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”.
We’ve all got a lot of extremely heavy reading and pondering to do now. But the short version of the outcome of For Women Scotland vs The Scottish Ministers is this:
On the face of the judgment just handed down live in the courtroom, a more absolute, comprehensive and legally momentous defeat for the Scottish Government – and the forces of gender ideology in general – seems difficult to imagine.
But we’ll get back to you on that after all the reading. Today, we’re just going to stand and salute FWS and their richly-deserved triumph. See you later.
Welcome back to what will hopefully be normal service after we’ve been spending the last few days battling off a determined and temporarily successful attempt at hacking the site. Apologies to those who had clicks intercepted and redirected to a malware site which tried to get people to download dodgy .EXE files, but our readers are far too alert to ever fall for such things so no harm should have been done.
So back to business, which for us often means pointing out things that have been said in newspapers that aren’t true, which brings us to last Friday’s issue of The National.
Because the above simply isn’t what happened.
As alert Wings readers will know, we’re fond of a WW2 analogy from time to time. The conflict is so extensively documented, and so deeply embedded in British culture (for both good and ill), that it’s a reliable tool for getting points across concisely and clearly.
(It’s also one of the last major wars in which, overall, the good guys and the bad guys were pretty indisputably easy to identify.)
So let’s keep that in mind for a moment while we look at this.
And then let’s talk about Stalingrad.
The wild thing about this poll isn’t the headline that six months after winning a massive landslide majority, Keir Starmer now trails Nigel Farage – leader of a party with five MPs to Starmer’s 411 – as the electorate’s choice for best Prime Minister.
It’s the little grey numbers sitting quietly at the bottom.
In the recent US election, the Democrats made a huge play out of the notion that the very concept of democracy itself was at risk if Donald Trump won.
And yet his eventual victory was unquestionably democratic. Not only did Trump win under the electoral college system by a huge 312-226 margin, and secure control of both the Senate and the House Of Representatives, he also beat Kamala Harris in the popular vote, by 50% to 48%. By every possible count and measure, Trump was the legitimate winner and has a clear mandate to govern for the next four years.
Over in the UK, however, things aren’t quite so neat and tidy.
As more horrific experiences from survivors of rape torture gangs surface from across the UK, we must focus not on knee-jerk political posturing but on the root cause that led to the failure of these children by our society.
Political inaction has now opened the door to inevitable political mileage, nurtured from stoking vengeance in a rightly-angered public. Those only interested in creating cultural conflicts no more support justice for survivors than those who allowed this abomination to fester by looking away or worse, covering up the problem.
For any functioning society, inflicting unimaginable pain on children on an alarming scale seems unimaginable. Yet, the evidence has been in front of us for years – so why has immediate action to ensure the safeguarding of children – and vulnerable adults – not been a pressing priority?
Any rational assessment of Scottish (or indeed UK or world) politics at the moment tends to be negative and depressing, so since it’s a new year we thought we’d make an extra-special effort at writing something positive.
Unfortunately that does require us to enter the realm of fantasy. But hey, everybody needs a little holiday from time to time, right?
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
