Mick Hartley

Moe on the NHS Fife tribunal, this time from Alex Massie in the Times:

Dr Kate Searle, a consultant within the A&E department at the Royal Victoria hospital, assumes she must be a woman because that is what it says on her birth certificate. Sex, you see, is assigned at birth rather in the manner in which a roulette ball is assigned red or black. Don’t press Searle for details, however, for she’s “not an expert” on any of this.

Is this idiocy genuine or merely performative? Neither possibility seems reassuring and one wonders if Dr Searle and those medical professionals who think like her are quite so cavalier when it comes to their own work. For even in Fife we must presume physicians remain capable of distinguishing between male and female patients.

Throughout this saga one person’s wishes have been indulged at the expense of everyone else’s needs. What Upton wanted, Upton must have regardless of its impact on anyone else. He wanted to use facilities previously reserved for women and who, really, were these women to object to that? They were only little people, of no great consequence. Nurse Peggie’s objections to a man’s presence in her changing room were axiomatically proof she was a dreadful bigot. Being kind to Upton meant being unkind to Peggie but so what? She should suck it up and know her place.

There are other victims too and some of these receive less sympathy than they merit. Like Dr Hilary Cass, I believe gender dysphoria is a real though very rare condition. Real trans people — a term I am very comfortable using — have seen their condition hijacked by frauds insisting that men with fetishes are indistinguishable from people with a genuine medical need. The ever-broader definition of “trans” cheapens the reality of the lives led by people possessing a Gender Recognition Certificate. That is no more in their interests than it is in anyone else’s.

Some of Sturgeon’s allies once acknowledged this distinction without, quite typically, even realising it. Shona Robison, while serving as cabinet secretary for social justice, once talked about “genuine” trans people, thereby conceding the possibility of fake ones. How one might be distinguished from the other was, alas, a question too difficult to even allow, let alone answer.

Thus we reach a situation in which people incapable of determining their own sex are nevertheless also sure that a person such as Upton is indubitably a woman because, well, because he says he is and so that must be true. This contradiction cannot be acknowledged since doing so is the precursor to admitting it cannot be resolved.

Above all, however, remember that this Scotland of magical thinking is the Scotland a majority of our MSPs wanted. Some things really are binary. You are Team Peggie or Team Upton and most of our political representatives chose to be the latter.