A Woman's Place is in the press

How the women of Scotland are winning the battle for their sex-based rights

This is the presentation I gave on Thursday 9 November at a Womens Place UK event in London.

Scotland’s campaign against self ID has had many challenges to overcome, so before I focus on the media’s role I want to give a bit of context.

Scotland suffers from small country syndrome - Holyrood is far more insular and cliquish than Westminster. The political conversation – whether in the leader pages or in pubs - is framed by the constitutional question. 

Nicola Sturgeon’s iron hold on her party from 2014 when she was anointed First Ministers was the stuff of legends.

Her party, the parliament and civil society were her courtiers, as were many in the media.  She created a powerful myth that she was a left of centre, progressive, global figure, when the reality was more mundane. She was, in fact, a mediocre thinker who needed to control every aspect of her environment to survive. To be fair, she did that pretty successfully for nearly nine years.

Women’s organisations, the trade union movement, equality NGOs, were all in the grip of the intersectional left – so wonderfully described by Helen Lewis in a recent Atlantic piece.

To its discredit, the Scottish Labour leadership largely ignored gender reform hoping it would go away, to the extent of dismissing influential figures like Johann Lamont, a former leader of the party, and one of Scotland’s foremost feminists of the last 30 years.

Five years ago public opinion was not alert to gender ideology. Self ID was not a common phrase. If anything, the public’s instinct was to ‘be kind’ to the poor men who believed their female spirit was trapped in a male shell. Think Hayley from Corrie, not a double rapist in a blonde wig.