In June of last year, I started work at Transport Scotland. It wasn’t the best job I’ve ever had. It was pretty much an entry-level post and it was only a temp gig through an agency, but after spending almost six years out of the workforce following a bout with cancer, two frozen shoulders, and chronic knee and hip pain, it was a huge relief just to be earning my keep again.
Of course, June is Pride Month, and Saltire (the Scottish Government’s intranet) was full of news and blogs about “LGBTI+” issues.
Also on the Saltire front page was a prominent invitation to two training sessions to understand the issues facing these groups: “LGBT+ Awareness 101” and “Trans 101”.
These were both run by the LGBTI+ Network, one of several “affinity networks” for civil servants belonging to different groups. With the GRR Bill on the horizon, and having heard stories about how difficult it had been for gender critical groups to get a hearing from the Government in relation to it, I was very curious to hear what this training involved, and I signed up to attend via Teams.
The first session was “LGBT+ Awareness 101”. This session was fairly inoffensive. The content regarding gay people was about what you would expect, and the T+ stuff was clearly biased, but not terrible.
However, the tone of the event suggested quite strongly that you weren’t meant to disagree with anything that was said. Towards the end, when questions were invited, I typed my question into the chat:
“How does the Scottish Government handle conflicts between TERFs and trans people?”
While idly browsing Twitter this morning, we made a startling discovery triggered by the SNP leadership election, and it was this: nobody in Scotland really knows what the nation’s law on abortion is.
It was prompted by these two tweets, both of which appear to be true:
The thing they agree on is that Humza Yousaf has just declared that he wants to change the law around abortion so that women can abort babies in Scotland solely on the grounds that they don’t like which sex they are. And that seems like something that should probably be bigger news.
But until this morning we’d regarded Kate Forbes as a decent consolation prize – no plan for indy, but at least someone who’d lead to the withdrawal of the toxic Scottish Greens from government and probably a mass exodus of the SNP’s Twitler Youth, leaving the party in a better place to rebuild for the future.
And after her disappointing chickening-out from the vote on the Gender Recognition Reform bill, we’d been impressed at the fortitude she’d shown by carrying on in the contest after the (justifiable) furore around her views on abortion and equal marriage, and her combative showing in Tuesday night’s STV debate.
Erin Lux, the co-convener of the extremist SNP affiliate Out For Independence, is the ultra-woke Canadian activist who tried to have Forbes kicked out of the election for “transphobia” almost as soon as she’d declared her candidacy.
OFI, whose membership is measured in dozens, has a disproportionate influence on policy but a microscopic percentage of votes in the election. The chances of any of its members ever voting for Kate Forbes under any circumstances are less than nil. She could have waded into the crowd and decapitated Lux with a chainsaw for all the difference it would have made to the number of votes she’s going to get from OFI.
But Forbes still folded like a deckchair in a hurricane.
If you’re talking about “transwomen”, you’re almost always talking about people with a fully intact and functional penis. More than 95% of people who identify as trans have NOT undergone any genital surgery, and that’s a fact that’s still not widely understood.
Last month this site ran an article entitled “All The Nice Greens Love A Rapist”, and two days ago the Scottish version of the party officially confirmed it.
Last month Wings broke a story about a “survey” being conducted by dozens of primary schools in the Aberdeen area in which children as young as nine were being asked about their sexual orientation and “gender identity”.
We read some harrowing tweets this week from an Edinburgh SNP activist. Sensitive readers should look away now, as the following article contains potentially triggering information about the wild and lawless streets of [checks notes] Corstorphine.
So this is interesting. Last week we were about to release some results from our latest Panelbase poll when events intervened. Naturally we’d asked a few questions about gender issues, and one of them concerned the Scottish Government’s potential legal challenge to the UK government’s use of a Section 35 order to block the Gender Recognition Reform bill.
There were three options in the question, and as luck would have it the three potential new leaders of the SNP each advocates a different one.
The SNP constitution states that a leadership election should take place over a period of four and a half months. Having not had one in almost 20 years, the SNP are now to conduct one from start to finish in the space of four and a half weeks.
The voting period of two weeks (who needs two weeks to vote after three weeks of debate?) means that it’ll be over just a week too late for the party to be able to hold its “special democracy conference” to determine its independence strategy for the next couple of years, but also that the new leader will be in place just in time to file a legal challenge over the Gender Recognition Reform bill before the April deadline.
(Something the party president Mike Russell publicly called for today, in an apparent attempt to influence the outcome of the election. Indeed, he called for candidates not to go back on ANY of the outgoing leader’s policies, which rather invites the question of why they should bother electing a new leader at all.)
Hatey McHateface on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “Drop a few hints and she might get a copy of Sturgeon’s Collected Speeches for you.” May 27, 07:15
James on The Final Robbery: “I salute wings, always a top notch read and putting the rest to shame. Well done sir!” May 27, 06:58
Young Lochinvar on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “Anyone else just sitting idly assessing this whole mess, and the whole mother of all messes down in London, and…” May 27, 04:19
gm on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/26/sturgeon-husband-murrell-crimes-jewellery/” May 27, 02:26
GM on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “Click on the pictures above. Also Telegraph, Sun, Reptile, even the BBC (who backed her to the hilt whilst hounding…” May 27, 02:23
Young Lochinvar on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “GM Link please? Ye know, that’s 2/3rds of the party leaders/ seniors during the independence debates have either been described…” May 27, 02:03
Young Lochinvar on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “Frank According to reports on the BBC ££where££ then a fair old percentage of purchases were from what you would…” May 27, 01:46
A2 on Woman buys thing with own money: “Who’d a thunk I’d remember about this post after all this time? (Is that first line an edit?)” May 27, 00:29
Mark Beggan on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “When is the Police auction? I fancy a nice set of Salt n Pepper grinders. Maybe get a designer bag…” May 27, 00:16
GM on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “It appears that Nicola Sturgeon is finally being called out by the MSM. ‘Sturgeon claims never to have seen..yet we…” May 26, 23:59
Skip_NC on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “Not as such, I don’t think. He didn’t steal pound notes. He took it in kind. There was the sale…” May 26, 23:20
Skip_NC on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “The amount of Short Money is not unknown. It may be hidden in the SNP financial statements but it is…” May 26, 23:11
sarah on Off-topic: “You’re a lucky man, TC, with your wildlife – especially the goldcrest. I’ve only seen one once in all my…” May 26, 23:03
Frank Waring on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “I don’t find it at all implausible that Ms Sturgeon was completely in ignorance of Murrell’s appetite for bling: on…” May 26, 22:26
PRJ on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “There was an article written prior to the referendum that implied that three SNP members had close links to unionists…” May 26, 22:03
Wally Jumblatt on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “They reckon that since they didn’t have any clue how much money they had left in the kitty (for 5…” May 26, 21:30
Andrea on The Final Robbery: “I came here to ask that very question. Do we know what happened to that “loan” and why it was…” May 26, 21:20
Tinto Chiel on Off-topic: “@sarah: the tinies are now obsessed with slaters (“wood lice”) and green-veined white butterflies. I heard a goldcrest singing today,…” May 26, 21:07
Freeforester on The Final Robbery: “As Pushkin Famously observed, “Where there is a trough, there will the pigs be also”…” May 26, 21:01
GM on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “Izzie, I’ll take your posts at face value.The unionist weasels on here are lapping this up. They will always be…” May 26, 20:34
Aidan on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “If you’ve read the article above you’d see that it wasn’t just SNP members money that was stolen. It is…” May 26, 20:16
Hatey McHateface on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “Hmmm. Ordinarily this would summon up a barrage of abusive posts along the lines that the Telegraph (like the BBC)…” May 26, 20:08
Hatey McHateface on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “Sure, Northy, but please show some respect. Some of us are still in mourning for the disastrous election results (remember…” May 26, 20:01
Hatey McHateface on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “Don’t just leave it at that, you idle so-and-so! Stir yourself and post Ataturk’s speech.” May 26, 19:53
Hatey McHateface on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “Wouldn’t work, TURABDIN, we have no bananas.” May 26, 19:49
Cynicus on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “TURABDIN says: 26 May, 2026 at 6:57 pm «Instead of politicians, let monkeys govern countries; at least they will steal…” May 26, 19:47
Cynicus on No Money Back, No Guarantee: “I do not wish to be disrespectful to Mehmet Murat ildan, but Scots have had monkeys governing us in different…” May 26, 19:43