Women won't wheesht (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
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There are inflatable dinosaurs leafletting shoppers in Aberdeen city centre. Grassroots feminists in Forth Valley are organising a conference for International Women’s Day. “Weegie Witches” dance out their defiance in Glasgow, while “Sole Sisters” create street art out of shoes to show the SNP that “women are voting with their feet”.
Local groups of gender critical feminists have sprung up throughout Scotland, from the Borders to the Highlands and Islands, and are making their mark both online and on the streets. Stickers, posters, postcards and suffragette ribbons all bear the same message for Nicola Sturgeon’s government: “Women Won’t Wheesht.”
As Covid restrictions ease and May’s local elections draw close, these women are ramping up their campaign to make the Scottish government think twice about its plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). Currently, if you want to legally change your gender in Scotland, medical evidence is required; you must have lived in your “acquired gender” for at least two years. The Scottish government’s proposed reforms would mean that no diagnosis or medical reports would be needed, and the period in which applicants must have lived in their acquired gender would be cut to three months.
In other words, self-identification of gender would be introduced. The SNP government is expected to reveal its draft legislation in the coming weeks. For Scotland’s gender-critical feminists, their fight has never been so urgent.
Many of these women describe themselves as “politically homeless”. Some are considering breaking the habit of a lifetime and not voting in May; others will spoil their ballots. Some are considering whether to vote for the new Alba party, which has pledged to protect and preserve the rights of women and girls. The Scottish Conservatives have also realised this is an issue on which they can appeal to female voters — several Conservative MSPs visited a demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament organised by For Women Scotland in September.
For my research published this week into what I term a Scottish “cooperative constellation” of gender-critical feminists, I spoke to a coalition of women that reaches across the independence/unionist divide and includes women from all sections of society and political tribes. Some began their feminist careers on Greenham Common. For younger members, this is their first step into the political public sphere.
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SubscribeI’m beginning to wonder if the supposed core beliefs of Greens (Environment) and SNP (Independence) are smokescreens for their true intention: social engineering. Certainly, their main ’labels’ do garner emotional commitment increasingly. In whichever forms of Government you look, Greens want demolition of the social order. This determination has become increasingly apparent with the SNP – remember the ‘Named Person’ legislation in which an ‘official’ would have more say than a parent in a child’s welfare? It was only thrown down via the courts.
Why did people vote for them when they know these are the kinds of social change which they are determined to make legally binding? My sympathies are with women and their hard-fought-for rights; but less so if they voted for these parties to have the executive power which they are now using.
“Why did people vote for them…?”
That is the question. No-one can plead ignorance as we all knew what the stood for.
The SNP aren’t for people who love Scotland and want to see Scotland thrive they are for people who hate England and want to see England suffer. Hate is the water in which the SNP swim, so they are naturally expanding into other identity based grievances, If its hateful at its core its welcome there.
In the US you have Democrats who were upset when politicians defunded the police and Republicans who couldn’t believe Trump actually wanted to build a wall. In Canada progressives love to give aboriginal land acknowledgments thanking them for letting us use ‘their’ land. Be careful what you wish for.
The vote for them because they are Anglophobes, and that’s all that matters.
A little bit of that Linda, but the reasons are now a lot deeper and Sturgeon is using the “sex war” to motivate her female base.
I just hope that the brave people who are standing against her GRA legislation are successful; the whole country should support them.
I sympathise with the women fighting the GRA, but I consider it a bitter irony that the gender critical crowd have their heritage in 2nd wave/radical feminism, which paved the way for a lot of modern day trans ideology and extreme activism.
I’m just amazed your sympathy outweighs the bitter irony.
Peter – you may be pointing out something highly important in saying the SNP’s true intention is social engineering. They have certainly turned Scotland into a nightmare zone.
The SNP are trying to bring in the Named Person legislation by other routes after it was ruled illegal.
It hasn’t gone away because that’s not how the SNP works. The law is wrong, the ECHR is wrong and so the elements of the discredited legislation are flowing back together bit by bit like that Terminator character that could mimic the physical appearance of anyone.
The problem for a lot of activist types who previously supported them is that the SNP has run out of road trying to be ahead of any trendy idea to constantly differentiate from the *evil Tories*.
The competing priorities cannot be obfuscated or muddled through any more and so real and irreconcilable conflicts are breaking out all over the place.
The problem for the SNP is this issue isn’t confined to the essay writing, chattering class, it is cutting through to more and more women who don’t want to be in a changing room with their daughters watching a self cert walking around towelling their bits..let alone be stuck in a cell, or women’s refuge with with one.
This isn’t about society oppressing individuals it is about the expansion of individual rights to the point where no remaining obligations to society exist for them.
Since the social experiment has been under way for some time, there is now growing amount of data that the majority of violence and rape in womens prisons is committed by trans.
“I’m beginning to wonder if the supposed core beliefs of Greens (Environment) and SNP (Independence) are smokescreens for their true intention: social engineering. “
This would credit both organizations with more intelligence than they possess.
I did a double-take when I read the line about being lesbian as same sex attracted invited abuse. I had to read it again because the very definition of lesbianism was same sex attraction … until yesterday. Now, of course, some men want to act out their fantasies and force themselves on women by claiming they are ‘lesbians’.
The whole “gender war” is the stuff of nightmares.
I never believed that the people could be induced, indoctrinated into accepting this departure from biology or basic common sense.
As I have said before, GM was the Rubicon and there appears to be no turning back.
That’s most of what transgender ideology is about.
Not sure if Scotland manages to outrun “Evil England” in all the coolest trends. Some progressive government departments, like the FCO, House of Commons, Ministry of Justice and Department of Education, are subscribers to Stonewall. Subsciption mean both corporate membership fees (somewhere between 1 and 3mln pounds from public bodies in 2021 apparently) and complying with their mandated policies. Such as naming mothers as “parent who has given birth” in all corporate policies.
I found out recently the foreign office is the biggest funder of Stonewall! I mean WTAF?!
Great article: many thanks! And good luck to those grass roots women’s organizations mentioned in the article.
Bit of history about the SNP: way back, the Scottish Labour Party tactic for containing the SNP threat to Labour’s hegemony in Scotland was to portray the SNP as neo-fascist. In reaction to this, the SNP leadership decided that their best strategy was to portray themselves as more politicially correct than Labour, thereby winning over the Scottish chatterati, including influential newspaper columnists. That strategy worked well for the SNP, so it has continued from the PC era into the Woke era. Of course, the average Scot couldn’t care less about PC, Woke, etc., so in the past, this strategy did not bleed votes for the SNP. It may be that now the SNP strategists have over-played their hand, possibly as a sop to their junior coalition partner.
One can only hope that they have overplayed their hand, but as long as they keep up their anti-English stance they’re on to a winner.
Hi Linda. I hope so too. Disclosure: way back in the 1990’s, I was a member of the SNP. I hardy detected any anti-English sentiment amongst the members. I was surprised to discover many members supported the English cricket team, for example. But my knowledge is decades out of date. However, the SNP do cash-in on a tendency of people to blame the wrong level of government when things go awry. They encourage punters to blame Westminster for problems with aspects of government that have been devolved.
You may be correct about the SNP 30 years ago, but, from friends and family who live in Scotland, I have been told they do suffer from abuse (admittedly mildish) whenever they speak. My great-nephew, who is a pretty good mimic, affects a Scottish accent to avoid getting picked upon at school. Many of my Scottish friends tell me that they do detect a growing hostile atmosphere and that mis-information is rife; for instance she found it difficult to convince people that she knew that the funding for the furlough scheme was from Westminster, they insisted it was an SNP policy and funded by them. These people are not fools, they have been fed mis-information; whether or not it’s a Holyrood policy to misinform I wouldn’t know.
For a long time the SNP have managed to employ a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ approach to government. When things go badly it’s evidence that the union is holding Scotland back from flourishing. When they go well it shows how competent the SNP is and how well Scotland can do if independent. It’s a neat trick and it doesn’t look like the faithful are getting wise to it.
I too was member under Salmond who was an inspirational leader who dealt in reality.
I resigned when I realised Sturgeon’s MO and direction of travel….took me about two months, but even I have been surprised how she has remodelled the SNP and how the people of Scotland have allowed her to do so, given the evidence of the Salmond “Fit up” and the disgraceful legislation pushed through and pending.
I used to be Scottish nationalist in my teens and twenties in the 90s, too. I was brought up to be and I was also under the spell of Salmond in his heyday. The hate was there then, trust me. Recognition of that turned me from nationalism and, ultimately, all identitarian politics forever more.
It was the fact that the hate was all there really was to it once you saw it.
Maybe not in the party conference or in the paper-thin claims to pluralism, then as now. But when your only wish is to partition an island, and it makes no real economic or cultural sense to do so (which it doesn’t), the only thing left on the table to explain it is that there is something problematically ‘other’ about that other half of the island.
And amazingly the SNP manage to simultaneously get votes from the working class and the chatterati – which is a sad testament to the very large proportion of Neanderthal anti-English nationalists that constitute the working class in Scotland, and I’m writing that as an expat working class Scot.
If you want a textbook example of infiltration, just look at the SNP. Scottish independence is not a stupid idea, English visions of grandeur not withstanding, and historically, the SNP was a reasonable political force. Then it became the establishment in Scotland, and in rushed every crackpot and woke lunatic in the country. None of these people have a scintilla of loyalty to Scotland and they don’t give a curse for independence. They just want the office to advance their nonsense.
I agree with you on everything other than independence not being a stupid idea.
I understand this upsets a number of people but I really do find it hard to follow these articles. Wrapped up in a special lexis. Looking out the window people are getting on with their private lives which are always rocky at times. A recent survey reported in the press ( sorry no ref) suggested a vast number of people had no idea about wokery. UK society hugely tolerant but really don’t like peoples’ privacy discussed. The saying- each to their own as long as you don’t harm people or involve minors sums it up. Of course the problem is social media. The idiot muttering in the pub corner now has their own special pulpit. Cripes.
You are missing the point. The point is that ‘each to their own as long as you don’t harm people..’ is exactly what is not happening. Women and children ARE being harmed and increasingly so.
And while people continue in ignorance of what is going on, the ‘diversity specialists’ and their supporters thrive and get stronger and infiltrate more and more organisations, media, businesses and mainstream life.
You do have a good point about the language used. I think the language created by these woke diversity agents isn’t just pretentious, it is deliberately exclusionary. Keep people ignorant and confused and they won’t realize what is happening.
Yes, exactly, everyone was fine with ‘you-do-you’, but that is no longer the case. A small subset of gender-extremists want their ideology taught in schools. It’s a form of child-grooming which needs to cease immediately, I can’t believe parents, teachers, and government officials have permitted this to go on for so long.
Absolutely. Er, you are talking about feminists, aren’t you?
Perhaps. Feminism certainly popularized the idea that gender is merely a social construct created by The Patriarchy™ to oppress women. The idea that gender is merely performative negated the reality of innate differences existing between the sexes. This later opened the gates to gender-bender hell.
This kind of stuff used to be confined to the margins, but since the inception of the internet these ideas have rapidly entered the mainstream, so much so that school children are being taught not merely to accept, but to blindly follow, the new gender-orthodoxy. This process of indoctrination is called the ‘queering’ of society. The end-goal is to break all sexual taboos until the unspeakable becomes acceptable.
It’s a form of medical felony as well.
Like positively reinforcing anorexia or self-harm.
And yet still this article uses Woke’s preferred language “gender critical” to describe people who don’t think a man can become a woman
Ok. Then I’ve got the point I suppose- they are harming people by trying to impose beliefs about individuals’ private lives. I hope we agree that’s wrong. What I find odd is the egotism and desire to publicise one’s sexual and intimate life. Again, if you’re in a relationship and it’s consensual and legal etc why should it be a matter for others?
Remember when the police infiltrated the CND and other activist groups? I think something similar must be going on now. I don’t know who is doing the infiltrating but it is succeeding in causing division and destroying good will as well as stoking anger and fear.
I thinks you’re on to something there.
I found this article and whole discourse very disheartening. Why on Earth are the Scottish people putting up with this nonsense?
This is really not a political point I make when I say ‘wake up to what is happening around you’
The country is trudging along blindly towards irrelevance.
Stand up for your greatness!
Ironic really. The trans-activists are using the feminist playbook against men (demonised as Male Chauvinist Pigs), but their target is women (demonised as Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists).
What goes around, comes around.
Cultural appropriation in its pure form, if there has even existed one.
How can a post-pubescent male understand what it means to menstruate every month, risk pregnancy at every sexual encounter, have to weigh up professional growth vs. having family, and so on. Though now they blatantly demand to partake in the small favours granted to women, because suddenly they feel their supremacist entitlement unfulfilled?
I suggest the above argument with anyone who simultaneously supports radical trans movements and blm.
The quote from David Lammy is interesting: “hoarding rights”. To me it illustrates that mindset of ‘we know best, rights are to be dished out to those we consider deserving’. As opposed to a tradition of those far from power organising to fight for those rights and maintain them.
As for the trans debate, this is an interesting podcast featuring Helen Joyce, author of “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality”
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6bMoSnQzSo3VYvks4IPw9N?si=hlcy6qx-Q_CJ83xXUSX61g&utm_source=copy-link
“these Scottish women are focused on slowing down policy change” – the key word is slowing, not stopping or reversing. Let these liberal women enjoy the grave of their own making. They’ve been helping to dig it for centuries.
“It’s united people from all kinds of backgrounds and experience”, Great!
And there, of course, is the problem with it all: feminist, trans, whatever. Researchers should not be providing theory as if producing gunshot for use on the barricades, they should be aiming at discovering some approximation to truth.
Don’t be surprised if trans activists now have theories of their own (born btw out of feminism) which better support their own aims.
Alas, this campaigning is likely to be in vain. The opposition ie non-SNP parties are mostly uninterested in the issue, or even in favour of self-certification. Moreover, the opinion polls keep putting SNP just below 50%. It is likely to be a textbook case of how a campaign without a clear political strategy, in which it works through the system, will fail.
The real problem is that politics and the media contain a huge over representation of homosexuals and lesbians, who are dead scared that should the people revolt against the trans madness, they will go down with the ship.
They are simply trying to hold on to the considerable power which they have achieved by duplicity.
I fought hard against GM because I knew what it would lead to, when I said “thin end of the wedge” almost everyone turned their heads away.
This proposal simply is “legal sex change on demand.” Nobody who no longer believes in Santa thinks sex can be changed in fact, but sex certainly can be changed in law because it already has been changed in many jurisdictions here in America. Making this change in law allows men to intrude into female spaces with impunity. “Gender,” which means sex stereotypes, is irrelevant to this issue plain and simple. So drop this confusing word used so effectively by sex-change promoters. Read this themasterswords930.pdf (equality4women.org)
The definition of the word “gender” at Oxford dictionary has been recently changed to comply with the woke narrative. It was originally a term for attributite of maleness, femaleness or neutrality in relation to animals and linguistics.
Most living things would inherit their linguistic gender from their physical gender, with some funny exceptions, where grammar takes precedence over physicality, for example when a diminutive suffix makes a young girl in German (das Mädchen) neutral instead of female.
English has lost this property a while back, but most Indo European languages have male/female expression in nouns, verbs and adjectives.
Perhaps, to fill the gap, English culture decided to compensate by inventing 170 new pronouns?
As a woman, I note that it did not take long for the debate within the comments to become all about the SNP, not abut the proposed policies. In fact the whole debate seems to have very little to do with public policy
Seems that they won’t shut up either.
The “woke” crowd of the modern era has my utmost disregard. As things stand, Russia or China, two decidedly “unwoke” nations – whatever else their flaws – will surely come and teach these godless loons the difference between right and wrong. It will be a sorrowful day, but a necessary one.
Lets have four genders Ms, Mr, Xx and Xy then each individual can chose how they want to be categorised by others.
Sorry for being a pedant, but I am still on line 1 and I must ask, why would people “let leaves”? I didn’t know that “leaf-letting” was a thing.
Anyway, after reading the article, welcome to a fairer and more just Scotland.
For Whom? Definitely not women.