{"id":412453,"date":"2025-09-10T06:27:19","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T06:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/412453\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T06:27:19","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T06:27:19","slug":"nicola-sturgeon-scotland-has-lost-its-mind-on-trans-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/412453\/","title":{"rendered":"Nicola Sturgeon: Scotland has lost its mind on trans issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scotland has \u201ccollectively lost its mind\u201d on trans issues, Nicola Sturgeon has claimed<\/a>. The former first minister was speaking at an event<\/a> in Aberdeen on Sunday night to promote her recently published memoir<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe weren\u2019t the first in the world to propose this,\u201d Sturgeon said of the bill. \u201cScotland wasn\u2019t doing something that had never been done before.\u201d She cited the example of the Republic of Ireland, which passed the Gender Recognition Act<\/a> in 2015. During Sunday\u2019s event, the former first minister acknowledged that she bears some responsibility for the debate over gender self-identification becoming \u201cmore polarising\u201d, though she insisted to host Catriona Stewart that she would \u201cnot apologise for standing up for trans people\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sturgeon resigned<\/a> 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>, a biological male who was placed in a women\u2019s prison, using female pronouns. In Frankly, Sturgeon admitted that she should have \u201chit the pause button\u201d on her gender reforms in order to develop a consensus in Scotland on the issue. While promoting the book, she suggested<\/a> that male rapists should \u201cprobably\u201d forfeit the right to choose their gender.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, the ex-SNP leader said that she doesn\u2019t \u201cwant to force anybody to believe anything that they don\u2019t want to believe\u201d. She added that \u201cI will always push back against the vilification of a minority that are already pretty stigmatised,\u201d and claimed that \u201cthere\u2019s too much punching down on trans people for my liking right now.\u201d For Sturgeon, women\u2019s rights and trans rights are not \u201cin conflict\u201d, and she argued that she \u201ccan be a champion and somebody who advocates and stands up for both\u201d.<\/p>\n

Earlier in the course of her book tour last month, Sturgeon conceded<\/a> that she was \u201cpartly responsible\u201d for the loss of \u201crationality in this debate\u201d. While in office, she claimed<\/a> that opponents of her reforms used women\u2019s rights as a \u201ccloak of responsibility\u201d for transphobia, adding that \u201cjust as they\u2019re transphobic you\u2019ll also find that they\u2019re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.\u201d On Sunday evening, she said that \u201cthe normalisation in this country of far-Right language and rhetoric and attitudes and opinions is terrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scotland has \u201ccollectively lost its mind\u201d on trans issues, Nicola Sturgeon has claimed. The former first minister was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5009],"tags":[748,141776,4884,7853,11187,980,285,712,141777,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-412453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scotland","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-gender-recognition-reform-bill","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-nicola-sturgeon","12":"tag-non-classifiu00e9e","13":"tag-optional","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-scotland","16":"tag-transgender-politics","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115178585732676413","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}