When Nicola Sturgeon looks back on her career, it is she who should feel shame

I literally bumped into Nicola Sturgeon a couple of months ago when I crossed the street and almost tripped over her as she wheeled her suitcase down the Royal Mile for one of her rare appearances at Holyrood. The meeting surprised us both – we haven’t spoken in years – and the greeting, while reasonably polite as the conventions of etiquette leap-frogged the creeping realisation of all that has passed between us, was cold – a muffled salutation that gave no hint to the warmth we once shared. 

And that saddens me. I walked away thinking I should go back, be more expansive, ask her how she was doing, tell her that on a human level I felt for her and wished her well for her eventual time out of politics. But I was dissuaded by my own sensibilities that told me she probably wouldn’t even give the encounter, as uncomfortable as I’d found it, a passing thought. What am I to her, other than another dissenter whose criticism she could do without, a commentator once considered a close ally and now relegated to a foe. I walked on feeling conflicted by the passage of time and emotion.

Building bridges across political divides is what I do. I’ve done it for over 20 years at Holyrood, but this is a chasm too deep to traverse. And believe me, I have tried. But it is so rooted in ideological differences, not in party politics. In her belief that men can be women and me knowing they cannot. It is that fundamental breach of reality which has gouged a jagged wound in Scottish politics so raw it can hurt, and which has wreaked so much damage across Scotland that it makes any hint of rapprochement too hard to consider. It has made enemies out of old allies and undermined our credentials as the birthplace of the Enlightenment. It’s a dividing line. And she drew it.

I remember, only too clearly, the exiting MSPs and ministers, last time around, who would impatiently dismiss my assessment about where this would lead as a ‘fringe issue’ that wasn’t being brought up on the doorsteps. And yet, here we are, where not a day goes by without the contentious issue of sex versus gender raising its head in politics, in the media, in employment law, health, and encroaching on the proper functioning of public bodies and service provision. 

As I write, I am watching the bonfire that is the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee examining the issue of public sector equalities duty. It should be a straightforward gambol through the requirements enshrined through various equalities and employment laws and resting on clear and legal definitions of woman, sex and gender. But all of that has been upended. So much so that Scottish Government-funded organisations that have the temerity to call themselves feminist have tied themselves in knots trying not to define what a woman is when interrogated by various tenacious committee members on the issue.

Sturgeon says that she believes we will look back on this episode and 'feel a sense of collective shame' about the vilification of trans people. I disagree. She should feel the shame.

It is embarrassing, damning and harmful to women. And what is so unforgivable is that while Sturgeon might describe herself as a feminist to her fingertips, like much of her rhetoric, what does that actually mean in practice? I am the woman that through sisterly solidarity persuaded her to talk publicly about her miscarriage. I wanted others to know what I already knew – that she hadn’t made some cold-hearted careerist decision to not have children – as was the way it was perceived by others at the time. But as a woman, she had suffered that unbearable pain of the loss of a child. She felt that deeply.

And she trusted me then to tell that story of hurt, loss, of being a woman. And she thanked me for it. I also talked to her so candidly about my menopause and what she might learn to expect as hers hit home while in high office. We talked, woman to woman, with a view to inspiring other women. But I am also the woman who held a mirror to what she thought was progressive and that I considered so regressive. And I will never understand how such a bright, well-read woman like her, refused to apply her keen intellect to foresee the obvious clash in rights to the detriment of women that her gender reforms would have. That blind spot was her undoing. Even now, she still talks like this was just a world not yet ready for her progressive ideals. 

Fundamentally, and contrarily, she has created an environment where any discussion of women’s rights becomes conflated into an accusation of transphobia and yet she still believes she is a champion for women. Sturgeon says that she believes we will look back on this episode and “feel a sense of collective shame” about the vilification of trans people. I disagree. She should feel the shame. Her policy was wrong-headed. Her approach was dangerously dogmatic and the consequences of what she led on, legitimised and weaponised, has ripped lives asunder, including those of trans people, and set women’s rights backwards. 

We will not look back, in years to come, and view the chemical castration of young people as right. We will not reflect kindly on those who thought the experimental use of drugs on confused children was the appropriate thing to do. We will not reassess that allowing male-bodied people to compete against women in sport was ever fair – watching a man punching a woman in the face in the name of equity can’t ever be viewed as progress. And we will never rerun the arguments that men should have access to single-sex spaces for vulnerable women in prisons, refuges, rape crisis centres, hospital wards and prisons and think that it was ever right that those women should relinquish their right to safety, dignity and respect, for the sake of a man’s sensitivities. 

And nothing said more about the dramatic shifting sands of politics and the legacy she leaves behind than two photographs, side by side – one of Sturgeon perfectly turned out, standing in front of an adoring crowd of thousands at the Hydro arena and the second, taken a decade later, of Sturgeon walking past a group of feminists on International Women’s Day waving placards accusing her of destroying women’s rights. 

While Sturgeon touts her memoirs, I believe that history will not judge the former first minister well on this and I still question why she saw it as a hill she was prepared for her reputation to die on.