Wings Over Scotland

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.

Upon investigation, the hospital deemed the procedures unethical. Smith was banned from mutilating healthy bodies (although he was found not to have breached any of the hospital’s rules at the time and not sanctioned), and the dubious experiment ended.

But let’s imagine for a moment an alternate reality.

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This sounds like good news, doesn’t it?

But in fact the headline on the STV News website – whether intentionally, through innocent misunderstanding or, as we suspect, a result of being deliberately misled by government ministers – is a flat-out lie.

In fact the Scottish Government has done the exact opposite. It has taken Dr Hilary Cass’s four-year report and set it on fire, so that it can continue to irreversibly destroy the lives of Scottish children in the name of gender ideology.

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The prolific American sci-fi writer LE Modesitt once said, “Never mistake law for justice. Justice is an ideal, and law is a tool.”

And the powers of tools lie in the hands of those who wield them.

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(And Get Away With It)

You’d have to be living in a pretty strict prison not to have heard the big story from today’s Olympics in Paris, in which male Algerian cheat Imane Khelefi was put in a boxing ring with young Italian woman Angela Carini and allowed to hit her in the head for 46 seconds until she retired, in tears and in fear for her safety, saying “I had to preserve my life”.

Sound like your kind of fun, men? It’s surprisingly easy!

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The average rape sentence in Scotland is seven years, so to get six years plus three years’ supervision for the technically lesser crime of sexual assaults means they must have been pretty grim ones.

So we know that Cameron Downing is a very bad man. Which does rather invite the question of why he was so popular in the SNP.

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This is one of the strangest political campaign videos we’ve ever seen.

Join us as we try to make sense of it.

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The Scottish public were just given a surprising answer to the question “Is it possible to be TOO much of a creepy misogynist pornsick nutcase for even the Scottish Greens?”

But goodness gracious, that last line is a stone-cold mic-drop.

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Last week’s controversy around the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre put the spotlight on the need for single-sex services to protect vulnerable women, but it’s very far from the only example of how Scottish women are being let down in this regard by both the Scottish Government and civic organisations.

The homelessness system in Scotland has collapsed. Emergency accommodation is dangerous, sub-standard, and overcrowded. There has been an epidemic of deaths in hotels and B&Bs in recent years.

Shockingly, 67 women in Scotland have died in homeless accommodation over the three-year period up to 2022, the most recent figures available, and the situation is steadily getting worse. Read the rest of this entry →

As a writer, feminist and literary events organiser in Scotland, I’m regularly sent links to information someone thinks might be of interest to me. This week it was a document commissioned by one of Scotland’s leading and most powerful publicly-funded literary organisations, Literature Alliance Scotland (LAS).

Nobody, of course, objects to transgender writers being included or supported, but the content of the guidance raises several extremely serious and concerning issues.

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The judgement in the case of a support worker constructively dismissed by Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre in 2022 is one of the most excoriating we’ve ever read.

Mridul Wadhwa, a man with whom Wings readers have been familiar for some years, was found by the tribunal judge to have been “the invisible hand behind everything that had taken place” as Roz Adams, a conscientious, caring and highly professional woman with a long history in the sector, was systematically and methodically hounded out of her job for holding, privately and sensitively, the belief that biological sex is real.

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The National have buried this pretty quickly in understandable embarrassment:

Because some things are just a little TOO on-the-nose for comfort.

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Well, what a nice statement of unity and tolerance this is:

And only slightly undermined by coming from THIS guy:

But Smith’s new message of tolerance hasn’t fully penetrated the party ranks.

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