Gender ideology is in retreat, but it isn’t over yet. On Friday, just days after the leadership of Scottish Labour expressed regret for backing a bill to allow self-ID, the party’s conference delivered a stinging rebuke by voting against single-sex spaces in schools.

Let that sink in: delegates to Scottish Labour are still so in thrall to a discredited ideology that they don’t think girls are entitled to their own toilets and changing rooms. They defeated a motion, supported by the party’s ruling body, calling for schools to respect single sex spaces “based on biology”. They don’t like the recommendations of the Cass review either. Delegates described it as “deeply problematic” and called on Scottish Labour to “stand on the right side of history”.

Scottish Labour isn’t an outlier in its adherence to gender theory. The UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting had to step in last week after it emerged that the General Medical Council, which regulates doctors, has been erasing the disciplinary history of doctors who claim to have changed sex.

The GMC’s register is a public document that allows patients to discover whether a doctor has been disciplined or struck off, yet it may not contain accurate information in the case of individuals who have changed gender. Indeed it’s now been revealed that hospitals are hiring doctors without knowing they are transgender and without seeing their disciplinary records.

The risk to the public is obvious. Even Streeting described the situation as “crazy”.  But sensible people are belatedly trying to wrest policy back from zealots who’ve been allowed to make absurd demands for years — and the cost of indulging their distorted version of reality is high.

The far-reaching effects of allowing a trans-identified male doctor to use a women’s changing room at a hospital in Fife have recently been exposed at an employment tribunal. A nurse, Sandie Peggie, faced disciplinary proceedings — and the possible loss of her job — after objecting to having to change her underwear, soaked in blood by a heavy period, in front of a man.

These are not theoretical harms. The Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, and his deputy, Jackie Baillie, have expressed support for Peggie after previously ignoring warnings about the impact of trans activist demands on women. But their U-turn has been greeted with fury by the party’s traditional allies in the trades unions: the Scottish TUC accused Sarwar of a “betrayal” of transgender people, claiming that his change of heart “inflicts hurt on some of our most vulnerable in society”.

The current first minister, the SNP’s John Swinney, is all over the place. He cited the wrong legislation about single-sex spaces in testy interviews last week, while expressing full confidence in Peggie’s employer, NHS Fife. In an extraordinary development on Friday evening, the Equality and Human Rights Commission intervened to remind the Scottish government and NHS Fife of their legal obligations to provide separate facilities for men and women.

At a time when the NHS is failing, leaving millions of people on waiting lists, health has become a target for doctors and health professionals promoting insane policies that ignore safety and privacy. They still have undue influence in centre-left political parties and trades unions, but a showdown can’t be far off. After all, the “right side of history” for activists is the wrong side according to just about everyone else.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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