There’s a bit of backstory to this one which involves the former First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon. Sturgeon became the leading voice in Scotland for what was known as self-ID, a law which would allow people to change their gender just by saying so. This law actually got passed in Scotland but never took effect because it was at odds with a UK-wide gender law.
But where all of this really reached a fever pitch was when a convicted rapist who’d started identifying as a woman was sent to a women’s prison. I wrote about that case back in January 2023 when “Isla Bryson” was convicted of two rapes. The gruesome details can be found at the link. In any case, here’s what “Isla” aka Adam Graham looked like.
Scotland: A #trans woman has been convicted for raping two women in Clydebank and Glasgow. Isla Bryson, formerly known as Adam Graham, is being sent to a women’s prison in Stirling. At the trial, jurors were explicitly told “Adam” was her “dead name.” pic.twitter.com/YjBLxF8AA2
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) January 25, 2023
In keeping with the gender insanity being promoted by the left and especially by First Minister Sturgeon, Isla was going to be incarcerated for raping two women in a women’s prison. Suddenly, there was a vocal backlash from a lot of people who though maybe that wasn’t a good idea. And that led to this now classic moment in which Sturgeon was forced, apparently for the first time, to acknowledge that the slogan “trans women are women” didn’t apply in every circumstance.
Does Scotland’s First Minister believe all trans women are women?
Scottish Gov has just implemented an effective ban on trans prisoners who’ve committed sexual & violent crimes against women being moved to a women-only prison. @itvnews pic.twitter.com/DRbvItHZ3i
— Peter A Smith (@PeterAdamSmith) January 30, 2023
The backlash was so bad that a couple days later Sturgeon had to make a very serious statement clarifying that putting a trans woman in a female prison was a terrible idea, one she did not support.
🎥 Nicola Sturgeon forced into humiliating u-turn as Isla Bryson to be moved to men’s prison: pic.twitter.com/4VCHv0K0oB
— Scottish Express (@ScotExpress) January 26, 2023
This story was one of the leading reasons that, just a month later, Sturgeon announced she was stepping down.
And that brings us to this week when Nicola Sturgeon is promoting her new book Frankly about her life and time as First Minister. And author JK Rowling, who was on the other side of all of those battles two years ago, just published a review of the book. The review is biting but also funny. Throughout she compares former First Minister Sturgeon to Bella Swan, the teen character from the Twilight series who is forced to choose between a hot werewolf and a shimmery vampire named Edward.
The truth is that Sturgeon, like Bella Swan, is a monomaniac. Both are consumed by a single, overriding ambition. In Nicola’s case, it’s independence for Scotland. In Bella’s, it’s having loads of hot sex with Edward Cullen without getting accidentally killed. Spoiler alert: only one of these ambitions is realised.
But the heart of the review involves Sturgeon’s gender efforts which she still claims were the right thing to do.
Notwithstanding all the ruminating on sexism and misogyny Sturgeon does in Frankly, always as it affects her personally, she is unshakeable in her belief that if men put on dresses and call themselves women they can only be doing so with innocent motives. Sturgeon hasn’t been remotely humbled by the Supreme Court ruling that proved her government was forcing a misinterpretation of the UK-wide Equality Act on Scotland, one that robbed women of many single sex spaces and of their very existence as a definable class with rights protected in law. She remains stubbornly wedded to her belief that it is possible to let some men into women’s spaces on the men’s say so, without letting any man who fancies it come inside. She denies there are any risks to a policy of gender self-identification. She can’t imagine any male predator capitalising on such policies, in spite of the fact that it has, demonstrably, happened many times. She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts…
But then Isla Bryson burst into the news. Bryson, a convicted double rapist, had decided he was a woman and would rather be incarcerated with the sex against which he’d already committed the most male of crimes. When asked on television whether bald, blonde wig-wearing Bryson was a man or a woman, the First Minister, whose composure and articulacy under fire had, for years, been her most potent political asset, made herself look – and forgive me for employing a PR term here – a complete f**kwit.
Of course, the blame for her looking like a complete f**kwit lies with others. Nobody had warned her about Bryson, you see. She apparently had no idea that the very thing feminists had warned her was likely to happen, and had already happened – trans-identified man Katie Dolotowski had already sexually assaulted a ten-year-old girl in a public bathroom, and served his time in a women’s prison in Scotland – would happen again. She explains in Frankly that she was worried about the impact it would have on trans people if she denied Bryson was a woman.
Therein lies the problem in the smallest of nutshells. If you’re prepared to accept the foundational falsehood that some men are women, you’ll inevitably find yourself panicking like a pheasant caught in headlights one day, because to admit that even a single man who says he’s a woman isn’t means the whole edifice of gender self-ID collapses.
Yes, and that’s exactly what happened in that video clip above. All it took was one journalist willing to push the issue in a logical way to make the whole edifice collapse. Too bad we don’t have journalist like that here in the US.
