Something very significant (and welcome) happened in Scotland today that didn’t even make it into the headlines of the stories that reported it.
In fact, it barely got a line.
There comes a point when even the most liberal and tolerant have to ask questions.
The above clip comes from a 2022 fundraising dinner celebrating the 75th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence. But Anas Sarwar seems to want to take things a little bit further than that.
The less said about the Scottish Government’s toe-curlingly embarrassing “summit” last week, the sooner we can all pretend it never happened. We’ve got little to add to the withering assessments of Robin McAlpine and Kevin McKenna and just about everyone else who’s bothered covering this pathetic waste of everyone involved’s time. (Not that the time of most of these worthless quangocrats was worth anything anyway.)
We take a moment only to note something remarkable: the closest Scottish Labour’s hapless branch manager Anas Sarwar has ever come to understanding anything.
Ooh! So nearly!
Yesterday the Scottish media gave Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman what she’s never willingly given anyone else – a platform on which to make her case.
Most did a very poor job challenging her on her outrageous comments about the Supreme Court, with BBC Radio Scotland’s Drivetime show being an especially wretched example of allowing the interviewee to ignore every question and then just ramble on endlessly about something else entirely, but LBC’s Gina Davidson was on top of her brief and put all the points that reasonable people wanted to be made, while giving Chapman ample time to answer uninterrupted.
Let’s break down how that went, with the help of our handy Bullshit Buzzer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
