The biggest threat to the safety of trans people comes from their loudest champions - Euan McColm

The impact of the SNP’s monomaniacal obsession, during the Nicola Sturgeon years, with gender ideology lingers

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Anyone who raises concerns about the impact of gender ideology should expect to be accused of two things.

First, they’ll be told - often in the most violent terms - they’re a hateful bigot. After that, trans activists will inform them that, along with being a real and present danger to anyone they meet, they’re reacting to problems that don’t exist.

According to the trans activists’ disinformation handbook, their campaigns affect nobody but the tiny number of men and women who believe themselves (or claim to be) members of the opposite sex. Why does anyone care, they ask, about changes to the law that will do nothing but make life easier for one of the smallest and most oppressed groups of people in society?

The fact - denied again and again - is that the entirely unreasonable demands of trans activists negatively impact everyone not captured by the belief that humans can magically change sex.

Primarily, the victims of this crank ideology are women. The “right” claimed by activists for anyone to self-ID into the legally-recognised sex of their choosing completely undermines the important principle that women should have access to spaces free from men.

This, however, is not a female-only issue. The safety of women and girls should be a matter of concern to everyone. So, too, should be the simple matter of fairness, shattered by allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports or to apply for jobs and other opportunities which, under the law, should be available only to those born female.

Now, a detailed new study makes clear that among those at risk of harm because of trans activism are trans people, themselves.

Professor Alice Sullivan from University College London led a team which recently published a review, commissioned by the previous UK government, of how public bodies record data on sex and gender.

Sullivan found - or, perhaps more accurately, confirmed - that the meaning of sex is no longer “stable” in data collected through surveys or administrative declarations.

This is the sort of truth that trans-ideologues blithely dismiss. They believe trans women quite literally are women and, therefore, see no problem with statistics being skewed by the inclusion of biological males.

Read more here: Supreme Court gender verdict on definition of a woman due - here’s what it will mean

Less easy to shrug off, I believe, are Sullivan’s findings on the consequences of allowing trans people to be recorded on official records as being of a sex that doesn’t align with biological reality. The professor and her team discovered during their research that this can lead to patients not being called in for routine health screenings for conditions such as prostate cancer.

“This,” says Sullivan, “has potentially fatal consequences for trans people.”

Doubtless, there will be many activists who seek to rubbish the academic’s work. We saw this happen last year when Dr Hilary Cass was abused and defamed after her review of gender identity services for young people led - thank goodness - to the end of the prescription of powerful puberty-blocking drugs to confused children.

Frankly, gender ideology plays hideous tricks on the brain.

Shortly after the publication of the Sullivan Review, UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced the adoption of a number of its recommendations. The NHS in England and Wales are not now permitted to change the sex data of patients aged under 18.

It will, I’m sure, astonish you to learn that Scottish Health Secretary Neil Gray has been less proactive. According to a Scottish Government spokesperson, publication of the Sullivan Review had been noted and its findings would be considered.

Here was the perfect illustration of the bestupiding effect of drinking the trans-activist nectar. Politicians who have spent years denying the existence of any problem related to self-ID are unable to recognise even the most compelling evidence they have got things dangerously wrong. Neil Gray should try to be a little more Wes Streeting in his approach to such important issues.

We have become used to senior Scottish Government figures behaving as if their once-cherished desire to destroy singe-sex spaces by enshrining self-ID in law never happened. First Minister John Swinney is shamefully silent each time a new outrage is revealed.

But the impact of the SNP’s monomaniacal obsession, during the Nicola Sturgeon years, with gender ideology lingers.

There wasn’t a peep from the Scottish nationalists last week when their former partners in government, the Scottish Greens made an sickening attempt to cut funding for women’s refuges in the capital.

Green councillor Alex Staniforth tabled a motion at before the city council calling for a review of the funding of Edinburgh Women’s Aid (EWA) because it doesn’t allow men who identify as women to use its refuges or attend group counselling sessions.

Staniforth’s horrifying motion was amended by SNP and Liberal Democrat councillors who instructed the council’s Labour leader, Jane Meagher, to write to EWA underlining the “importance” of providing services to trans-women.

Meagher - a feminist with a history of campaigning to protect women-only spaces - is now compelled to make a request she does not wish to see fulfilled to an organisation that has neither the right nor the desire to fulfil it. Well done, everyone.

If Alex Staniforth and others who prioritise the desires of men over the legitimate needs of women truly cared about the safety and dignity of trans people, they would be campaigning for the collection of accurate data based on biological reality. Rather than devoting themselves to erasing the meaning sex, they’d be making sure anyone on whose behalf they claim to be fighting is fully aware that they cannot literally change sex; that a trans woman is biologically a man and vice versa.

For years, now, activists have angrily accused feminists who wish to preserve women-only spaces of being dangerous to those who transition. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the biggest threat to the safety of trans people comes from their loudest champions.