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.
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.
So we’ve had a response from Adam Ramsay to our article of yesterday about him. We’ll publish it in full, in the interests of fairness.
And, well, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t ask some questions.
There’s something very unusual – possibly unique, we think – about the reaction of the transactivist community to this week’s tribunal judgement in Roz Adams vs Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC).
Normally in cases like these, there’s an instant and concerted attempt to rubbish the judgement, both from amateurs and activist lawyers like Robin Moira “Barry” White, Jolyon Maugham, and the anonymous “Pissed Off Lawyer” tweeting as @legaltweetz. They’ll issue spurious “analyses” dismissing the findings with jargon terms like “obiter”, and either question their correctness or attempt to minimise their significance.
For some reason that didn’t happen this time. The hyper-antagonist online trans army has very conspicuously failed to rush to the defence of ERCC CEO Mridul Wadhwa, perhaps because Judge Ian McFatridge’s conclusions were so relentlessly, brutally and comprehensively excoriating of Wadhwa’s appalling behaviour that no amount of spin or disingenuity could disguise it.
But then, on white charger and with papoose, enter a hero.
Ladies and gentlemen (and non-binary genderfluids), meet Adam Ramsay.
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.
The picture editor of The Times must have been delighted with this gift.
But it’s a very accurate picture, and fairly used.
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.
We watched a TV documentary about the sinking of the Bismarck last week.
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.
So there it is. In a massive, humiliating and abrupt reverse, the Scottish Greens have announced that they’ll support the Scottish Government – still led for the foreseeable future by Humza Yousaf – in this week’s confidence motion.
Shockingly enough, the debate about the Greens’ principles, intellectual consistency and integrity was an extremely brief one. Faced with the loss of their relevance and influence, they crumbled like month-old carrot cake and rushed their cards onto the table before the SNP had time to do any thinking.
Any hope Kate Forbes might have had of leading the SNP just evaporated, and so did any hope of grown-up government between now and 2026. The SNP will now spend the next two years as pathetic, grovelling puppets, doing whatever the Greens want as long as the paycheques and pension contributions keep rolling in.
It’s a tragic demise for a party that just a couple of years ago still crushed all before it in Scottish politics. But that’s showbiz, folks.
Daniel Sanderson of the Telegraph has filed a series of excellent but deeply disturbing articles this month about the growing presence in Scottish primary schools of LGBT Youth Scotland, a charity which has been heavily involved in not one but two serious child abuse scandals, one of them the most horrific in Scottish history.
But LGBTYS seems to be able to do whatever it wants.
Paraphrased from points made by a number of people this morning, including Sonia Sodha of the Observer and in a letter by Joanna Cherry of the SNP and Robin Harper, former leader of the Scottish Greens to the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland:
The question is this:
In the light of the Cass Review findings, why do English children deserve evidence-based healthcare but Scottish ones don’t? Why is it okay to conduct untested, unproven medical experiments on Scottish children?
We do hope that someone in Scotland’s notoriously toothless media will ask the First Minister soon, and that he has a very convincing answer ready.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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