The Scottish political establishment’s refusal to adhere to the spirit and letter of the Supreme Court judgment on sex and gender has been evident in recent court cases, argues Herald columnist Kevin McKenna, who says that perhaps there’s another way of forcing them to do the right thing

I was chatting to some people before Christmas about the concept of a national women’s movement in Scotland. They felt it had the potential to do something that Labour has been unable to achieve: seriously damage the SNP.

It wouldn’t be a political party as such, but at election times they could make sure that many more voters than now could be made aware of what the SNP was really all about. They felt this was an idea whose time had come because our perennial party of government had deleted women as a sex class. The last year in particular had removed any remaining doubts that the SNP had effectively sought to remove all protection of the characteristics associated with that class.

Those women who have been the most heroic in resisting the SNP’s state misogyny have been observing the red flags for most of the last decade. Yet it’s only been in the last two years or so that what they’d been trying to warn the rest of us about has become more widely known.

You can probably make your own list of the main cut-through moments during this period. A review of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre found it had failed to provide women-only spaces for traumatised victims for a period of 16 months. Its CEO, a man identifying as a woman, had previously stated that women raising concerns about this should “re-frame their trauma”. This person had somehow been appointed, even though the role was one........

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