Scotland has “collectively lost its mind” on trans issues, Nicola Sturgeon has claimed. The former first minister was speaking at an event in Aberdeen on Sunday night to promote her recently published memoir, Frankly, and defended her record in government. Among the policies discussed was her support for the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which sought to reform the process by which people could legally change their gender.
“We weren’t the first in the world to propose this,” Sturgeon said of the bill. “Scotland wasn’t doing something that had never been done before.” She cited the example of the Republic of Ireland, which passed the Gender Recognition Act in 2015. During Sunday’s event, the former first minister acknowledged that she bears some responsibility for the debate over gender self-identification becoming “more polarising”, though she insisted to host Catriona Stewart that she would “not apologise for standing up for trans people”.
Sturgeon resigned as Scottish first minister in February 2023, a month after the UK Government blocked the GRR Bill from receiving royal assent. Early that same year, she also referred to convicted rapist Isla Bryson, a biological male who was placed in a women’s prison, using female pronouns. In Frankly, Sturgeon admitted that she should have “hit the pause button” on her gender reforms in order to develop a consensus in Scotland on the issue. While promoting the book, she suggested that male rapists should “probably” forfeit the right to choose their gender.
On Sunday, the ex-SNP leader said that she doesn’t “want to force anybody to believe anything that they don’t want to believe”. She added that “I will always push back against the vilification of a minority that are already pretty stigmatised,” and claimed that “there’s too much punching down on trans people for my liking right now.” For Sturgeon, women’s rights and trans rights are not “in conflict”, and she argued that she “can be a champion and somebody who advocates and stands up for both”.
Earlier in the course of her book tour last month, Sturgeon conceded that she was “partly responsible” for the loss of “rationality in this debate”. While in office, she claimed that opponents of her reforms used women’s rights as a “cloak of responsibility” for transphobia, adding that “just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.” On Sunday evening, she said that “the normalisation in this country of far-Right language and rhetoric and attitudes and opinions is terrifying.”