Wings Over Scotland

It’s sometimes tempting to believe that transactivists, and in particular the extra-loud attention-seeking type, are simply mad and/or stupid. But that’s not always the case, because this sounds like some actually pretty cunning work.

(Click pic to enlarge.)

But let’s start at the beginning.

In May this year, the former Scottish Greens candidate Euan “Sophie Molly” Weddell posted a fundraiser page on GoFundMe, ostensibly to raise £8,000 for private surgery to remove the blocked kidney of his boyfriend Scott “Heather” Herbert.

Observers were immediately sceptical. The condition described is a very serious one, and it seemed highly unlikely NHS Grampian would “refuse to provide a surgery date”. But of course, the supposed reason was transphobia.

(Reading between the lines, it sounds like the actual problem was Herbert demanding to be illegally accommodated on a women’s ward.)

Secondly, the amount being sought was far too low for the likely actual cost of such a procedure, particularly given that Herbert previously, and quite infamously, had gender-reassignment surgery.

Indeed, Weddell himself said the cost was £18,000.

Thirdly, the proposed method of generating the cash – two 25km (16m) sponsored walks – was bizarrely and needlessly implausible, given that he’s in receipt of disability benefits and claims to have “mobility issues”. (Though he has no trouble stomping around at trans protests all over the country where he “destroys TERFs”.)

16 miles is a pretty testing trek even for a fully able-bodied person, but after a couple of weeks of “training” he declared himself ready. On the supposed day of the walk, 13 June, he posted some comically unconvincing “evidence” of having done the walk, consisting solely of very close-cropped pics of him standing near generic foliage.

It would have been farcically easy to post any amount of actual evidence. A vast number of free phone apps, for example, will track the number of steps you’ve done on any given day. (This is the one I use, but iPhones also actually have a built-in one in the preinstalled Apple Health app.)

The Google Maps recommended walking route from Aberdeen to Inverurie passes through a lot of nondescript countryside, but even in the more rural stretches there are scores of opportunities for distinctive and verifiable location shots.

He pulled the same routine on 11 July – this time with far fewer pictures – claiming that NHS Grampian were “forcing” him to “walk to complete exhaustion”.

But we digress. Let’s assume that the sort of gullible saps who’d be willing to donate to a pair of obvious skanky chancers like Weddell and Herbert in the first place, on the premise that it was for much-needed medical treatement, wouldn’t actually care if he did the walks or not, and move on.

Because as it transpired, the money wasn’t needed after all.

Mysteriously, NHS Grampian appeared to have suddenly gotten over their intense institutional transphobia and decided to go ahead with the operation after all, and Weddell announced that the money would be donated to an unspecified “worthy cause” of his choosing instead.

But hold on. As luck would have it, we know, very recently and from an impeccable source – no less than the Dean of the Faculty Of Advocates – that the law does not simply allow you to repurpose money that you raised for something else.

If it can’t be spent on the stated purpose, it must be returned to donors. If you didn’t specify a secondary purpose at the time you solicited it, you can’t simply keep it unless people actively ask for it back.

The fundraiser was very explicit about NOT having a secondary purpose.

(Those rules are for England and Wales, but Scotland is no different.)

You can’t just put an update on the website, where there’s no guarantee of who’ll see it. You have to contact EVERY donor personally, and then if they want to let you keep the money to pay for clothes pegs, ball gags, fake AK-47s and revolutionary berets, or whatever else might “support” Herbert’s “recovery”, that’s their affair.

We’ll find out tomorrow, incidentally, whether that last pic, which appears to be either goading or threatening gender-critical campaigners Graham Linehan and Helen Joyce, is part of the reason Herbert is due to appear in court facing as-yet-unspecified criminal charges.

(Though it remains to be seen whether he actually shows up, or claims the operation as an excuse for not being able to attend.)

While it’s been widely reported that the summons concerns posts he made celebrating the death of former Tory minister Anne Widdecombe, speculation has been rife that other social media posts may be the real reason, and the police statement was decidedly ambiguous, referring only to “a post made online”.

Prior to the charging, media had reported a video in which Herbert and another member of his and Weddell’s “polycule” going by the name of “Poppybear Hackett” made apparently threatening comments.

In the last few days, “Poppybear” has apparently acrimoniously left the polycule and posted a series of cryptic social-media comments attacking Weddell.

(“Tabby”, incidentally, is the fourth member of the polycule, a large gentleman who goes by the name of “Tabitha”.)

A couple of the comments in particular jumped out.

We know that Police Scotland are interested in the events surrounding the fundraiser, because they called us last night to talk about it. And it certainly appears to be the case that it continued to solicit money after the point when Herbert knew he was going to get the operation on the NHS – donations were only paused the day after the op was actually carried out, and one presumes they had more than a few hours’ notice.

But even if it was raised in good faith, and the NHS’s offer to carry out the surgery arrived completely out of the blue – rather than having actually been known about or expected for some time – you still can’t just keep the cash by default, trusting that having already given it to you, people will go “Oh, just buy yourselves some nice stuff with it instead”.

It also doesn’t matter if GoFundMe say you can do that, because GoFundMe don’t write the law and aren’t lawyers. (They operate in 20 countries where the laws are all different.) They can say THEY don’t mind, but that doesn’t get you off the hook legally, as Lucy Connolly would attest.

Otherwise, anyone who wouldn’t be able to just get people to give them thousands of pounds for fun, but wanted some free cash anyway, could make up some spurious medical situation, pretend to do some activities, gather the money, then disclose the medical situation had been somehow magically resolved and walk away with the dough knowing that few people would bother with the hassle of asking for refunds.

Whether that’s what’s happened in this specific situation, we don’t yet know. It certainly sounds like all is not well in the world of the polycule, though, and if this rather murky matter isn’t cleared up then it has the potential to get a lot worse.