How a handful of outraged Scottish women changed our world

The loudest noise in 2024 came, paradoxically, from The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht. That was the title of the bestselling book, edited by the journalist Susan Dalgety and the academic Lucy Hunter Blackburn, which recounted the grassroots campaign against the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill led by the grassroots For Women Scotland campaign.

With a little help from a certain well-known Edinburgh author, these “ordinary Scottish mums”, as they were rather patronisingly described — Marion Calder, Trina Budge and Susan Smith — took on the media, the medical profession, and the political establishment and helped to spark a debate about women’s sex-based rights that has gone global. They killed the bill, but that was only the start.

As of this month, the gender