IN some interviews I’ve conducted with successful women over the last two years or so, a pattern has emerged that speaks of something dark in Scottish public life. Without prompting, one prominent female executive said that she had better get “the gender stuff out of the way”. I’d had no intention of discussing this but she felt she’d had to draw the red line as it belonged in the territory of workplace discrimination against women.

She then proceeded to tell me the ways in which her career might be adversely affected if she were to discuss what she viewed as one of the main drivers of inequality in the workplace for female professionals.

In her opinion, women who harboured even mild concerns about gender self-ID were being targeted. Sometimes this was manifest at a very low, and what she felt was an insidious level, when group emails suddenly – and without any prior consultation – popped up demanding that all staff use pronouns in their official correspondence and on their social media accounts.

On other occasions they might be summoned to attend diversity training sessions on why such pronouns were necessary. Here, they would be provided with a lexicon of words and phrases that were now considered transphobic. The act of misgendering an individual could result in disciplinary measures.

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Yet, neither she, nor any of the other female professionals I’ve spoken with, had ever harboured transphobic views. Nor had they ever discriminated against trans people. By degrees, they believed that the trans debate wasn’t about transphobia at all; rather it was being wielded clandestinely as a weapon to silence women by monitoring their behaviour.

There was a suspicion too that it could be deployed to remove women who had too much to say for themselves by the imposition of a dogma to which they could not in good conscience subscribe.

The consequences of this are most evident in sport where mediocre male athletes have turned themselves into women for the purposes of accessing medals that were beyond their capabilities in fair competition. Effectively, they were stealing the dreams of honest female athletes.

In a less obvious but equally insidious manner the same process was insinuating itself into the selection processes for preferment in Scottish public life.

The apotheosis of this credo is evident in Roz Adams’ case at an employment tribunal against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. This has finally been concluded in Ms Adams’ favour after the tribunal judge found that she had been bullied and harassed by staff and board members for several months.

She had been targeted by some of her colleagues and her bosses for performing what any reasonable person would have viewed as a core purpose of her job: providing welfare, sanctuary and advice to women traumatised by male sexual violence.

Like some of the women I’d interviewed in other areas of public life, Ms Adams was supportive of trans inclusion. It’s when this principle was deemed to be more important than the needs of female victims of male violence that she began to harbour doubts.

The Herald: Female victims of sexual abuse should be invited to “reframe their trauma”Female victims of sexual abuse should be invited to “reframe their trauma” (Image: free)

These had crystallised after she had revealed the biological sex of some support workers. This was a means of reassuring a rape survivor who, not unreasonably, had wanted any counselling to be provided by a biological woman. At this point I’d urge anyone reading this column to set aside a little time to read the judgment handed down in Ms Adams’ favour.

If it had been imagined as the plot of a book or film it would have been described as a dystopian nightmare. In this, a decent, hard-working employee, striving to help vulnerable and traumatised women, has her life almost destroyed in a witch-hunt orchestrated by her bosses. Her offence had been to put the interests of female survivors of rape above the whims of males presenting as women.

In a podcast that has become notorious, Mridul Wadhwa, a transwoman who is chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis, had previously suggested that some female victims of sexual abuse could be “bigots” and that they should be invited to “reframe their trauma” in counselling sessions.

In effect, some victims of male sexual violence were being told to give themselves a shake and get over themselves. They were being told: “Your suffering is secondary to the men whose feelings you’ve hurt by preferring to talk to women.”

By refusing to participate in this, Ms Adams, according to the employment tribunal judge, was subject to a “heresy hunt”. The harassment she experienced as a result of her beliefs amounted to constructive dismissal and a disciplinary process which had been “reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka”.

Mridul Wadhwa’s role as chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis, which is funded by the Scottish Government, must now be subject to some independent scrutiny. It’s scarcely believable that an organisation established to help traumatised women has become a place that risks escalating their suffering.

Indeed, the Scottish Government must now give serious consideration to helping fund Beira’s Place, the privately-funded service where Roz Adams is currently employed. It was established by JK Rowling and its board comprises women with lifetimes of public service and who believe in the reality of biological sex.

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Crucially, the vulnerable women who attend Beira’s Place can be confident that they will be counselled by women and where they will not be required to "re-frame their trauma."

Of course, the Scottish Government are more likely to bring back hanging than be associated with JK Rowling, even though Beira’s Place puts the needs of rape survivors first.

You see, the Scottish Government in the Sturgeon/Yousaf/Swinney era is chiefly responsible for creating a hostile environment for gender critical women.

This was first evident in the refusal of Nicola Sturgeon to reach out to her colleague Joanna Cherry after she’d been threatened multiple times with male sexual violence. It continued in the bullying and harassment experienced by other women in the party who objected to self-ID and whose complaints were ignored by SNP headquarters.

And it currently proceeds in the abject cowardice of “honest” John Swinney (insert laughing emoji here) for subscribing to the notion that transwomen are women.

These fakes at the top of the Scottish Government are always keen to celebrate the relative success of women in breaking through the glass ceiling. It’s just that when many of them do so, they discover that the SNP wants to gag them. They are a party with no principles and entirely without shame.