Joan McAlpine: Gender ID is a personal passion for the FM and any harm will be her personal responsibility

What a hill to die on. That’s the most common refrain I hear from supporters of independence, perplexed at the Scottish Government’s insistence on going to constitutional war with Westminster to defend a policy most Scots oppose.

The SNP’s founding purpose, written into its constitution, is defending Scotland’s interests and promoting Scottish independence. To achieve the latter, the party needs to make its case and there’s no shortage of issues to rally around from the cost of living crisis to the hangover of Boris Johnson’s sleazy administration and the continuing damage of Brexit and denial of Scottish democracy.

But, instead of striving to unite Scots, the government divides us by prioritising a cause best described as niche: the right of any man, including rapists, to declare themselves legally female with no safeguards whatsoever.

This is the principle the first minister is riding into battle to defend, as the UK government has challenged her Gender Recognition Reform Bill, saying it contravenes the Scotland Act. Not since Bonnie Prince Charlie sacrificed his Highlanders at Culloden has a Scottish battleground been so ill-chosen. It’s not so much dying on a hill, as succumbing in a quagmire.

The Sunday Post View: Trans people deserve better than ministers’ flustering bluster

Sometimes it takes a picture to tell a story, like the photograph of convicted rapist Adam Graham/Isla Bryson in a blonde wig and tight lycra leggings. It left nothing to the imagination because this person is an intact male. Under the criminal law of Scotland, only people with a penis can commit rape but the first minister cannot bring herself to call him a man while, at the same time, admitting Graham/Bryson may be masquerading as a trans woman.

However, she has just whipped her MSPs to pass a law that allows him to self-declare as female and change his birth certificate without scrutiny or safeguards. The government has failed repeatedly to define what counts as a false declaration under its legislation.

She also whipped her MSPs to vote against amendments to her bill that would have prevented rapists changing legal sex. This is why real feminists believe the trans ideology the first minister has promoted with such conviction is deeply sexist. It dictates we must believe a man who says he’s a woman, over the word of a woman who says he’s not…even if he’s raped her.

It should have come as no surprise to the first minister that this “individual,” as ministers began saying last week, was initially sent to a women’s prison. That is exactly the policy she has presided over and was warned about.

Natasha Radmehr: To suggest Isla Bryson is a typical trans woman is like suggesting Jeffrey Dahmer is a typical gay man. It is grossly unfair

In January 2020, Kenneth Gibson, an SNP MSP, raised at First Minister’s Questions, the concerns of his constituent, Rhona Hotchkiss, a recently retired prison governor, who once ran Cornton Vale. During 2019, she had spoken of her concerns, describing how male criminals identifying as women, with no surgery and no gender recognition certificate, were sharing spaces, including shower areas, with females. She described their presence as traumatising in itself, as many of the women were victims of male violence, and told how one trans-identified male, calling himself a lesbian, bragged about his sexual prowess. Another strutted around in tight clothing, aroused.

Hotchkiss explained “risk assessments” never considered the psychological impact on female prisoners. If risk assessment determines where a prisoner is housed, why not just make prisons mixed sex? We know why – for reasons of privacy, dignity and the fact that men, as a group, are more likely to be abusive, voyeuristic and predatory. How they identify does not change that.

Hotchkiss was a member of the SNP but her well-publicised warnings rang no alarms for the FM. She was never invited to share her expertise, even when she wrote to party bosses explaining why she had resigned. The Women’s Pledge Group of SNP members, including parliamentarians, formed to oppose gender self-ID in 2019 was also ignored.

The first minister did not reach out or listen. Instead, she made a video on her phone condemning opponents as transphobes. She dismissed the fears of women as “not valid”.

This ideology is a personal passion of the first minister so now she must answer for any harm done – to women, obviously, but also to her party and the cause of independence it was founded to champion.