Yesterday we posted an article noting that hardline trans-rights extremists, among whose number we must regretfully count the Scottish Government, were engaged in a determined and alarmingly successful attempt to abolish the scientific basis for reality.
We did not expect such a striking illustration of that assertion to arrive this soon.
Last year, author and tax expert Maya Forstater was sacked from her job at a charity thinktank over this tweet:
It had attracted the ire of a spectacularly unpleasant individual by the name of Gregor Murray, a man – visibly, obviously so – who was then an SNP councillor in Dundee but was later suspended for issuing a stream of misogynist abuse to a number of women.
Ironically, Murray then quit the SNP in a tantrum, accusing the party of “institutionalised transphobia” because it wouldn’t let him describe women as “hateful, vile scum” freely.
Murray was previously the convener of the “Out For Indy” LGBT pressure group which is behind attempts to oust gender-critical women from the SNP. He continues to draw a wage as an extremely male independent councillor, and to regularly abuse women and “transphobes” on Twitter from behind the safety of a locked account, when he’s not busy leading a local Scouts troop.
(He seems particularly keen to be involved with children.)
Despite the fact that Murray, who has undergone no form of “transition” and remains a man by every accepted definition of that word, the judge in Maya Forstater’s unfair-dismissal tribunal ruled that it was not acceptable for her (“the Claimant”) to regard him as such, making a series of extraordinary and deeply disturbing findings.
The use of “is said to be” there is quite something. But the judge’s ignorance of what intersex conditions are is if anything more unsettling. Intersex people are men and women with disorders of sexual development, but they’re still men and women, just as a person doesn’t cease to be human if they’re born without legs.
Paragraph 84, however, is where the judge rules on the abolition of sanity. He finds that it is an infringement of human rights not to recognise and affirm the plainly false claims made by someone with a mental disorder.
(Gregor Murray does NOT possess a Gender Recognition Certificate, but this did not prevent the judge from describing his demand not to be called a man as “legitimate”. The basis of this supposed legitimacy in the absence of a GRC was not explained.)
In other words, if Maya Forstater had encountered a person claiming to be Napoleon Bonaparte, then in the opinion of Mr Justice Tayler the law would have compelled her to acknowledge and identify that person as the deceased Emperor Of France.
A legal precedent for this exists in the case of Maria Maclachlan, a feminist who in 2018 was forced by a judge to refer to her male attacker as “she” in court.
(Her attacker, the male Tara Wolf, was found guilty and fined £150.)
Presumably the same doctrine would also have to be applied in a rape case and the victim be compelled, on pain of a contempt-of-court charge, to refer to her rapist as “she”, particularly given that the Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate has this month declared rape to be a “gender-neutral” crime.
(Even though by law in both Scotland and the rest of the UK the offence explicitly requires the perpetrator to have penetrated the victim with “his penis”, our emphasis.)
Judge Tayler found, terrifyingly, that anyone who might object to such a sequence of events held views “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.
No doubt there are some readers of this site who even now will persist in saying “shut up about this niche stuff, the SNP are the only route to independence!”
But securing an independent Scotland founded on such a basis would be to win only a pile of worthless ashes. If sane people don’t take a stand at this point, we will all be fighting for a country in which men can freely invade women’s spaces, rape them, force them to refer to their rapists as women in court, and then be sent to a women’s prison and be locked up with other women and rape them too.
This site wants no part of that Scotland. The abolition of sanity is absolutely not a price worth paying for independence, and the 2.7 million women in Scotland deserve better than to be thrown under a bus in pursuit of it.
But even then, it wouldn’t just be them. If statement of scientific fact is to be made a hate crime then nobody is safe.
“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak out for me.”
(Coming soon, by way of example: going to jail if you call someone a “nerd” or a “geek”.)
You can stand aside in silence while thousands of years of human civilisation, science, language and freedom are dismantled in front of your eyes, readers. That’s your own choice to make. But we will not. If you don’t want to hear about it, this is no longer the site for you.
