Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, announced her resignation on Wednesday, saying that she had become too polarizing a figure — an acknowledgment that comes amid a tense fight over gender law in the country.
“My judgment now is that a new leader will be better able to do this,” Sturgeon said in a surprise announcement after more than eight years in office. “Someone about whom the mind about almost everyone in the country is not already made up, for better or worse. Someone who is not subject to quite the same polarized opinions, fair or unfair, as I now am.”
She said was was worn down by the “brutality” of political life.
The announcement comes one month after Britain’s Parliament rejected a measure from Scotland’s Parliament that would have made it easier and faster for people to change their legally recorded sex. Scottish lawmakers voted 86 to 39 to pass the measure, despite polling by YouGov showing that roughly two-thirds of Scots are opposed to the reforms.
The new Gender Recognition Reform Bill would have lowered the minimum age to change one’s recorded sex from 18 to 16 and would lower the required time of “living in [one’s] acquired gender” from two years to three months, or six months for those aged 16 and 17.
The reform would have also removed the need to provide a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Sturgeon has previously said she will “never apologize for trying to spread equality, not reduce it, in our country.”
The gender issue exploded in Scotland after a convicted rapist and biological male who now goes by the name Isla Bryson was incarcerated in a women’s prison.
Sturgeon denied that her resignation was in response to the gender legislation but said that in the current political environment, “issues that are controversial end up almost irrationally so.”
Sturgeon has been a strong advocate for Scottish independence. She became the leader of the Scottish National Party after her predecessor resigned following a failed independence referendum in 2014.
She later pursued another independence vote in 2016. The second vote failed as well.
Sturgeon’s resignation comes three months after the U.K. Supreme Court ruled that the Scottish government cannot hold a referendum without U.K. government approval. Then-British prime minister Boris Johnson rebuffed Sturgeon’s attempts to hold another independence vote in June.
Sturgeon was praised for her handling of the pandemic and climate policy, which helped thrust her into the international spotlight. Her approval ratings have taken a hit, though, amid the battle over the gender legislation.