I’m still haunted by the counsel of a female journalist six years ago when I first felt compelled to write about the debate around gender self-ID. “Don’t even think about it,” she’d said. “It’s going to get very messy and you’ll lose your footing and get into all sorts of bother.”

Her fears were well-founded. Anyone looking for me to be a feminist ally would have to be desperate. It’s not that I don’t have good intentions. It’s just that, well … they’re dogged by clumsiness in word and deed. Whenever there have been two steps forward there’s a stumble and then a step back followed by grovelling apologies for cracking the wrong joke at the wrong time in the wrong company.

Then came a series of what I suppose we must call ‘light bulb moments’ and I felt I had a moral responsibility to write about it. To ignore what I was witnessing in Scottish politics and in every stratum of civic governance would have made me complicit in a social contagion which I genuinely believe to have been touched by wickedness.

The declaration by the great American civil rights leader, Vernon Johns has always resonated with me: “When you see a good fight get in it.” And this is a good fight: perhaps the most important in Scotland’s 21st century story.

Joanna Cherry (Image: free)

My first moment of clarity came when Joanna Cherry, the SNP’s most able Westminster politician, was being subjected to a campaign of harassment and intimidation for her belief that sex is immutable and that gender self-ID was a threat to women’s private and safe spaces. Worse: this was being orchestrated by senior (mainly male) figures in her own party.

I then became aware that lesbians were being branded bigots by........

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