It really is quite the remarkable feat of timing that concerted mass reporting by SNP activists managed to get the Wings Twitter account (and several others) closed down this week of all weeks, isn’t it?
They’re also trying to get my personal account banned, and reporting scores of others, in an open attempt to purge any sort of dissenting opinions from public dialogue at exactly the same time as opening a “consultation” whose outcome has already been predetermined, and which in another remarkable coincidence is due to close just a few days into the four weeks scheduled for the Alex Salmond trial.
What were the odds, eh readers?
A Wings acquaintance, wholly unconnected with either Scottish politics or the gender debate, passed this comment to a mutual friend today:
It’s fair to say that the Scottish Government has something of a track record with such poorly-drafted laws, particularly in the social-justice field, with the discarded likes of the flawed Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act and the failed Named Persons legislation littering its footsteps like an incontinent dog someone hasn’t cleared up after.
But that string of disasters doesn’t seem to have dissuaded it from charging arrogantly ahead in its determination to place women in Scotland in peril from predatory males everywhere they go, with no space left safe.
Rather than scrutinising the proposed law, the Scottish media is simply parroting as undisputed fact the Scottish Government’s highly questionable assertions, such as the meaningless and subjective phrase “international best practice”.
Even the Times, one of the more gender-critical newspapers, today carries a puff piece headlined by an unchallenged Scottish Government claim that everything’s fine:
There is in fact a vast catalogue of well-documented evidence in the UK alone contradicting that claim, even before self-ID has been implemented – partly compiled by someone whose Twitter account‘s days are also undoubtedly numbered. The Scottish Government has simply dismissed it all airily with a wave of the hand.
But if the entryist trans-rights activists who have infiltrated and poisoned the SNP think that shutting down this site’s Twitter account will silence it on the subject, they are gravely mistaken. This is the most dangerous piece of legislation ever proposed in Scotland, not just to women but to society as a whole.
In George Orwell’s famous warning about the genesis and day-to-day operation of absolute tyranny, “1984”, the protagonist Winston Smith makes a realisation:
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
What the line means is that so long as it is permissible to state certain obvious truths, the key notion that there is a factual basis for reality cannot be countermanded. The authoritarian dictatorship (Ingsoc) which runs Winston’s world uses intimidation and torture to force Winston to deny this most basic foundation stone of reason, and it’s that which enables it to suppress every other aspect of dissent and exercise total power over the population, which – in the real stroke of malign genius – is policed and enforced by the terrified citizens themselves.
(“Cancel culture” is the new “network of informants”.)
The fact that humans are a sexually dimorphic species in which the words “woman” and “man” have clearly-defined and mutually-exclusionary meanings demonstrates that “women don’t have penises” is a statement of truth far more fundamental than “2+2=4”, because human sexual dimorphism began at the evolution of primates and predated the existence of language and arithmetic by tens of millions of years.
If humans could not distinguish the two (and only two) sexes from each other, mankind would not have survived to invent those concepts and none of us would be here now.
So it is not in any sense an exaggeration to say that what the Scottish Government is proposing is the formal and legal abolition of reality. Or to be more precise, the recasting of reality as a hate crime. That subversion of the entire concept of fact, and the violently enforced moulding of behaviour to that end, was the heart of Orwell’s book.
It is fatuous in the extreme to dismiss such a proposal as an irrelevant distraction which can be dealt with after independence, because after independence it’ll be far too late. The last possible practical opportunity to prevent the Holocaust was in 1933, not 1945. The abolition of material, empirical scientific reality would define an independent Scotland forever. We cannot let that happen.
Wings Over Scotland is and always has been in essence a fact-checking service. It has no place in a country where there are no facts, and we will fight that nightmare vision of a future Scotland until our last breath.
The rapist’s charter that is this appalling, dreadful legislation, conceived and drafted by – at the most charitable interpretation – criminally reckless morons, will open the door to consequences even worse, and this site will oppose it with all our strength no matter how many Twitter accounts are closed down.
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OTHER RESOURCES
Claire Graham (intersex voice silenced by Twitter)
Miranda Yardley (dissenting transwoman silenced by Twitter)
Meghan Murphy (Canadian feminist silenced by Twitter, also here)
4th Wave Now (US parents group silenced by Twitter)
