Sturgeon is imploding – as is her extreme agenda

You’ll no doubt be familiar with the term “jumping the shark”. It was coined in 1985 by the American radio personality Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode of the US sitcom Happy Days, in which The Fonz, played by Henry Winkler, jumps over a shark while on water-skis. It’s a creative – if pejorative – term to describe when something has dissolved into so much farce that it signals it is well past its best and in decline – if not on its way to oblivion. And it could not be a better descriptor for Nicola Sturgeon’s absurd political performance over the past few months.

In the aftermath of the UK Government vetoing her gender recognition law, Scotland’s First Minister has had her head in Jaws’s mouth for several weeks now thanks to her ludicrous stand on Adam Graham, the transgender double rapist.

Like Alex Kintner’s yellow lilo washing up on Amity beach following a murderous 4th of July, the SNP leader’s political reputation lies in tatters – chewed up by her unwillingness or inability to accept basic biological facts. But now reality has finally caught up with her.

This week, we learnt that Scotland’s prisons have abandoned their dangerous self-identification policy for transgender prisoners and have promised to send convicts to prisons that match their biological sex instead.

In a victory not just for common sense but for women’s safety, the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) confirmed that all newly convicted transgender prisoners will initially be placed in a jail based on their birth sex until a wider review is completed.

It follows a report into the decision to send Graham, 31, who identifies as Isla Bryson, to the Cornton Vale women’s prison.

While it claimed that no female prisoners were put at risk, an analysis of the key findings left a number of unanswered questions, including whether female staff had been put into a vulnerable position.

A wider review, which is expected to be published in the coming months, will also look at “how the SPS should consider the weight of an individual’s previous offending history as part of the case conference process”.

So what we have here is essentially a complete rejection of the founding principle of Ms Sturgeon’s hare-brained Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which stated that anyone over the age of 16 can self-declare their gender, without a medical diagnosis and with few or any legal protections.

Graham appeared outside the High Court in Glasgow dressed in Lycra leggings that left very little to the imagination with regard to his male genitalia.

In refusing to say whether this scumbag, described as a “bullsh-----” by his ex-wife, should be treated as a man or a woman, Sturgeon well and truly jumped the shark.

And the First Minister has continued to swim in extremely dicey waters by refusing to say whether another transgender prisoner, Tiffany Scott (who was born Andrew Burns and was photographed outside court in 2017 with a twelve o’clock shadow), is male or female – despite him stalking a 13-year-old girl and later attacking female prison officers.

I cannot be alone in thinking the world has gone stark, raving mad when a political leader, a supposedly highly educated person, cannot identify an adult human male double rapist when they see one.

Notwithstanding her own political fate, however, Sturgeon’s reality-defying obstinacy has actually done us all a favour.

For the complete implosion of her transgender policy must finally have opened millions of people’s eyes not only to what’s been going on in Scottish prisons, but also to the wider spread of extreme gender ideology in hospitals, schools and companies across the UK.

For far too long these organisations have unthinkingly pandered to the extremists at the fringes of this debate out of some politically correct quest not to hurt people’s feelings, with big corporations insisting that employees state their pronouns and NHS websites providing guidance on menstruation while omitting the word “girl”.

But as we have learnt with cases like Graham’s, feelings don’t matter more than facts. And the fact of the matter – regardless of those pathetically obsessing over this convicted double rapist’s pronouns – is that he is a man who poses a significant danger to women.

And with the SPS denying him and fellow trans inmates an automatic right to be housed in a women’s prison, reality has rightly reasserted itself.

We should, of course, show compassion to all human beings, whether they be male, female or indeed transgender. But that should not mean denying biological sex, or jeopardising the safety of other groups, including women. Transgender people have rights under the Equality Act – but then so do women, as several recent cases have clearly established.

It is the job of our politicians to ensure that these rights are balanced and that the interests of one group are not allowed to trump another.

Not that the extreme gender ideology crowd think like that. It’s a scandal that the “if-you-stand-up-for-women-you’re-a-Terf” brigade of illiberal progressives won’t acknowledge the truth of this matter.

It’s even more outrageous that they portray those who do so as “transphobic” bigots when “biologically correct” would be a more apt description. And they have had some success in recent years in bullying or guilting people into going along with their agenda.

As Kathleen Stock, the philosophy professor who was hounded out of her job at the University of Sussex for her gender-critical views in 2021, pointed out this week, quoting polling to support her claim: “Most people do not believe that trans women are women.”

Yet many are confused about the issue because “organisations such as Stonewall, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, All About Trans, the Scottish Equality Network … have turned what used to be a boringly factual matter about whether Xs were Ys into a quasi-religious question revealing the respondent’s personal values”.

Pointing out how these organisations, propped up by “well-meaning foundations, generous lottery distributors, and successive Tory governments” have “guilt-tripped much of the nation into half-believing something nonsensical,” Prof Stock adds: “It’s as if the public has been sold a subliminal version of the Peter Pan story: say you believe that fairies exist, and you can save Tinkerbell from dying.”

She’s right of course.

And now, Sturgeon’s blundering policy failures have opened millions of people’s eyes to the fairy tales that they had been led to believe were true.

The only species thought to be able to change their biological sex, besides clownfish, are sharks, funnily enough. Some scientists believe that the big sharks change sex when they reach a certain size, with males becoming females. The switch may ensure survival by allowing the largest, most experienced sharks to give birth to young.

But humans aren’t fish and never have been – although some humans are undoubtedly clowns.

What should be a factual, calm debate has been turned into a theological question about whether you “believe” transwomen are women.

In revealing the farcical nature of her flawed arguments, Nicola Sturgeon has given us the chance of a reformation.