What JK Rowling can teach Nicola Sturgeon about gender

For transsexuals like me, the Scottish Government’s bill to reform the Gender Recognition Act is a disaster. If passed unamended, the bill would introduce ‘self-identification’, sweeping aside the checks and balances that make the process of changing ones’s gender credible in the minds of the public. 

This is not some minor administrative detail: allowing any man to effectively say he is a woman just because he wants to is an affront to women’s safety and dignity. Women would have no choice but to introduce measures of their own if they want to protect their spaces, groups and associations. Meanwhile the lives of transsexuals like me would become much harder.

Yet both Nicola Sturgeon and Shona Robison – the minister landed with the task of presenting the bill to Holyrood – have their heads buried deep in the sand. One woman who is able to see this proposal for what it is, however, is JK Rowling. As