Very long piece in the Telegraph, which makes for painful reading for Sturgeon. The gender policy gets due prominence:
www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/02/19/nicola-sturgeons-dreamland-scotland-faces-painful-reckoning/
"The country over which she has presided since 2014 is cracking apart. Not only did she pursue a constitutional policy that has left the Scottish people deeply divided, but she also governed at a level of incompetence to which she feigns to be oblivious but to which her electorate, and indeed many of her party's supporters, most certainly are not.
The last straw was her gender identity policy, which allowed a rapist to be put in a women's prisonn_ because he claimed to identify as female, and included proposed further reforms that forced the promise of a veto from Westminster.
Many Scots, including supporters of separatism, had had enoughh_, and she knew it. She is off; they, or at least some of the less deluded, may now find they have no choice but to face the reality of the near-failing state that she has created."
And
"The prime example of this gulf between the SNP's fantasies and the real world was Ms Sturgeon's proposal over the rights of people who choose to identify as a gender different from the one they had at birth. The episode typified her almost mindless readiness to jump on any minority bandwagon, usually with cynical intent, if it helped her signal her supposed virtue and establish the loyalty of a new client-group in her coalition.
It appears that she and her friends also believed it brought the added bonus of provoking the hated Westminster parliament into overruling Holyrood, and acting like the colonial oppressor the SNP chooses to imagine it is.
The issue, they might have hoped, would provide a further stick with which she could beat England during an election campaign that she had already decided would be a de facto referendum on separatism. It quickly became obvious, however, that few Scots shared either her supposed interest in transgender questions or her view of them.
Many of her voters also worried about using the next British General Election as a referendum on independence. They feared it might well drive away those potential voters who took the more realistic view that, whatever the merits of other SNP policies, they were not ready for full independence: any more than they thought it was a good idea to let a sex offender born male loose in a women’s prison, or allow 16-year-olds the right to decide what gender they aree_ as easily as they can choose the colour of their shirt.
This farrago played an obvious part in driving her from office. But even before it, she was aware of the speed with which she was running out of road, although her devotees refused to see it. Rumours about her possible departure this year were circulating before last Christmas, and had picked up in the last month or so. Every day, new issues were serving to undermine her that touched on vital questions of her, and her party’s, competence."