Scotland became the laboratory for trans extremism – and it’s not just the SNP’s fault

Three recent events have confirmed that Scotland’s civic sphere has drastically over-reached itself on the subject of gender ideology.

First we had Police Scotland anticipate a change in the law that is not actually happening – an extremely worrying development for an organisation that is, at least in theory, supposed to uphold the law of the land. In a submission to a Scottish Parliament committee, Police Scotland confirmed that the force provides for exactly the kind of self-identification of trans people that the UK government prevented from being enacted in Scotland – an intervention subsequently found by the Court of Session to have been entirely legal and legitimate.

Not only has Police Scotland decided that it knows better than the courts or parliament on this issue, it has proudly asserted that it expressly allows male rapists to self-declare their sex in order to foster their “sense of belonging”. Publicly-funded lectures by trans activists on their ideology, to which officers are subjected, have resulted in this astonishing up-ending of all logic in the criminal justice system. More worryingly, it has resulted in incidents of rape, which can only be committed by biological men, being attributed to women. Facts matter, but not to Police Scotland any more.

Then there was the long-delayed and very much welcomed resignation of Mridul Wadhwa, the biological man who identifies as a woman and who used his position as head of Edinburgh Rape Crisis to accuse female rape victims who requested support and counselling only from other biological women of transphobia.

But scandals about the creep of trans ideology are now being exposed so quickly that it’s hard to keep up, and now we have a report that between 90 and 100 children – some as young as nine – were prescribed puberty blockers on the NHS, despite doctors being ignorant of the risks involved. Tracy Gillies, the medical director at NHS Lothian, said it was “really very difficult to articulate” why any clinician would now prescribe drugs to suppress puberty to treat gender issues.

Half of those treated had a neurodevelopmental condition such as autism, a further third had a diagnosed mental health disorder, and yet clinicians still treated patients’ complaints as a gender issue. Seventy per cent of patients were biological girls.

“As soon as a child mentions they’re gender questioning, everyone goes, ‘I can’t deal with this, they need to go to the gender service’,” said Rhoda MacLeod, who leads the Sandyford Clinic, Scotland’s only gender service. The prescription of puberty blockers to under-18s was suspended in England when the Cass Review into young people’s gender care was published earlier this year, and Scotland quickly followed suit.

But for many young people, the damage has already been done and they will suffer the effects for the rest of their lives. More worryingly, legislation being prepared by the UK government (and which, following an agreement with the Scottish government, will apply to the whole of Britain) will seek to ban “conversion therapy”; it is already feared among parents’ groups that exactly the kind of practice that has failed children in Scotland – immediately referring gender-questioning children to gender clinics – will become the only legal course of action. This is the “affirmation” model of care that is so beloved of trans ideology champions like Stonewall and Mermaids. Questioning or challenging a teenager’s belief that they have been “born in the wrong body” could become a criminal act.

And still politicians at Holyrood, politicians of most of the main parties (with the honourable exception of the Scottish Conservatives) refuse even to discuss the issue, for fear that they will be asked what is, to them, the unanswerable question, What is a woman?

The SNP, supported wholeheartedly by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, have gone along with this ideology from the very start, seeking to legislate to allow children and, yes, even rapists, to change their gender without so much as a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. This would have had real world consequences for the vulnerable women forced to share a prison cell with biological men with a history of sexual violence. And yet when the vote at Holyrood came, those MSPs blithely accepted the praise of the trans activists and ignored the real and justified fears of women.

Actions have consequences. The mindset at Holyrood remains one of overwhelming support for trans ideology, and to hell with the concerns of these silly women. Now, despite having expert advice from the clinicians involved, we know that vulnerable children have been subjected to untested drugs whose side-effects we cannot predict. No MSP who voted for Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill should have the brass neck now to speak out against this heinous practice, for the lead those clinicians took came from the chamber at Holyrood.

Not that there is any danger of MSPs speaking out. The same politicians who might wring their hands in faux concern in the presence of the TV cameras are the same ones who have failed to raise a single word of criticism about Police Scotland’s corruption of rape statistics, the same politicians who can find time to Tweet their latest visit to a local food bank but couldn’t get round to commenting on the Edinburgh Rape Crisis scandal.

In their mindless and craven subservience to gender ideologues, MSPs have let Scotland down. They have let down Scotland’s women and their children. Their only strategy is to hope that when election time rolls around again, this issue will not be anywhere near the top of voters’ concerns. Because if it is, they will have no answers to give and no defence to mount.