Wings Over Scotland

In February this year this site asked whether disabled children should be used as props to make men with sexual fetishes feel better. Just before Christmas, it appears the Scottish courts have indirectly given their answer.

An important ruling for women, girls and the disabled was passed in the judicial review of the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018. On the 13th December Judge Lady Haldane declared that men literally change sex if they have a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC).

Next week MSPs will vote on the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill which will grant GRCs on the basis of self-identification, with no diagnosis, checks or safeguards of any kind, and thereby enable any male to claim he is female and should thus have access to female single-sex services and spaces. The bill is expected to pass comfortably due to the support of Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems.

The new law is a predator’s pass: a permit for perverts. Indeed, on 15 November Social Justice Minister Shona Robison refused to back amendments specifically aimed at preventing the GRC being exploited by registered sex offenders.

Instead, incredibly, she proposed a system of men self-reporting their sexual offending to the police. This will have huge and grave implications for disabled women and girls in Scotland.

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Boris Johnson infamously once hid in a fridge to avoid any awkward questions. Nicola Sturgeon prefers a different kind of small rectangular space, but it’s the same move.

Well done to the Times for attempting to ask one of the obvious questions arising from the events – do the Murrells have a joint bank account? – and we hope someone will ask the others soon. (Why such a specific amount? Why hasn’t it all been paid back yet if it was just a June-2021 cash-flow matter? Why can the Times STILL not credit where they pinched the story from?)

But it wasn’t the only thing the SNP ran scared from today.

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The National must have been enormously proud when it successfully fought off all the other newspapers to secure this stunning exclusive today.

We must admit, when we had a good look in the “Pete Wishart Victories” section of our extensive archives we drew a blank. So we were excited to read on and find out.

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So it’s now official: in Scotland the words “sex” and “gender” mean the same thing, except when they don’t, and if you give a man a piece of paper because he’s asked for one, with no sort of checks whatsoever, then it literally turns him into a woman, except when it doesn’t, unless it does.

Or put more concisely: the word “sex” in Scotland now has no meaning at all.

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Let’s be quite clear what this means.

It means that the new Westminster leader of the SNP thinks it’s “absurd” to even try to achieve independence while the UK is in a crisis.

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This is real. Sounds right up our street, frankly.

We’ve got some pretty exciting ideas.

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Same energy.

Although to be scrupulously fair to General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmany Melchett, he did at least actually launch an offensive from time to time, rather than just putting out occasional half-arsed discussion papers and press releases about it.

Can this really be six and a half years ago?

We suddenly feel very old.

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Word reaches us, readers, that Nicola Sturgeon was “furious” when she joined the most recent meeting of the SNP’s Westminster group by Skype. Her rage was driven by the suggestion that the party should trigger a Holyrood election to act as a de facto independence referendum, a policy we’re reliably told is supported by a number of MPs who are too scared of being browbeaten by Sturgeon in front of their colleagues to actually speak out in favour of it.

(We won’t mention their names at this point.)

Our source mentioned to us that they seemed to remember an interview in which the First Minister had revealed a possible reason for her extreme antipathy to the idea – one for the BBC’s extensive and rather good three-part documentary “Yes/No – Inside The Indyref”, which was broadcast in August 2019 and never seen again.

It’s not available on iPlayer or YouTube, but fortunately we happened to still have the show recorded on our Sky+ box, so we went to check, and lo and behold our source’s recollection was correct. Apologies for the slightly wonky quality of this video, as we had to record it off the TV screen.

We’ve transcribed it below.

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