Sir Keir Starmer’s policy shift on gender self-ID is a significant moment in this unhappy debate. In 2019, the leader of the UK Labour Party had pledged to uphold his party’s manifesto commitment to de-medicalise the process of transition. Last week, he signalled his intention to row back from that. “We don’t think that self-ID is the right way forward,” he said.

Labour’s new position isn’t a complete reversal, though. Rather, it would appear to rest at the gentler end of the U-turn spectrum. The current law requires those seeking a Gender Recognition Certificate to have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from two doctors. Under a Labour government, only one doctor’s verification would be sufficient.

And whereas approval must presently be conferred by a legal and medical panel chaired by a judge, Labour’s new position would require only the agreement of a registrar.

Sir Keir’s cautious pivot has been met with defiance from some in Scottish Labour’s rocket wing. Having ditched any pretence at authentic radicalism in improving the lives of disadvantaged communities, self-ID has become a flag of convenience for them.

It’s not hard to divine the reasons why UK Labour has revised its thinking. Having seen the calamitous effects of extreme gender ideology on the SNP’s reputation in Scotland, Sir Keir had no option but to change course.

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In the process, he has reverted to that outdated principle: listening to what the majority of those who live outside the political bubble are saying. Put simply, he has seen what happens when a lie is exposed to the light.

In Scotland, the SNP’s position on self-ID fell apart when the public became aware of truths which Nicola Sturgeon and her gender fanatics had sought to conceal from them. This began to occur when it became known that Adam Graham/Isla Bryson, a double rapist, was to serve his sentence in a women’s prison.

The majority of women in Scotland’s prison estate are very vulnerable, many having suffered severe trauma in their lives, including sexual assault at the hands of violent male partners.

The obvious dangers implicit in sending men guilty of violence against women to women’s prisons horrified the public. The way in which several SNP and Labour politicians desperately clung to the regressive and pernicious dogma that had led us to this place angered them. It became clear that the SNP’s professional wing regarded those expressing concerns about this as stupid at best and probably transphobic.

Yet, when photographs of Graham/Bryson were published it was clear to any sane observer that we were dealing with a fully-intact man. Effectively, the public were being told not to believe the evidence of their eyes and that if they did so they were bigots.

This is the biggest lie at the heart of the SNP’s obsession with permitting violently misogynistic men to masquerade as women. There are many others. Not the least of these is that a woman can have a penis. The sight and sound of politicians performing verbal contortions to avoid having to define what a woman is have troubled the public. How were these people ever elected? When a political party chooses to gaslight the overwhelming majority of their voting public in such a way it indicates arrogance. Worse, it suggests that wielding power over a long period of time has made them strangers to the realities of people’s lives.

Nicola Sturgeon and her WhatsApp commandos had used threats and coercion designed to ensure that no thoughts of safeguarding women’s private spaces would be permitted to erode the ideological purity of her Gender Recognition Reform Act. Other proposals which would have ensured the safety of vulnerable women prisoners were disregarded.

Now that the carefully-constructed screens camouflaging these falsehoods have begun to tumble, other lies have become apparent to the public. The most sinister of these is that vulnerable children, especially girls, are being told they’re in the wrong body and that they should consider self-mutilation to correct this condition.

This proceeds from another lie: that highly sexualised drag acts channelling a semi-pornographic energy can be beneficial for a child’s psychological development.

Lesbians who have fought for decades to gain equality in law are now being told that they risk breaking it if they reject the advances of males whose idea of womanhood is to dress like an Ann Summers mannequin. Women athletes are having their dreams snatched from them by talentless males self-declaring as women by using their male physicality.

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Sir Keir Starmer will encounter much noise from the impostors masquerading as progressives who have disseminated these lies. He’ll surely know that a new McCarthyism has hollowed out large sections of his party’s executive and the trade union movement.

They have abdicated their responsibilities to fight for the rights of those who have been marginalised by extreme capitalism. Instead, they’ve chosen a quiet life and the path of least resistance by genuflecting before these false prophets.

This is manifest in the hounding of those who defend the rights of women and uphold the biological truth that sex is binary and that transwomen are transwomen. The Labour MP Rosie Duffield has been bullied and intimidated by members of her own party for stating these truths.

The realisation that the voting public have now caught up with this delusion that’s captured the political elites has probably come too late for the SNP. Partly as a consequence, senior figures in Scottish Labour now believe that they can actually defeat the SNP at the 2026 Holyrood election, rather than merely make significant gains.

This though, represents only one part of a two-step process. The next step is to take a deep breath; ignore the contrived outrage generated by an unrepresentative cabal of cultists and embrace Sir Keir’s moment of clarity.

Anas Sarwar knows that the electoral apocalypse which engulfed Scottish Labour in 2007 happened because the party lost touch with the people who had entrusted them with lifting them out of poverty. The same harsh truth is now stalking the SNP.

In a recent article for The Guardian, Anneliese Dodds, the UK’s Shadow Secretary for Women and Equalities wrote: “We need to recognise that sex and gender are different – as the Equality Act does. We will make sure that nothing in our modernised gender recognition process would override the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act.

“Put simply, this means that there will always be places where it is reasonable for biological women only to have access. Labour will defend those spaces, providing legal clarity for the providers of single-sex services.”

The Scottish Labour leader need only be guided by these words to make the necessary change.