Ruth Dudley Edwards: As JK Rowling says, women won't forgive what Nicola Sturgeon has done to trash their rights

​In the United Kingdom, to change your legal sex you must be over 18, have a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and live in your new chosen gender for two years.

Sturgeon, however, has railroaded through the Holyrood parliament a law permitting anyone over sixteen to secure a change in their gender identity simply through self-declaration.

She has removed the medical assessment that is the only safeguard against exploiters, and an unsupervised three months will be a sufficient qualifying period.

Children — caught up in a fashionable movement most grow out of that tells them that their biological sex is irrelevant and all that matters is what they feel they are — are given a clear path to alter their lives permanently.

Clutching their Gender Identity Certificates, indoctrinated boys and girls will be free to demand puberty blockers and other harmful drugs, and girls to bind their breasts and deform their ribs. This is the gateway to surgery.

And predatory males (along with harmless trans women), untrammelled by doctors or the law, will be given access to female-only spaces like changing rooms, bathrooms, schools, clubs, refuges, prisons and hospital wards.

Infiltration into women’s competitive sports, where men’s strength distorts results, is happening already.

Under existing laws, the Scottish highest court has ruled that trans women are women “for all purposes”, including, for instance, being eligible for women's quotas on public boards.

Progressive bodies like Police Scotland go further, recording offenders’ chosen gender identity rather than their biological sex so a rapist who self-declares as a woman will be sent to a women's prison and if he rapes again, it will be recorded as a female crime.

In the most recent Scottish poll two-thirds of the electorate opposed these reforms.

There is widespread alarm about the abusive, misogynistic social warriors (straight, gay and trans) who scream on social media and on demonstrations their violent hatred of what they call cis-women (those who accept their biological sex), lesbians (for refusing to have sexual relation with men) and champions of women’s rights like J.K. Rowling.

She is at the head of a magnificent army (including men and trans people) defending women’s beleaguered rights.

“Weird, isn’t it,” she tweeted on Saturday after a Glasgow protest, “but I struggle to remember any other progressive movement that attracted so many men who love fantasising about the brutal deaths of women.”

And so they do. “A few of Scotland's wonderfully progressive and kind politicians”, she tweeted under a photograph of senior SNP representatives “posing proudly in front of banners calling for women to be decapitated and eaten.”

The cavalry has arrived in the shape of Minister for Equality, Kemi Badenoch, and Home Secretary Suella Braverman. They have persuaded Rishi Sunak to veto the Scottish bill under the terms of the Scotland Act 1998: it is a “reserved matter” that would adversely affect how equality law works in the UK as a whole.

Inevitably Sturgeon is threatening a massive court battle at the expense of the British taxpayer.

The usual “progressive” suspects are squealing in Northern Ireland. “Disgraceful,” said the Alliance Deputy Leader Stephen Farry MP, never happier than when clambering aboard a virtue-signalling bandwagon. “This bill would have seen Scotland leading the way on social justice in the UK. It is important it is allowed to be implemented and that similar legislation is introduced across the rest of the UK”.

In charity, I will assume he’s ignorant rather than that he doesn't care about children whose lives are being ruined or terrified women whose safe spaces are being invaded by violent men.

Some believe Sturgeon is just picking a fight with Westminster to rally the Scots to the faltering independence struggle. Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court judge, is one of the lawyers who thinks she made the wrong call.So does Rowling, who quoted the journalist Hadley Freeman to her 14 million Twitter followers: "Sturgeon is making a big mistake in thinking that by denying science and trashing women’s rights she looks progressive, because the public are smarter than that... women won’t forget what she’s done, and they won’t forgive."

We sure won’t.