The Sandie Peggie case has helped Anas Sarwar grow a pair when it comes to gender self-ID

I am no psychologist, but I understand the concept of ex post facto rationalisation whereby people try and give logic to their past choices, even when it was obvious that they were mistakes at the time. 

Some might just call it a chancer’s charter.

And that’s exactly how I would describe Scottish Labour’s cynical attempt to absolve itself of the damaging psychodrama that has engulfed Scotland with the dogged pursuit of gender self-identification.

By now, choosing to do a mea culpa and stand in support of a nurse suspended by the NHS for objecting to a biologically male doctor who says he is a woman using a changing room with ‘female’ on the door, Labour manages to even get a U-turn wrong.

How, I wonder, must Claire Baker and Carol Mochan feel – the two Labour MSPs who bravely refused to be whipped by their party leader into voting for an egregious bill at the time of its passing, for all the reasons now being explored in the Sandie Peggie vs Fife Health Board employment tribunal – with Anas Sarwar’s admission that if he had known then what he knows now, he would never have voted for Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill.  

By admitting he got it wrong, Sarwar hasn’t just exposed himself to having been behind the curve on an issue that has so aerated a nation, he has revealed a cowardice that lacks both political instinct and intellectual integrity. But more damagingly, an inability to listen to women. His women. Women that include his former leader, his MSPs, and others in his party who told him of the things that they knew then that he says he only knows now. And yet they had to bow to his will. Just another man telling women what to do.

And yes, I am personally disappointed in him. Angry even. I know the Labour leader knows the difference between a man and a woman. I know he knows that you cannot change sex. He knew it all along. He just didn’t say it. And it gives me no pleasure to say, we warned him of where this would take us. 

So, tell me this: what does Sarwar know now about the ins and out of the legislation he supported that he didn’t know when his MSPs were whipped and forced to sit way into the night to pass legislation with self-ID at its core?

What more has he understood about the realities of biology and its interplay with the law that justifies this volte face?

What more has he learnt about the possible consequences for women’s rights of men being able to self-declare as women that has given him this wake-up call?

What is it about this moment in time, that has changed in the years that have passed between the passing of the legislation that he voted for and where we are now, that has prompted his extraordinary change of heart? 

It would of course be easy to answer with a quip about the rise of Reform UK. But I am hopeful there is more depth, more sincerity, to it than that and when faced with the brutal facts of reality, of a case so mundanely normal and so abjectly clear in its injustice, that it is Sandie Peggie who has helped Sarwar grow a pair. 

What is so dispiriting is that Scottish Labour struggles to find its distinctive voice in the context of devolution, fails to put clear blue water between it and the UK party and offer a policy difference that could remove that branch-office label and expose the SNP for all its flaws. And Sarwar could have done it on this.

If he had listened to the thoughtful women around him in his own party who were at the vanguard of pushing against the hate spewed down upon them for simply standing up for women’s rights – women like Ann Henderson, Johann Lamont, Jenny Marra, Elaine Smith, Susan Dalgety – he could have carved out a particular policy niche long before Wes Streeting came around to the right way of thinking. But he didn’t; he went with what was sold to him as the progressive flow. He didn’t have the courage. And you can only wonder what the polling might look like right now if he’d made a different choice. 

And it’s a thought, isn’t it, that if it weren’t for Alister Jack and the Tories, the thing that Anas Sarwar says he knows now that he didn’t know then to be wrong, would now be the law. And his U-turn wouldn’t matter a fig because gender self-identification wouldn’t just be an enthusiastically adopted way of thinking, it would be enshrined in law. Men could effectively become women by proclamation and Sandie Peggie could go whistle.

The Peggie case is the very embodiment of the gender woo-woo that has inculcated our public sector landscape as the so-called Stonewall law became accepted as fact. I shouldn’t have to tell the leader of the Scottish Labour Party that the institutional capture on gender self-ID had already happened. Practice had leapt ahead of the law long before MSPs passed the GRR. And it had been championed and legitimised by a then first minister who repeated the mantra that ‘trans women are women’ with a maniacal fervour – and no debate – that meant those around her just accepted fantasy as fact. And I’m looking at you, John Swinney, given you say you have no regrets.

Well, Sandie Peggie was not willing to buy into your fantasy. Sandie Peggie is a nurse with 30 years unblemished experience. She’s a no-nonsense, working-class Fifer and she wasn’t having it. And it is the complete and utter ordinariness of Sandie Peggie and her objections to sharing a changing room with a man that has allowed this issue to break through into the public consciousness.

Yes, we saw a tipping point in this madness with Isla Bryson. But the vision of a rapist claiming to be a woman, while clad in garish pink leggings that left nothing of his male physique to the imagination, was in some ways a cartoonesque version of events. Absurd, fantastical, far removed from normal life. The Sandie Peggie case is different because she is, while accepting the irony of the phrase, the everyman. And if this can happen to her, then it can happen to you. And that’s where Labour should always have been standing.