In the 1990s, Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon at Falkirk Royal Infirmary, performed a pair of amputations on two men. Neither of the men involved had anything physically wrong with them, but both were suffering from apotemnophilia – a rare psychiatric condition involving the desire to have healthy limbs amputated.
Sufferers, counterintuitively, claim not to feel “whole” with four limbs and obsess over having their unwanted body parts chopped off. Smith argued the surgeries were life-saving, claiming the patients would commit suicide otherwise.
Apotemnophiles, like autogynephiles, insist that there is no erotic element, but it was later discovered that one of the men Smith operated on ran an amputee fetish website.
Despite saying as recently as mid-May that it was “committed to continuing with that legislation”, and the new First Minister making a huge fuss about it at Edinburgh Pride just a handful of weeks ago, the administration has clearly (if belatedly) realised that as well as being massively unpopular it would probably be another disastrous high-profile failure along the lines of the Gender Recognition Reform Act, as it too would be likely to be in conflict with UK law.
So on the face of it it’s just a “pragmatic step” to avoid wasting any more time, energy and political capital that could be better spent trying to turn the government’s fortunes around, and leaving Labour to do all the dirty work instead.
But it may turn out far more significant than that.
The most striking aspect of it was the visible and audible distress on the faces and in the voices of some of the Royal Navy sailors who’d been on the ships which sent the German battleship to the Atlantic seabed as they told the story of the final battle.
We were going to write a follow-up piece to this last week, until the SNP detonated a hand-grenade in its own trouser pocket. But with the coronation of John Swinney this afternoon after the only challenger sold out for some shiny beads and trinkets, we can get back to some serious news.
The controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland, which has been involved in a number of serious child sexual abuse scandals, continues to exert considerable influence on Scotland’s education system, thanks to extremely lavish funding from taxpayers – well over a million pounds from hard-pressed councils in the last year alone to address unspecified issues whose urgency is difficult to identify.
After our last piece we sent LGBTYS a letter raising our concerns about their improper interference with primary schools, something we were obliged to do before we could file a formal complaint with Scotland’s charity regulator, the OSCR.
We received an automated reply on 24 April saying “We are currently experiencing staff shortages and it may take up to a week to respond to your email.”
That deadline expired five days ago, and we will now be writing to the OSCR. But in the meantime LGBTYS persists in exceeding its remit, with deeply alarming results.
The Cass Review into gender medicine, which has been almost six long years in the making, was finally published this morning, and despite the fears of some – including us – that it was going to be watered down, it’s turned out to be an absolutely explosive document even on a quick skim. (It’s 388 pages long.)
The most damning aspect, though, is almost certainly this one:
Those quotes annihilate any concept of an “innocent good intentions” defence for the gender clinics. Because if you genuinely believe that you’re doing good, you don’t try to bury all the evidence.
Many things about the session are disturbing, not least the incredibly one-sided nature of both the witnesses and the committee, none of whom seem to have even a token interest in challenging the claims of the witnesses, however absurd or contentious (eg that praying for someone is basically a form of torture).
We make no apology for returning once again to the depressing subject of the Scottish Government’s proposed new law to ban “conversion practices”, because it provides such an illuminating microcosm of how far a once competent and widely-respected administration has fallen since 2015.
Emma Roddick, who is piloting the bill towards the statute books in much the same way that Mohamed Atta piloted American Airlines Flight 11 towards the World Trade Centre, is a 26-year-old who by her own admission suffers from a serious and debilitating mental illness that any sane country would regard as an insurmountable bar to political office.
The Scottish Government’s website about its controversial and extremely disturbing new “conversion practices” legislation assures citizens that the proposal was formed after consultation with an “Expert Advisory Group”.
But all of a sudden it doesn’t seem to want you to know who they were.
After yesterday’s disturbing article about the indoctrination of Scottish schoolchildren into transgender ideology via the Scottish Government’s proposed new “conversion practices” legislation, Wings was contacted by a number of current Scottish teachers telling us we had no idea how far it had already gone.
The message below was by no means untypical:
“This stuff around the UNCRC has been a concern for a while. Some of the articles seem to be being interpreted in ways they were never intended. It has become a vehicle for activist teachers to push their own agendas, all the while hiding behind ‘children’s rights’.
Getting certified is being pushed heavily in every school. Headteachers seem to be under a lot of pressure (coming from Scottish Government) to get it all implemented. We’re currently working towards silver.”
It’s from a 2018 BBC3 documentary called Becoming A Trans Man – Leo. The 15-year-old child in the video plays with a Rubik’s Cube as Wolton, who was 31 at the time, enthusiastically grooms her into transitioning into a “man”, advocating chest binders, a double mastectomy and the irreversible mutilation of her genitalia (“Lower surgery – you want that”) that will, Wolton confirms, lead to her permanent sterilisation, as well as the destruction of her future adult sexual function.
The BBC presents it as a heartwarming tale of friendship.
