What happens after the Sandie Peggie case? A summit at Holyrood has pointed the way forward, says Mark Smith

I know that, sometimes, older people (mainly me) rail against younger people, with their scrolling thumbs and wide eyes and mad ideas, and conclude that the world’s on a bobsleigh ride to hell. But I have positive news: there’s a generation coming up that seems to be taking a look around and coming to some sensible conclusions. And they may help to fix things.

Someone who’s seen the trend first-hand is Robert Laverick, university lecturer, co-founder of an organisation called Academics for Academic Freedom and one of the speakers at an event at Holyrood the other night called We Mean Business. The main purpose of the event was to discuss how businesses, large and small, can navigate the post-Supreme Court, post-Sandie Peggie landscape on sex and gender. And chatting to some of the people who were at the meeting, one thing became pretty clear pretty quickly: this isn’t over yet.

But the signs of hope are there, they definitely are, not least the meeting itself. When the group that hosted the event, LGB Alliance, was founded seven years ago, they were howled at for questioning the idea of gender rather than biological sex as the basis for policy and law. There was even an attempt in the courts in 2023 by the trans group Mermaids to have LGB Alliance stripped of its charity status. The attempt failed and the failure was an indication, one of them, that we’re moving on from the “no debate” era, the idea that the trans activists’ opinions are correct and anyone who disagrees with them must shut up or be shut down.

I’ve seen the change for myself, step by step. At the end of 2022, I was at the protests at Holyrood against the bill on self-ID and it looked hopeless. The bill passed and the protesters told me they were worried what would happen........

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