Wings Over Scotland

This clip was broadcast on ITV News Wales this week.

It’s a staggeringly obvious mess for a whole raft of reasons – a number of completely spurious, illogical and unsupported claims are accepted as facts without any sort of challenge or balancing voice (which has been standard practice on ITV News for a while now across almost any contentious political topic) – but it led us to somewhere magnitudes of crazier still.

Because we were naturally somewhat curious about who Jenny-Anne Bishop, the very obviously male “community rights activist” (and who according to his LinkedIn page is also a “Transgender Advisory Boar”) that they interviewed for much of the piece was, and how he came to have an OBE.

So we did our thing.

He got his gong (which is not a euphemism) for “services to the trans community” a decade ago, but we were more interested in the first line here:

What has this chap been telling over 150 organisations on 800 occasions in just a few years, as the UK’s institutions have been captured by a bizarre cult ideology?

Luckily, we were able to find out.

Oh, we can already tell this is going to be amazing.

Buckle in, folks, here we go.

You may wish to have the emergency phone number of the Grammar Police on hand before we really get down to it. But at the end of this course you will have learnt, understand, be briefed, increased and to produce things, so that’s good.

That is quite a lot of fonts.

We’re not sure quite how you establish whether, say, a Siberian tiger is transphobic or not. And where did “homophobia” suddenly come from?

“Same-sex behaviour”? What, like going to the pub with the lads to watch the football, or doing a yoga class with the other mums after you’ve dropped the kids at nursery? If so, those figures seem a little low.

If the burning trainwreck of random capitalisation above makes you wince, go and fetch yourself a stiff drink right now, because it infests the 110-page document to an absolutely comical degree. Do NOT even attempt to make any sense out of why, for example, “Interacting” and “Assuming” suddenly Get capitals despite Being in the Middle of a sentence, because Trust us, there is absolutely no Logic whatsoever at Play and you’ll just end up Gouging your own eyes Out.

(eg why does only one of the two instances of “course” there get a capital?)

We met Brian Dimorphism once. Lovely chap. Bit confused.

Ah, the well known prefix “bi-“, famously meaning “an unspecified number higher than 1”. But what’s interesting here (other than the incredible amount of work being done by the “+” in “LGBTIQ+”) is that the T, I and Q have all been very conspicuously left out of the definitions of sexual orientations.

So the mystery of why the earlier pic suddenly brought “homophobia” into a definition of “transphobia” remains an active question, but now we’re forced to wonder what the “LGB” and the “TIQ+” are doing lumped together at all. Perhaps we’ll find out in a bit.

(Remember, “NO QUESTION IS A SILLY QUESTION”.)

Always remember, readers, that sometimes “Q” stands for “Agender”, and that while it doesn’t stand for a sexual orientation, sometimes it stands for a sexual orientation.

Everything goes a bit fuzzy on the next page and bits get haphazardly cropped off it, which seems somehow appropriate.

We love the idea of a “current” definition of female and male, words whose meanings have been unchanged and universally understood for approximately 100,000 years.

Now, this is interesting. “Male and Female are the Biological sex categories, Masculine and Feminine are Gender categories” is a statement we agree with completely (other than the capitalisation issues, of course). And they’re VERY clear about it.

Let’s see how well it holds up on subsequent pages.

We all know you only have a gender expression on the right-hand side of your body. But then things get a lot more complicated very quickly.

(“Biromantics” are of course people who really love pens.)

But wait a minute.

This is a right old mess, and we’re not even talking about the basic “assigned at birth” nonsense. Having just been told in the starkest possible terms that sex, sexuality and gender are different things, we’re then presented with this bombscare of a sentence:

“Assigned gender/sex at birth is different than sex, which is based on many variable factors.”

You can’t say that gender and sex are completely different things and then casually toss in a “gender/sex” as if they WERE interchangeable terms after all. Who’s going around assigning babies genders as well as sexes? What are the “many variable factors” that determine sex, and how can it change after birth?

Most of this is the usual bollocks, but “metagender”, apparently meaning “neither cis nor trans”, is a brand new one on us. How does that even work? Either you identify with your birth “gender” or you don’t. What’s the middle ground there? Are you “semi-binary” or something?

(And again, if gender isn’t sex, who’s assigning babies genders rather than sexes? Who decides you’ve had a little Neutrois or Abimegender or any of the hundreds of other genders? Nobody gives birth to a “man” or a “woman”, women give birth to babies who are boys or girls. Newborn infants have no social roles.)

But phew! None of this drivel has to make sense anyway! Just make stuff up!

Because nobody can ever tell.

We think the Right Time & Place is that vegan community cafe just off the High Street, round the back of Superdrug. Ask for Starsprinkle, she/they does afternoons there.

In more primitive, less progressive times, we simply called this a “person”.

We don’t introduce ourselves with pronouns when we meet anyone, because we’re not completely insufferable narcissistic tools, but in fairness we’ve found the last sentence on that slide invaluable when being attacked by bears.

Let’s pause here for a short moment and think of just some of the situations in which the words “Name doesn’t match paperwork” would constitute an EXTREMELY LARGE RED WARNING FLAG WITH FLASHING LIGHTS AND GREAT BIG LOUD BLARING KLAXONS GOING OFF ALL AROUND IT, and which definitely shouldn’t be blithely ignored by some simpering dolt in the name of politeness and inclusivity.

Can someone bring us a non-binary person immediately, please? We are DYING to call them an “Inbetweenie” or “Gender Bender” and see how that goes.

This is a jawdropping mess. “Butch” and “femme”, for example, are terms generally used to describe lesbians, and “lesbian” and “transgender” are not synonyms, as the presentation itself has repeatedly made clear.

We’re told that SOME intersex people (how many?) don’t want to be called trans, but they get lumped in anyway.

The word “crossdresser” intrinsically means that someone isn’t trans at all – if you’re dressing in the clothes of what you regard as the opposite sex, you can’t think you ARE that sex, or it’d just be “dressing”. (And the same thing goes for drag, which is crossdressing for money.)

And if anyone ever introduces themselves to you as a “Gender Outlaw”, we’re pretty sure you’re legally allowed to shove them into the nearest canal.

Having just pointed out that intersex people are not the same thing as trans, and many of them strenuously object to being lumped in with trans people, why would you keep inventing new terms that insist on doing exactly that?

Being intersex is a definable and verifiable physical condition, not a mental disorder, so what would it be doing in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition)? It also has nothing whatsoever to do with gender – you can have an intersex condition (properly called DSDs), and be trans or not trans or non-binary or whatever. There is no link of any kind between the things.

Why are your poor employees being subjected to this wildly inaccurate drivel?

Why does the “Cis woman” only have one arm? Why are “Trans people” only one person? (And “Gender diverse people”. How many people are in there?)

Is the first one “WHAT in the name of CHRIST have you done to your EAR?”?

All aboard, all aboard, woah-oh!

(As with most trains nowadays, you may experience significant delays, or be redirected to a Bust Replacement Service. Thanggewverymuch, try the fish!)

The above provides an opportunity for Jenny to execute a neat segue into a lengthy personal section about himself and his equally-male wife, who like all women share an abiding love of steam engines. We’ll restrict ourselves to a few highlights.

Our favourite is the appearance of (we assume) the proud dads at the wedding.

Attendees were treated to no fewer than 20 pages of these thrilling snaps.

But eventually we get back to the story.

Interestingly, there’s no claim here that all or indeed any of these articles are ANTI-trans, only that they’re “on trans topics”. Most campaigners would be delighted with such a sharp increase in media coverage.

Also, “16 articles a day” sounds like a lot until you consider how many newspapers there are in the UK – we can’t find a definitive list anywhere, but there are around 50 dailies alone, including both national and regional titles, and obviously any sizeable story is likely to be picked up by multiple outlets, so 16 is actually a pretty low number.

Crocs: when diversity goes too far.

Honest to God, the single most surprising thing about this entire presentation is that they manage to spell “harassment” correctly the whole way through. (Alert readers who spotted the spectacular “Ones own personnel sense of Gender” earlier will doubtless be as shocked as we were when they dodged the “harassment” landmine.)

But normal service is swiftly resumed.

As is the majestically arbitrarily deployment of capital letters, whereby Trains, Aircraft and Clubs all get one but the things that SHOULD have them, like Ladies and Gender Recognition Certificate, don’t.

There can’t be a single font, point size or formatting type anywhere in Microsoft PowerPoint that hasn’t been utilised at some point in the presentation. Check out this unexpected punch to the eyeballs.

We’re pretty sure you can’t ban disabled people from disabled toilets. But exactly how many toilets were IN this bus?

We have SO many questions here.

Whatever clothes you might be wearing, by definition only female people ever need gynaecological treatments. It’s literally what “gynae-“ means, you maniacs.

If you’re being treated in the Gynaecology Department, YOU ARE A WOMAN, or you’re about to get a very uncomfortable surprise.

We’re nearly done, folks. Hang on in there.

Well, yes, in that it’s a brain.

AIEEEEEEEE! It’s a FONTPOCALYPSE!

But thankfully, other than the obligatory links to Mermaids at the end, that’s it. We’ve shown you fewer than half of the slides, and remember, almost EIGHT HUNDRED groups of poor beleaguered employees – amounting to thousands if not tens of thousands of people altogether – with better things to do had to sit through the entire thing for hours, all just to end up hopelessly confused and ill-informed.

It’s hard to even begin to estimate how many productive labour hours have been wasted by just this one ridiculous man. And there are legions more just like him gallivanting around the country, many of them being paid hefty sums of taxpayers’ money to fill people’s ideas with this incoherent, abysmally-written woo-woo mindrot.

It’s no wonder the country’s going down the tubes, if we’re still allowed to say “tubes” without it being either sexist or ableist against the neurodiverse. We don’t know about you, gang, but we’re impatient for the end.