THE Wings Over Scotland website highlighted some extremely disturbing polling figures. Last January, a poll by Savanta ComRes found women in favour of independence by a huge 20-point margin (60 to 40), more than double the eight-point margin among men (54 to 46). The overall support was 57 to 43 for Yes, a 14-point lead.

A few days later, Nicola Sturgeon made her infamous “unscripted” video about transgender issues – her first really open statement of her stance on the subject – and not long afterwards the SNP initiated their proposed gender reform legislation.

Barely over a year later, the most recent poll (BMG Research for the Herald, published last week) puts Yes behind by 47 to 53, a six-point deficit. That’s a 20-point negative shift in 14 months, and almost all of it is down to losing the support of women.

Men are still narrowly pro-indy in the BMG poll (51 to 49), but support among women has plummeted spectacularly, from a 20-point lead to a 14-point deficit – a staggering 34-point turnaround dating measurably from the First Minister’s declaration of support for the hugely unpopular policy of self-ID. Just 43% of women are now Yes, with 57% for No.

It is extremely difficult to explain such a dramatic movement in opinion which is almost totally limited to just one sex, other than by the party’s dogged determination to promote trans rights at the expense of women’s rights, most recently illustrated by the Scottish Government’s absurd defence of Lorna Slater’s incredibly offensive comments on the topic.

While we’ve gone seven years of Sturgeon’s leadership with zero movement on indy and absolutely no work done to address key weaknesses like currency and borders (let alone the SNP’s increasingly woeful domestic record, typified by shambolically incompetent and embarrassing farces like the saga of the CalMac ferries), there appears to be no limit to the amount of effort and resources the Scottish Government is willing to expend on destroying women’s rights to single-sex spaces.

All of those pushing for gender reform – including this newspaper – need to face up to the fact that in the highly unlikely event of there actually being an indyref next year, we will lose it as a direct result of the First Minister’s inexplicable obsession.

You can have independence or you can have blokes in women’s toilets. The numbers make it startlingly plain that you can’t have both.

Frances Earnshaw

Denny

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Gillian MacKay’s article (National April 8th) celebrates the Bill for banning Conversion Therapy. However this bill, which is about to be put before the Scottish Parliament’s Equalities and Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, is a serious threat to civil liberties.

It aims to prevent people by Law from dissuading other people from having their sex or gender altered, or from leading a same-sex lifestyle. The Bill is 33 pages long, but I only want to make four points.

1. If Conversion Therapy involves physical or sexual abuse, then it is already an illegal activity under existing legislation.

2. If Conversion Therapy only involves conversation, at its worst it may mean misplaced zeal, a lack of patience or understanding and perhaps inability to listen, very human and common failings. Yet this Bill proposes that these common failings should be punished by years of imprisonment and limitless fines.

3. If the Government criminalises private conversations, it will continue to lose public respect for the law.

4. Conflating private conversations or personal advice with Hate Crime has been the habit of totalitarian governments all the world over.

For the Holyrood Committee I would add that this Bill pays no heed to the principle of subsidiarity which we were led to expect from our own Scottish Government.

Lesley Findlay

Fort Augustus