Has the organised and professional left ever been more out of touch with the people it purports to represent? The question is worth asking, I think, in light of the events which have unfolded in London this week at the Supreme Court and at the House of Commons.

After two days of evidence at the Supreme Court, judges are now considering how exactly women are defined in law.

This all stemmed from the Scottish feminist group For Women Scotland challenging a Bill passed in the Scottish Parliament.

Their lordships will now consider whether a person who holds a gender recognition certificate which declares them to be a woman under the Gender Recognition Act should be included under the female sex for the purposes of the Equality Act.

Some commentators on the case have sought to take refuge in a contrived word salad to shield them from accusations of being transphobic. Thus, many of the reports will either begin or end with an agreed maxim: that the case will have repercussions for women, trans people, and other protected groups.

This, of course, is a distortion of the facts and you can read much more detailed analysis from Murray Blackburn Mackenzie (MBM), the brilliant policy analysis collective. It seems to me, though, that it’s only real, biological (natal) women who will be facing the most adverse consequences if the judges deny the appeal.

In the course of the last few years, the very essence of what it means to be a woman has been slowly dismantled by an insidious process that has been made possible with the endorsement of Scotland’s main institutions of national and local government.

Many physical characteristics unique........

© Herald Scotland