RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2024/04/11/queen-of-the-gender-crits/

EXCERPT

Indeed identity politics has become as central to the SNP’s creed, if not more so, than taking Scotland out of the UK. In a reversal of Whisky Galore-type stereotypes, in fact, the Scots have now taken on the role of witch-finders, sniffing out heretical thoughts under the cover of a supposedly liberal ideology. A vast amount of parliamentary time has been wasted on bad and unnecessary legislation advocated by trans activists, including a bill to remove all safeguards from the process that allows people to change their legal gender. The UK government salvaged the day by blocking the reckless Gender Recognition Reform Act last year, but the SNP had another trick up its sleeve.

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into effect on April 1—April Fools’ day, as critics were quick to point out. It’s been on the statute books since 2021, but implementation was delayed because no one could say with any certainty what it actually criminalised.

Officially described as an act “to make provision about the aggravation of offences by prejudice; to make provision about an offence of racially aggravated harassment; to make provision about offences relating to stirring up hatred against a group of persons” and various other “connected purposes,” the law extends existing protections against racial hatred to cover age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics. Women are not explicitly protected. And so the female half of the population will have to wait for a separate piece of legislation that addresses misogyny at an unspecified time in the future.

At a moment when trans activists physically disrupt feminist events, and scour social media for posts they can present as transphobic, the scope for trivial and malicious complaints is endless. Opponents of the legislation warned that the Act would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech, not least because a new offence of “stirring up hatred” has no clear definition, yet attracts a sentence of up to seven years in prison. The Act has been denounced as a “clype’s charter” (clype being a Scots word meaning a sneak); and that is exactly what it has proved to be, prompting around 8,000 complaints to the police in the first week following the Act’s implementation. 

A new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ has no clear definition, yet attracts a sentence of up to seven years in prison.

In a development that surprised no one, the Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf, who steered the bill through Parliament when he was Justice Secretary, has been accused of watering down protections for “gender-critical” women (which is to say, those who believe in a biologically-based definition of womanhood) to avoid upsetting trans activists. Susan Smith, director of the feminist organisation For Women Scotland, claimed on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that Yousaf and his fellow SNP politicians broke a promise that she and a colleague would be involved in drawing up training materials because he thought “it would upset the trans lobby if those examples were given in the guidance to the police.” And, as everyone predicted, one of the first targets when the legislation came into operation was another English novelist who has made Scotland her home.

J.K. Rowling has lived in Edinburgh since 1993, before she published her first Harry Potter novel. Her increasingly stellar fame was initially seen as an ornament to the city and she became one of Scotland’s foremost philanthropists, setting up a charity in 2006 that supports children in orphanages in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. More recently, after Edinburgh’s rape crisis centre appointed a trans-identified male as its CEO, Rowling set up and funded Beira’s Place, a women-only service for victims of sexual violence. In any sane world, such generous acts would have won plaudits from government ministers. Not in Scotland, however, where the SNP is convinced that even the mildest resistance to the intemperate demands of gender warriors is tantamount to heresy.