As anyone who has watched the Prime Minister’s Questions can tell you, surviving British politics requires facts, a sharp wit, a sharper tongue, and really thick skin.   

That’s why it was surprising when Nicola Sturgeon felt compelled to resign as First Minister of Scotland recently. It wasn’t her thwarted desire to see Scotland achieve independence that did her in. It was her inability to make 2 and 2 equal 5.  

In her last months in office, she’d attempted to defend women’s rights while also embracing a radically pro-transgender ideology. In an embarrassing interview, Sturgeon couldn’t rectify her insistence that “trans women are women” with her back-and-forth about placing a male rapist in a female prison.  

Her failure to square that circle had nothing to do with her wits or abilities. The idea that a man can be a woman is simply incoherent. Bad ideas have victims. This time the victim was one of its proponents.