An SNP politician’s lonely fight in the gender identity debate

Joan McAlpine is an unlikely rebel against the Scottish political establishment. The SNP MSP is chair of Holyrood’s culture and external affairs committee, a former parliamentary aide to Alex Salmond and a past editor of the Sunday Times Scotland. She has a reputation as a firebrand Nationalist and, in the interests of full disclosure, I have previously been disobliging about her in print.

Her exile has been quick, brutal and, inevitably in these days of viewpoint-patrolling, the result of voicing an incorrect opinion. McAlpine is gender-critical, or, in the prosecutorial terms of her detractors, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF). Recently she began asking awkward questions about the campaign to give force of law to relatively new and largely untested theories about sex, gender and identity. Worse, she has now invited Meghan Murphy to the Scottish parliament. Murphy, a Canadian feminist, was banned by Twitter in November for using a masculine pronoun when referring to a trans woman (i.e.