Mick Hartley

Iain Macwhirter in the Times, in praise of For Women Scotland:

With a little help from a certain well-known Edinburgh author, these “ordinary Scottish mums”, as they were rather patronisingly described — Marion Calder, Trina Budge and Susan Smith — took on the media, the medical profession, and the political establishment and helped to spark a debate about women’s sex-based rights that has gone global. They killed the bill, but that was only the start.

As of this month, the gender reform bill is history, the Tavistock clinic has closed, and puberty blockers have been banned by a Labour minister. Rapists are no longer placed in women’s prisons. Indeed, it is arguable that, had the Democrats listened to the Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, Kamala Harris might have been heading to the White House right now instead of Donald Trump. Many pollsters agree that the Republican Party’s most effective campaign advert in the final stages of the presidential campaign was directed against Harris’s support for transgender transition (self-ID) for prison inmates.

It was, perhaps, not so much that the women in Scotland were particularly courageous and outspoken – though they were – more that the SNP under Nicola Sturgeon led the way in promoting the idiocies of gender ideology and self-ID, with double rapist "Isla Bryson" in the women's prison as the shining blonde-wigged evidence of the lunacy.

It may not have been a “woke mind virus,” but it was certainly pathological. A kind of Maoist cultural revolution — without Mao — had seized the commanding heights of academia, the civil service and even women’s organisations. Edinburgh Women’s Aid refuge was led by a natal male. The government was handing public money to groups like LGBT Youth Scotland to promote transgender ideology in schools. It still is.

Yet all it took was a handful of women equipped with robust common sense to expose this elite capture of our civic space. When the Scottish government decided to count trans women as women when assessing gender balance on public boards, FWS took them to court under the Equality Act. That led, ultimately, to the biggest farce of the panto season, when the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom met last month to define what a woman is. The supreme idiocy of this hearing, even more than the gender recognition bill or the Isla Bryson case, has mobilised women across the planet in defence of sex-based rights. The idea that the opinion of judges, not human biology, should define what a woman is, is so outrageous that even the LGBT campaign Stonewall has been largely silent on the case.

At the close of this year, I think we can safely say there has been a “vibe shift”, as they say in America, over gender ideology. No one wants to demean or discriminate against trans people. As For Women Scotland would say: live how you want, love whom you wish, but don’t tell women what a woman is. They were born that way.