How self-ID helped bring down Nicola Sturgeon

In the years when I wrote a lot about sex and gender and politics and law, I made the same observations many times. One, that politicians weren’t talking fully and openly about the implications of self-identified gender, and the policies and practices related to it. Second, that as a result, such policies would never be politically sustainable: no policy made in the shadows can survive in sunlight.

Over several years, and not just in the UK, policymakers of many sorts began to subscribe to the doctrine of self-ID, but very few ever sought or won public consent for the associated policies. I don’t think you need to be a conspiracy theorist to think that there was an element of deliberate strategy behind that lack of public debate. After all, several of the campaigning and lobbying groups involved in pushing the self-ID agenda admitted in a document that they had deliberately avoided public debate about their preferred policies, not least by cloaking them under the ‘veil of protection’ offered by association with gay rights advocacy.