I hope Nicola Sturgeon’s house is full of flowers. I hope she is getting bouquets as well as brickbats for her defence of human rights and respect for transgender people. It seems to me she is holding the line for decency in public life in the UK, in the face of a massive push towards the gutter.
In the past weeks, Conservative politicians, journalists and commentators - some of whom should know better - have worked together to create a huge scarey bogeyman, a puppet shadow on the flickering news, a paper dragon in the red top press.
Of course, there is grace on both sides. Joanna Cherry, who has been subjected to misogynistic abuse for expressing gender-critical views, is also doing her bit to maintain standards of civility - such as when she went on Twitter to defend SNP politicians who had been photographed at a rally in front of a sign that they weren't aware of, which read: “Decapitate Terfs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).
Cool heads are required to avoid this wedge issue being successfully played by the right against the independence movement. It is clear that transgender people are being weaponised as a political strategy. An edge case - a convicted rapist who claims to be trans - is being exploited for political ends.
My heart went out to transgender woman India Willoughby, who has lived as a woman for many years. She pleaded with a mostly hostile audience on BBC Question Time this week, essentially asking them to accept her right to exist. She asked: “What about if I was out one night and I was raped, where would I be sent - to a men’s prison?... And that just would be my fault for looking like I do?”
In the emotion of the moment, she got that a bit wrong. People don’t get sent to jail for being raped, of course, but if you replace that with a non-violent crime - maybe hot-wiring the pre-payment meter - then I would expect India to be sent to a women’s facility.
There are only a few transgender women in jail in Scotland, perhaps a dozen. As in England, the prison service reviews these on a case-by-case basis. Some sex attackers may attempt to pose as transgender prisoners - the convicted rapist Isla Bryson may be one example. But I just don’t believe the Scottish Prison Service has acted as irresponsibly as some reporting of this case suggests. I haven’t seen any reliable reports that Bryson mixed with female prisoners at Cornton Vale. That jail is in the process of being closed down and a new facility is being opened on the same site this year, so there may have been empty areas. There are disputed reports that another prisoner with a history of attacks on women, Tiffany Scott, was due to be moved to the women’s estate but we don’t have any reliable evidence for that. I already saw plenty of misleading reporting suggesting that having a gender recognition certificate would entitle a prisoner to be held in the female estate. It doesn’t - that is still a matter for the prison service.
But the focus on this edge case reminds me of how the abortion debate in the US was weaponised by the right. They did that in the mid-90s, partly by creating a new term - “partial-birth abortions”. That is a rare, medical procedure that is used, as I understand it, when the fetus is what doctors call “non-viable” - for example when it hasn’t developed a brain stem. It is not a typical case - but the Republican movement focused on it to force a wedge between Democrat politicians and their traditional supporters - especially working-class Catholics.
They forced Democrat politicians onto very difficult territory. Republicans asserted that in these cases, the baby would be partially delivered before being stabbed in the back of the neck with a pair of scissors. Democrats trying to talk about the kind of situations women who seek abortions are more commonly in were constantly forced back to the edge case - “Do you support partial-birth abortions?” A complex, difficult, nuanced issue was recast as infanticide practiced by crazy Liberal doctors.
Democrats supported abortion rights - but it wasn’t what they wanted to be their defining, flagship issue. There were other things - growing economic inequality, workers’ rights that they would have been more comfortable canvassing on to their base, which generally supported limited abortion rights but found it a difficult subject to get excited about.
As a political move, weaponising abortion was hugely successful for the Republicans - at least in the short term. Republicans won the 1994 mid-term elections, partly through exploiting this ‘wedge issue’ - the first time the phrase was used.
Arguably, this has come back to bite the Republicans. Now that they have succeeded in overturning Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court judgment that guaranteed the right to basic abortion rights across the US, the issue has become one that is bringing people to the polls from the other side.
But the Democrats allowed themselves to be wrong-footed, the edge case was made to stand for the whole. They were forced into a monolithic position and it became unacceptable to have a dissenting or questioning view. For example, as technology changes the timelines of fetal viability, is there a case for limiting social abortion (when there are no underlying health issues) to under 20 weeks? It ought to be possible to raise that without causing offence.
But nuance was lost from the debate. The Democrat Party became one where many working-class people of faith no longer felt they had a home. Rural, blue-collar states in particular were flipped from blue to red by the “partial-birth abortion” monster. There were attacks on clinics and a doctor who performed late abortions - George Tiller - was assassinated. Now, women’s lives are at risk. Legal exceptions for women with complicated and dangerous pregnancies are proving hard to access in practice in several states.
In the UK, we have not yet really experienced the depth and rage of culture wars that the US has been riven by. Wedge issues turn human beings into pawns in a political game. Let’s not go there.