Mick Hartley

Joan Smith at UnHerd on the SNP 24 gender nonsense (yesterday):

What’s really pernicious about this exercise, aside from being a waste of time and money, is the way it seeks to co-opt those of us who don’t buy into identity theory. We’re “agender”, according to the Scottish government, which means “a person who does not identify as having a gender”. A normal human being, in other words.

Not sure about that. As I understand it those of us who don't believe in gender theory are just dismissed as boring old "cisgender", bovinely content to amble through life with the sex/gender with which we were "assigned" at birth. "Agender" then means a kind of extreme non-binary rejection of any sex/gender distinction at all – a Nietzchean Beyond Man and Woman, perhaps. But I could be wrong. This is all arcane cult-speak after all. 

Scotland was one of the cradles of the Enlightenment, but it turned out that a couple of centuries of rationality was no defence against a belief system which is akin to magic. Suddenly, a handful of Scottish politicians affect to believe that sex isn’t fixed, that men can magically become women, and anyone who protests is smeared as Right-wing or “transphobic”.

A group of people insistent on defining themselves in any way they choose has thus denied that courtesy to everyone else. It’s clear that the terror of being called a bigot has affected politicians throughout the UK, and the impact is evident in the absurd documents just published by the Scottish government’s chief statistician.

When will someone call a halt to all this? We’ve witnessed far too much bowing and scraping to what is in effect a reality-denying cult. There are only two sexes, and collecting information about “gender” is nothing more than an exercise in appeasing narcissists.