Who is really to blame for the nastiness of the “debate” around trans rights? Nicola Sturgeon says the T-shirt JK Rowling famously wore accusing the then SNP leader of being a “destroyer of women’s rights” unleashed vile abuse against her and made the debate more toxic.

I thought so too. Rowling’s stunt felt cartoonish. “Destroyer” cast Sturgeon as the enemy in a battle. I had and still have grave concerns about the head of steam to have built up behind the idea that sex no longer matters and that what counts instead is self-declared gender, due to the obvious implications for women’s safety, privacy and dignity, but Rowling’s accusation made me wince. It felt over the top. It paid no respect to Sturgeon as a trailblazing woman or her good intentions towards trans people as a vulnerable and stigmatised minority.

Depressingly, it echoed the trans activists’ habit of framing this debate as a zero-sum game, where one side’s victory entails the other’s destruction, when a more constructive tone was plainly required. Sturgeon was already being personally targeted over self-ID by other politicians, but Rowling’s actions ratcheted up the pressure to another level.

Whether it marked the moment “rational debate” became “impossible”, as Sturgeon claims, is more contestable, but it almost certainly made the debate more toxic.

Then again, I thought exactly the same about Nicola Sturgeon’s own comments, when she linked concerns around self-ID to transphobia in an apparent attempt to discredit critics.

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