
In her eight years as Scotlandās First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has revealed herself to be addicted to, and adept at, Manichaean practices: the use, developed by the devotees of the prophet Mani in the later Roman empire, of a cosmology which divides people, events and the world itself into, on the one side, luminous spirituality and goodness and, on the other, a tenebrous state of wickedness.
In Sturgeonās rhetoric, the former is the SNP itself, its policies for governing and its goal of national independence. All democratic politics partake, necessarily, of some of Maniās drear religion, but Sturgeon has made it the brand of her party and her leadership, underpinned by the constant grievance that Scotland remains held ā after centuries ā in servile chains.
Every SNP minister and senior official must display their versions of this: the head Manichee, example to them all, is Sturgeon. And in the matter of the Gender Recognition Recognition Bill ā which would allow children of 16 to change their gender, independently of their parentsā consent Ā ā she deploys its mechanisms with practised skill.
In a speech just before the Bill came to Holyrood, she said she would ānever apologise for trying to spread equalityā, that the Bill would cut away the āintrusive, traumatic,Ā dehumanisingā barriers to transition, and, with the Vox Humana in full flow, that she bore an important responsibility āto make life a little better for the stigmatised minoritiesā. This is luminous goodness ā government as Good Samaritan.
And yet, the opposing forces, evil as they might be, have put down some markers which could cause the less enlightened to pause. Londonās Tavistock Clinic, home to Englandās Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), became increasingly beset with complaints and controversy. Last summer, it was closed. Scotland has its own Gids centre: the Sandyford Clinic, in Glasgow. It, too, began to receive a growing list of complaints. Last September, SinĆ©ad Watson, who started to identify as a man aged 20, and who had been prescribed testosterone treatments and had a double mastectomy, told UnHerd that she bitterly regrets it, and called for Sandyford to be closed.
The procedures and overall approaches at the Tavistock and Sandyford are not of liberation and joy, but of young men and women inadequately advised by clinicians who were, as one report noted, more concerned with āputting them quickly onto a pathway to transitionā. These considerations closed the Tavistock Gids and now threaten Sandyford: they also inform the decision of the UK Government to animate a Section 35 Order under the 1998 Scotland Act ā the legal basis for the Scottish parliament ā which has, for the present, stymied the Scots nationalistsā momentum.
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