Wings Over Scotland

I spent yesterday trying to work out exactly why I was so depressed about the fatal shooting of conservative American activist Charlie Kirk.

It wasn’t because I shared many of his opinions – other than opposition to gender ideology and DEI, and (surprisingly) support for Scottish independence, we had little in common. And it wasn’t general sadness about such a young man (31), a husband and a father to two preschool children, being so brutally slain. Because over 50 people are murdered every single day in the US alone and everyone just shrugs.

Nor was it even the fact that his death was captured in all its shocking, bloody horror on video, and inescapable on social media, nor that it came just the day after footage broke of another appalling killing in the States, the unprovoked stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a violent lunatic who’d been released on no-fee bail despite 14 previous arrests and should never have been at large.

Nor was it the grimly predictable emergence of the fact that Kirk’s shooter appears to have been a transactivist – America’s fastest-growing murderer demographic.

In the end, the most chilling thing about this particular crime is this: Charlie Kirk was killed for doing exactly what civilised people are supposed to do.

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Last week we introduced readers to Sophia “Tarquin” Brooks, the 18-year-old boy who Graham Linehan is currently on trial for supposedly “assaulting”, and in particular his connection to disgraced former policeman and serial harasser Lynsay Watson.

(From reporting of the proceedings at Westminster Magistrates Court, it sounds very much like Watson has been directing and influencing Tarquin’s complaints to the police – which had originally been dismissed as baseless – and was largely responsible for the matter getting to trial.)

But Watson isn’t the only middle-aged trans-identifying man with whom “Tarquin” has a seemingly close relationship when it comes to the relentless, vindictive persecution of people who believe in biological sex.

We think (but haven’t been able to verify) that that’s Watson on the left of the thumbnail of the above video, in the facemask and with a brown bag amid extraordinary scenes as Tarquin left the court after giving his evidence.

But the burly, blond bespectacled man at the centre of it, who appears to be acting as some sort of official representative for “Tarquin”, is Stephanie Hayden – born Anthony Halliday, who changed his name in 2005 to Steven Hayden shortly after being released from the Sex Offenders Register (more on that below) before obtaining a GRC in the name of “Stephanie” in 2017.

Hayden is a convicted paedophile and self-described lawyer who, like Lynsay Watson, dedicates his entire life to the persecution of gender-critical campaigners.

And as remarkable as it might seem to anyone who read our previous piece, Hayden may be the more toxic of the two.

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We’ve written already about the magnitude of the error transactivists have made in bringing about the arrest of Graham Linehan on trumped-up incitement charges. But thanks to the excellent work of court reporter Nick Wallis this week, the sheer scale of it is still only beginning to unfold.

At its heart is a scarcely-believable tale about how a tiny handful of deeply mentally ill men – at the core, just three – have for years orchestrated a campaign of vindictive, hateful intimidation and terror which has caused untold suffering to individuals, done catastrophic damage to the reputation of the police, and cost the taxpayer millions of pounds, all in a desperate attempt to validate their own delusions.

It’s going to be no small task to summarise it for you. But let’s do our best.

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We think transactivists will swiftly come to see yesterday as an epic mistake.

Because it looks as though it might just have been the final straw.

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…grind exceedingly slowly, but grind they do.

May 2021:

And now today, just four years and three months of struggle later:

As far as we’re aware, today marks the first time the Scottish Government has formally acknowledged that transwomen are men. For our next trick, we’re going to send in an FOI asking if they know what religion the Pope is, or where bears go to the toilet.

Do stay tuned.

The media coverage of the gender-ideology revelations in Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir has been based on a couple of short sentences from it, but since the main section of the book devotes 14 pages to the subject it’s worth checking out in depth, at least until something more interesting happens.

Highly intelligent people only, obviously.

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As more and more of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoirs ooze out into the public sphere like pus leaking from a burns-victim’s blisters, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of rank, festering untruth spreading out in all directions.

First she audaciously attempted to blame Alex Salmond for supposedly leaking the news of his own arrest on false sexual-assault charges to the press, a laughably mad allegation totally derided by everyone involved including the journalist the story was leaked to (by Sturgeon’s own chief of staff, Liz Lloyd).

For good measure she then accused the MSPs investigating her conspiracy against him of being mere puppets controlled and directed by Salmond, an obvious nonsense immediately refuted by them directly, in case the idea of Murdo Fraser taking orders from Alex Salmond wasn’t already too idiotic to contemplate.

And her spewing sewage cannon still wasn’t done, managing to dredge up another smear that Salmond had been secretly opposed to equal marriage in 2012, an assertion so laughably obviously disproved by entire truckloads of evidence that making it can only have been a result of the gravest desperation.

(Or perhaps pure jealousy that Pink News never made HER their “Ally Of The Year”, as they did with both Salmond and David Cameron.)

But even so, this might be the boldest Hail Mary attempt of all.

Because even for Nicola Sturgeon, trying to rewrite time itself is an ambitious move.

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Say what you like about Nicola Sturgeon, but she’s not stupid. Releasing her memoirs when the Scottish Parliament is in recess has ensured acres of media coverage for what so far have been extremely anodyne “revelations” bundled up with barefaced and obvious lies of such startling audacity that it’s almost impossible to discuss them rationally. (Which is of course the point.)

But this extract from an interview to be aired on ITV tonight is actually interesting.

In it, Sturgeon doggedly continues to refuse to use male pronouns for multiple rapist Adam “Isla Bryson” Graham, despite admitting that he IS male, instead calling him “they”. But it was the bit before that that raised our eyebrows.

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At some point, we’re all going to have to have a discussion about the word “normal”.

Because suffering from a debilitating mental illness that supposedly causes you to commit suicide if medical professionals don’t pump you full of wrong-sex hormones and/or mutilate or remove healthy and functioning parts of your body, and which affects no more than 1 in 300 people, is NOT, in fact, “completely normal”. Nor is having a physical disorder affecting less than 1 in 5,000 people. They’re the exact opposite of that. They’re extremely abnormal.

(“Abnormal” is not an intrinsically pejorative term, it’s a simple neutral statement of fact, meaning something that’s uncommon or unusual.)

But that’s not the main problem with NHS Fife’s “LGBTQI+” website.

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For the combatants in the gender wars, it’s been quite a spring and summer here in the TERF Island theatre of battle.

In February, polling company YouGov revealed the vast extent to which public opinion has shifted around the issue (significantly though not entirely in the wake of the Cass Review last April), which we reported on via a snazzy Stalingrad metaphor. But just as with Stalingrad, it was only the precursor to the recapture of territory on an epic scale.

So let’s recap what we’ve won and what it means.

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We’ve said it for a lot of years, but “1984” really does contain a complete explanation of every aspect of modern life, and especially politics.

So let’s look at today’s Herald On Sunday, and in particular its “special report”.

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