinks cases such as Peggie’s indicate a level of ‘organisational capture’ in the institutions where they occur. ‘If we are to avoid a divisive culture war,’ he concludes, then Scottish Labour ‘must make it clear we support single sex spaces on the basis of biological sex.’ Better late than never, I suppose.
But for many Scottish women, Labour members and supporters amongst them – who have spent an inordinate amount of time being called ‘Nazis’, ‘terfs’ and bigots for saying exactly the same thing for the last decade – Scottish Labour’s leadership sudden change of tack over gender issues lavishes insult upon injury. Sarwar and Baillie may now be championing precisely what Scottish feminists have been calling for, but in 2022 Scottish Labour MSPs were whipped to back the SNP’s controversial attempt to introduce gender self-identification via the SNP’s gender bill. Asked by Holyrood Sources if they would vote similarly today, both Sarwar and Baillie insisted they would not – ‘knowing what we know now.’
As many have said on Twitter/X, there is absolutely no reason why they should not have known, in 2022, precisely what they claim to have realised only recently. Women like Sandie Peggie being confronted by men in female-only spaces and services is precisely what lobby groups for self-ID have been arguing for. In changing rooms, prisons, toilets, arts awards, maternity groups, breastfeeding groups (for heaven’s sake) where gender ideology meets our common language, ‘female-only’ can include males through said male’s desire and assertion, the latter of which must override reality and, it can reasonably be argued, common sense. To recover any credibility on this issue, Scottish Labour must admit that it simply did not listen to the siren warnings of many women, including their party’s former leader Johann Lamont, over the obvious collision between women’s rights and the demands of gender identity activists.
Alongside many other legislators capable of seeing that self-ID was incoherent at best and dangerous at worst, Lamont was vilified by colleagues across the chamber for staunchly setting out the sensible, women-centred case against Sturgeon’s flagship policy of gender reform. Not only that, she and many others were pointing out that even without a change in the law, self-ID was indeed ‘capturing’ institutions – from rape crisis services to prisons, arts organisations to the civil service and the Scottish parliament itself. If Sarwar and Baillie had done their job as opposition politicians over recent years, then Scottish women would not have had to step up and lead the fight against gender identity madness.
If Sarwar and Baillie had done their job as opposition politicians over recent years, then Scottish women would not have had to step up and lead the fight against gender identity madness.
These extraordinary women include Marion Calder, Susan Smith and Trina Budge of For Women Scotland – as well as the powerhouse policy-analysis trio Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, whose work is quoted often by the (far too few) MSPs who continue to try to unpick the damage done by Sturgeon’s gender-obsessed regime. There are countless others: anonymous women who never wanted this fight but who, when it arrived on their doorsteps, refused to back down. Apologies are due to every Scottish woman who has been let down by legislators so keen to avoid the wrath of gender ideology lobby groups that they pretended this was somehow about ‘balancing rights’. If MSPs had just listened to the women listed above, they would know that the only rights under attack were women’s.
Sandie Peggie’s case has created a seismic shift ver the discussion of gender issues in Scotland. Not only have Sarwar, Baillie and even SNP First Minister John Swinney felt the need to state their support for Peggie, those MSPs who screamed loudest in favour of gender reform in Scotland have been suspiciously silent over the past fortnight. Perhaps they have seen the same polling that tells Sarwar, Swinnie and other leaders that this particular jig is up.
That the Scottish Labour leadership is now saying things that would result in open letters and fiery abuse from youthful activists only three years ago is quite something. The response from trans activists is telling, too. I have yet to see Baillie called a ‘terf’, nor have I seen Labour activists openly plotting against her – as happened to her former UK Labour colleague, Rosie Duffield.
There is only so long a fundamental untruth can be allowed to thrive in a liberal democracy. Cases such as Peggie’s, which cut through to the mainstream, go to the heart of why self-ID cannot hold sway. Perhaps it would be folly to await apologies for the women who deserve them: women who have been psychologically abused, socially ostracised, often fired or threatened with economic sanctions, all for insisting, as Peggie has, that women are definable and important in life and in law on the basis of sex.
If Scottish Labour has any sense, the party will now be aware that female voters will not easily forgive those who blithely signed away their rights, while ignoring the abuse meted out to countless women for daring to state the position now proudly held by Anas Sarwar and Jackie Baillie. The Scottish Labour leadership may now be in line with public opinion, but this belated change of heart certainly does not guarantee them votes.
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