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 next. A few months later, I was at Edinburgh Uni when hundreds of trans-rights protesters shut down a screening of a documentary on sex and gender. One student at the protests told me it was ok for gender-critical feminists to express their opinions but only in their own homes. Wow: 1956 conservatism disguised as 2026 progressivism.

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But you know what: a few months later, the screening of the documentary did go ahead (albeit with heavy security) and the SNP’s bill did not become law (albeit with UK Government intervention) and in April 2025 we had the Supreme Court ruling on ‘woman’ and last December, the ruling in the Sandie Peggie tribunal. The tribunal is ultimately still unresolved and will go to appeal, but we’re now very much past the no-debate era and firmly in the debate era with a realistic prospect we’ll reach a sensible destination.

The meeting this week at Holyrood is another of the good signs, not least because, had it happened five years ago, even two years ago, there would have been protests. There were also MSPs of almost all stripes at the meeting (not the Greens, obviously). And almost all the speakers said they thought things were starting to change for the better.

The news is not all good of course. The former MP Joanna Cherry pointed out to the meeting that although the Supreme Court ruling is clear, the Scottish Government is spending vast amounts of public money because they can’t accept what the court said (they’re fighting a judicial review of the policy on trans prisoners). And on Thursday there was a pathetic non-answer by the justice minister Angela Constance when Douglas Ross asked why the government’s written case in the judicial review did not include a single mention of women’s rights. Good question. No answer.

The meeting also heard about a report the LGB Alliance have just done called Compelled Conformity, and it doesn’t make for encouraging reading either I’m afraid. As Ms Cherry pointed out, a lot of businesses outsourced their equality, diversity and inclusion policies (EDI) to activist groups who view sex and sexuality as based on gender rather than biological sex. This led to staff policies and practices that got the law wrong and ostracised, excluded or punished staff who did not agree with the official line. One woman is quoted in the report thus: “I am expected to accept the male lesbian to keep my job. It makes me very unwell.”

But I promised positive signs so here’s the one about the next generation courtesy of Robert Laverick, the lecturer who spoke at this week’s meeting. Like the other speakers, Mr Laverick said the ideology on gender had permeated pretty deep into lots of businesses and institutions, especially universities, but he actually thinks the generation that’s just coming out of school and into university offers some hope.

Sandie Peggie Picture by Andrew Milligan/PA Wire

“The younger generation is starting to reject the ideology,” he told the meeting. “And you’re starting to see that change coming through on campus. You see it at sixth-form level or higher – they see it as the old fad that the generation above them had.” That’s certainly the way it is with the teenagers and young folk in my life, and Mr Laverick thinks some bottom-up pressure from them, as well as some top-down pressure from bosses looking again at their policies, should bring about change.

What the change will look like, and how easy it’ll be, is another matter. Simon Fanshawe, the co-founder of Stonewall who now runs a consultancy that seeks a better way to do EDI, told the meeting policies based on gender ideology divide staff into three groups – the advocates, the heel-diggers, and the rest in the middle – and a divided staff is not good for business. It also makes people nervous and stressed at work, like the woman who says she’s expected to accept the concept of a male lesbian. A better approach, says Mr Fanshawe, is for businesses and organisations to be impartial, refuse to take sides and see everything from the perspective of equality; there can be no hierarchy, with certain rights above others, only equal rights.

The problem is doing it. “The Supreme Court ruling is clear,” said Mr Fashawe, “but the implementation will not be easy. A) because people don’t understand the law. B) because a lot of the conversations they will have to have with people are fraught. And C) they don’t have their policies in place that enable them to do it.” The Compelled Conformity report does have some practical suggestions, such as moving away from external lobbying groups and seeking independent, objective oversight, but this stuff is in with the bricks, it’s embedded, there’s resistance, and it’s going to take time.

The takeaway message of the meeting, though, was cautious optimism. It doesn’t help that we can hear the government dragging its heels, and we can hear Ms Constance’s empty blather in the parliament, and we can hear many – too many – organisations still parroting the mantras of EDI. But we can also hear, I think, the sound of the next generation looking around and saying: what the hell is this about? I know I started by joking about younger people with their scrolling thumbs and wide eyes and mad ideas, but I actually think that to a large extent, we’re in their hands now; they’re the ones who are going to help end this. That’s the hope.

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