Nicola Sturgeon has for many years been hailed, particularly by commentators south of the border, as the consummate political leader – someone who effortlessly dominates the Scottish political scene. In doing so, it’s said, she repeatedly shows up the public-school boys in the Westminster government for the bluffers that they are.
That unearned reputation is starting to slip, now that Sturgeon’s dogged pursuit of radical transgender policies, via her now-blocked gender bill, has blown up in her face. The public outcry over the case of ‘Isla Bryson’ – the male rapist briefly held in a women’s prison – has shown that the SNP has lost the room and the moral plot when it comes to the gender issue.
Now, Nicola Sturgeon has demonstrated that famous political nous once again by dismissing her critics as bigots. A strategy that has, of course, worked brilliantly for politicians in recent years.
Speaking to Lewis Goodall of Global’s News Agents podcast, Sturgeon said:
‘There are people who have opposed this bill that cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable. But just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find they are deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.’
Sturgeon said she was not suggesting that all opponents of the gender bill hold these views. However, given that roughly two-thirds of Scots oppose her gender reforms, this was a foolish statement to make. It puts one in mind of Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment about Trump voters, or all the broadsides against xenophobic Brexiteers from the leading lights of the Remain campaign. And we all know how that worked out.
To many this will look like shameful, desperate stuff from a leader who has no claim to the moral high ground. Those critics Sturgeon has so haughtily smeared were actually proven right last week. Those who said that so-called gender self-ID poses a threat to women’s safety have been completely vindicated. Indeed, the ‘Isla Bryson’ case has shown us just how compromised women’s rights and spaces are under the existing gender laws – laws which Sturgeon and her gender bill seek to ‘liberalise’ further. In that case, the moral depravity of prioritising the hurt feelings of sex offenders over the safety of women has been laid bare. In that context, Sturgeon’s insistence that she is on the ‘right side of history’, and that some of her critics are a bunch of reactionaries, now looks perverse.
Indeed, it is an inversion of reality. If there is any bigotry in the gender debate it is surely on the side of the trans ideologues.
Misogyny? How about the trans activists who routinely bombard JK Rowling, Joanna Cherry and many more prominent gender-critical women with rape and death threats – or the black-clad antifa goons who show up to menace feminists at rallies and demonstrations?
There’s also something inherently homophobic about a movement that thinks same-sex attraction is a myth, and that lesbians who don’t want to sleep with a transwoman in possession of a penis are ‘genital fetishists’ or ‘sexual racists’ who just need to be a bit more open-minded. This is the modern, politically correct successor to the old homophobic notion that lesbians just need a good shag.
Here’s hoping that Sturgeon goes the same way as other political leaders of recent times, shocked to find out that voters don’t take kindly to being insulted. The ‘deplorables’ of Scotland can now see just how much their first minister appears to hold them in contempt.
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