Reality bites Sturgeon for the crime of woke transgression

The Scottish First Minister’s admission that trans women need to be treated differently to born women is a potential game-changer, and may be where the trans doctrine starts to unravel.

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. Whisper it: trans women are not women.

Is Nicola Sturgeon a bigot? I ask because this week she said something we’re forever being warned not to say. She expressed an idea that is apparently so hateful that instant cancellation normally awaits those who utter it.

What was her speechcrime? She said trans women are not quite the same as women. Not always. Not in every situation. Transphobe! Ready the stake.

The First Minister of Scotland committed her act of wrongthink in response to questions about violent trans women being housed in women’s prisons. “Are all trans women women?” a reporter asked.

“Trans women are women but in the prison context there is no automatic right for a trans woman …” said Sturgeon, before our intrepid interrogator butted in.

“So there are contexts where a trans woman is not a woman?” he said.

There it was: the question that threatened to expose not only Scotland’s folly of putting violent born males in jails full of vulnerable women, but the entire ideological edifice of the trans worldview.

Namely that trans women are women. This is the mantra of our age. It’s become a borderline religious chant. Virtually every individual and institution that wants to be thought of as pure and good has at some point recited this woke catechism.

Failing to genuflect to the idea that a man can transform into a woman is the modern equivalent of refusing to believe that bread transforms into the body of Christ during mass.

It’s heresy. Only today heresy is punishable by social death rather than literal death, which is progress, I guess. So it wasn’t surprising that Sturgeon seemed rattled by the reporter’s query; knocked for six by his suggestion that Scotland’s different prison rules for trans women proves that trans women are not women after all.

She knew how much was riding on her response. Her reputation, her woke credentials and the entire belief system of gender self-ID, which holds that people are whatever sex they say they are.

Sturgeon laughed nervously. Then she said: “There are circumstances in which a trans woman will be housed in the male prison estate …”

Right, said the reporter, so now we know: trans women and women are “not equal”. It was an extraordinary exchange. And an important one.

It might just mark the point at which the trans doctrine started to unravel.

The grilling of Sturgeon sprang from some serious missteps she has taken on the gender issue in recent months. First there was the Scottish parliament’s passing of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would streamline the process by which a person can legally change his or her sex.

The government in Westminster is taking steps to block the bill on the basis that it threatens women’s rights. After all, if it’s made even easier for a man to “become a woman”, what will become of female-only spaces such as changing rooms, domestic violence shelters and, indeed, women’s prisons? All would effectively be thrown open to any man who claimed to be a woman, whether that be a genuine trans person or a chancer, a voyeur, possibly even a predator.

All voices deserve a hearing in this debate, including those voices, such as JK Rowling’s, that insist womanhood is not some costume any Tom, Dick or Harry can pull on.

Then there was the prison scandal. Mere weeks after the gender bill was nodded through, a Scottish trans woman called Isla Bryson was found guilty of raping two women. Bryson – whose birth name is Adam Graham – will be looked upon by the vast majority of people as a man. He has male genitalia. And he repugnantly forced his genitalia into two women. And yet following his conviction he was sent to a women’s prison. There was uproar over this, rightly, and before long Sturgeon announced Bryson was being moved to a blokes’ jail. So it seems this trans woman is not a woman. Not really. And that all trans women, in Sturgeon’s words, do not have an “automatic right” to be treated as women, at least in the context of criminal justice.

Perhaps it’s time we thought the unthinkable. Perhaps it’s time we said the thing you’re not meant to say. Whisper it: trans women are not women.

Of course trans people should be treated with courtesy, as should all people. They should be allowed to dress as they please and refer to themselves as they please without facing any persecution whatsoever.

But let us also bring reality to bear on this most tetchy of issues. If you were born male and went through male puberty, can you subsequently be a woman? Literally, legally a woman?

I say no. And it’s not transphobia to say no. My belief in biological science and women’s rights demands that I reject the idea a man becomes a woman simply by declaring himself to be one.

As a lapsed Catholic I no longer believe in transubstantiation. And as a rationalist I don’t believe in transgenderism’s core tenet – that we can choose our sex. If that makes me a blasphemer, so be it. It is important to follow the dictates of one’s conscience, even when the consequences are rough.

For too long, women in particular have been demonised and cancelled for saying sex is real, men are not women, and biology matters. Enough. All voices deserve a hearing in this debate, including those voices, such as JK Rowling’s, that insist womanhood is not some costume any Tom, Dick or Harry can pull on.

Sturgeon’s admission that trans women will sometimes need to be treated differently to born women is a potential game-changer. It’s a tacit confession that the so-called “TERFs” have a point. Maybe reason will finally find its way into this discussion.

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for online magazine Spiked.