Wings Over Scotland

At the weekend, Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman was filmed applauding as a notoriously unhinged transactivist ranted through a megaphone to a small and almost exclusively male crowd of protestors about how he was going to openly break the law by continuing to use women’s public toilets, and addressing JK Rowling with the words “We should all take a shite on you, you heinous creeping old bitch”.

At another protest, Chapman herself asserted that the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling on the correct interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 was motivated by not by a solemn consideration of the law or by the arguments of counsel who appeared before it, but by “bigotry, prejudice and hatred”.

Chapman is – incredibly – Deputy Convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament, and as such her comments sparked a storm of wholly justified outrage over her flagrant breach not only of Parliamentary rules but also of the law – specifically the Judiciary and Courts (Scotland) Act 2008, which requires all MSPs to uphold the independence of the judiciary.

But Chapman today refused to back down.

And the call for consequences has grown far beyond the usual suspects.

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Regular readers of Wings won’t need any reminding that Dani Garavelli of the Herald is, among some very stiff competition, one of the most contemptible pieces of nightsoil currently operating in the Scottish media.

But if you’re new here, we can give you a quick illustration.

If the sneering piety of that opening paragraph made you feel a little revolted, a bit angry and somewhat nauseous, then congratulations, because that means you’re still something minimally approximating to a decent human being. But unfortunately it gets a lot worse from there.

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Well, it’s always nice to be a landmark for free speech.

But let’s start at the beginning.

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Scottish Greens candidate and transactivist Matt “Ellie” Gomersall, with whom Wings readers will be familiar, appeared on the Jeremy Vine show today and blundered straight into an elephant trap a myopic mole could have seen coming on a foggy night.

Having just embarked on a diatribe in which he dismissed as “ridiculous” the idea that predatory men would ever pretend to be transwomen to gain access to vulnerable women, Vine asked him about Adam “Isla Bryson” Graham, the convicted double rapist that even hapless Humza Yousaf felt able to confidently assert was “at it”.

Having just painted himself into a corner, Gomersall was then embarrassingly unable to disown Bryson as a “real” transwoman, thereby implicitly admitting that transwomen do indeed present a danger to women in exactly the same way that predatory men do, and torpedoing his entire core point that it was unfair to “discriminate” against them in exactly the same way single-sex spaces discriminate against non-trans men.

(Outrageously, earlier in the speech he’d tried to claim that it was only natural that some transwomen would be sex offenders because some biological women were.)

It’s tempting to believe that Gomersall was demonstrating an intellectual vacuum by making such vacuously cretinous arguments and failing to spot even the most obvious pitfalls in them, but the truth is far worse. Gomersall, and people like him, know that they’re lying (which is why they always try to silence opponents), but they lack the moral courage to face up to the fact that the inevitable price of their lies is vulnerable women being raped by what he revoltingly waves away as “fringe cases”.

All rapists are fringe cases. 95% of men would never dream of raping anyone. But we discriminate against ALL men in women’s spaces because you can’t tell which ones are rapists by looking. Men like “Ellie” Gomersall, though, think that the price of a few women being raped is worth paying to validate their delusions and fetishes (in his case, the creepy fetish of skinwalking as his pretty sister), and they don’t even have the shred of decency to bother coming up with a coherent line of bullshit to cover it.

Get ready for a lot of this in the coming days and weeks.

Obviously, don’t believe any of it.

Pretty soon now, nobody in a position of power will admit to ever having thought that transwomen were women. But don’t worry. We’ll remember.

We’ll be honest, readers, we gasped out loud when we saw this.

That such a basic, fundamental truth of human existence should ever be front page news with the capacity to shock 100,000 years after we invented language is a sign of just how insane our world has become since 2015.

But magnificent as it is, it’s not even today’s BEST front cover.

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We wouldn’t be Wings if we didn’t round off this evening with a representative selection of some of the more measured and thoughtful responses from transactivists across the UK to today’s Supreme Court judgment.

So fetch some sort of celebratory beverage, settle down in your comfiest armchair in front of the fire (‘cos it’s been Baltic today) and enjoy the Sounds Of Kindness.

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For those among you who don’t have the time or patience to wade through 88 pages of judicial lingo, we’ve distilled today’s Supreme Court judgment down to its key points.

Much of it, of course, can be summarised as “the bleeding obvious”.

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We’ve all got a lot of extremely heavy reading and pondering to do now. But the short version of the outcome of For Women Scotland vs The Scottish Ministers is this:

On the face of the judgment just handed down live in the courtroom, a more absolute, comprehensive and legally momentous defeat for the Scottish Government – and the forces of gender ideology in general – seems difficult to imagine.

But we’ll get back to you on that after all the reading. Today, we’re just going to stand and salute FWS and their richly-deserved triumph. See you later.

Because you certainly are a bit light-headed if you’re buying this horse-plop.

We don’t normally spend much time analysing opinion polls more than a year out from an election because it’s a complete chump’s game – too much can happen. But this one’s so absolutely batshit mad that we couldn’t resist a bit of a probe.

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Alert readers will have noticed our so-far-fruitless attempts to extract information from the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator regarding the disturbing activities of the controversy-plagued LGBT Youth Scotland.

We are far from the only people raising concerns about the charity – we know of at least 17 separate formal complaints against LGBTYS in the past year alone, yet the OSCR has declined to open any sort of formal inquiry into them. (It carried out three such inquiries in 2024.)

But despite the OSCR’s assertion that “we strive to be transparent and accountable”, when we went to find those complaints (including, of course, the one from ourselves) to link you to them, we hit a brick wall that rapidly turned into a whole new concern.

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In relation to yesterday’s article, we’ve now filed the following with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator.

I request a review of this decision.

Firstly, I wish to note that since the response I received was a wholly generic one containing no reference or relevance to any of the specifics of my case, it should not have taken until the 28th day of the 28-day deadline to deliver. This appears to be a deliberate stalling tactic.

The information I sought did not involve the disclosure of any sensitive identities or data. It is in fact an attempt to establish the answer to an extremely basic question of first principles: why is LGBT Youth Scotland operating so far outwith its stated remit?

Since the fact that it IS doing so is not in any question – its own public statements declare that it is operating widely and openly in primary schools – it is a matter of plain and overwhelming public interest that this glaring anomaly be explained. The charity itself refuses to do so, or even to enter into any discussion of the matter, so it becomes a matter for its ostensible regulator.

Since the public is unable to ask the OSCR to speak on behalf of LGBTYS, the only remaining option to achieve transparency, accountability and public confidence is to seek the information requested and thereby discern the answer via the OSCR.

Particularly given LGBTYS’s unfortunate record of involvement with extremely serious child abuse, and its highly controversial position on matters such as “puberty blockers” – on which it is starkly at odds with the stated position of the Scottish Government – this matter cannot simply be swept under the carpet and the public ordered to mind its own business. Someone, somewhere, at some level of Scottish civic life, must answer the question:

Why is an organisation whose remit concerns intrinsically sexual matters and exclusively encompasses 13-25-year-olds being allowed to operate in primary (and indeed nursery) schools and discuss such sexual matters with children 10 years below its minimum stipulated age range?

Given LGBTYS’s refusal, that duty then lies with the OSCR, and it should not evade it. The public deserves to know both that OSCR has in fact complied with its own responsibilities and carried out a satisfactory investigation, and what the outcome of that investigation was, given that nothing has changed in respect of the charity’s actions since concerns were raised with the OSCR a year ago and LGBTYS continues to far exceed its stated brief.

There are in this case no redactions which would reveal any sort of information that would place anyone at risk. The identities of LGBTYS and/or OSCR employees could be safely redacted if appropriate, while the substance of the discussion remained visible. What matters is that the question was asked, and that the public be told the answer.

None of OSCR’s stated objections to answering the FOI request are pertinent to this particular enquiry. It has no valid excuse to refuse. We fully expect it to do so anyway, because nobody in Scotland is answerable for anything any more. But we’re required to give them another 28 days to waste everyone’s time before we approach the only person in Scotland who appears to still believe in their civic and professional duty: the Information Commissioner.

Barring a miracle, we’ll see you on the 15th of May, readers.