A recent law facilitating gender transition brought down the head of the Scottish government, who had been in office since 2014.
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© ANDY BUCHANAN / POOL / AFP
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Ua social crisis with serious consequences. Scottish independence Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon, weakened by a recent law facilitating gender transition, announced her resignation on Wednesday February 15 after eight years in power, British media report. “In my head and in my heart, I know that the time has come, that it is the right time for me, for my party and for the country, and I therefore announce today my intention to resign as Prime Minister and leader of my party,” Nicola Sturgeon told a news conference. She will remain in office until the Scottish National Party appoints a new leader.
In January, after the surprise resignation of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Nicola Sturgeon assured that she still had “full of energy” and that she did not feel “at all close” to the moment when she should leave . Nicola Sturgeon came to the head of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Scottish government after the resignation of her predecessor Alex Salmond in 2014. The Scots then voted 55% in favor of remaining within the United Kingdom.
She has since, with patience and determination, resumed the fight for independence, reinvigorated by Brexit, which the majority of Scots had opposed. She has since been fighting for the organization of a new vote, firmly rejected by London. She has accumulated electoral successes, obtaining once again in May 2021 a pro-independence majority in the local parliament with the Greens.
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But Nicola Sturgeon was weakened by the adoption in December of a very controversial law facilitating gender transition, permitted from the age of 16 and without medical advice. London said it wanted to oppose it and just after the vote, a scandal came to provide grist for the mill of its detractors: a transgender woman convicted of raping women before her transition had been incarcerated in a women’s prison, creating strong reactions. She was eventually transferred to a men’s prison.
Born in the industrial town of Irvine, southwest of Glasgow, to an electrician father and a nurse mother, still active in politics, Nicola Sturgeon joined the SNP aged 16 as a co-ordinator Youth Assistant.
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Peter Murrell, her husband, is the party’s chief executive. The childless couple met more than twenty years ago at a meeting of SNP youth, of which Nicola Sturgeon became one of the first representatives in the Scottish Parliament when it was created in 1999.