Oor Nicola Sturgeon thread.

[git-intae-thum]

Deeply suspicious of anyone who expresses a very strong opinion either way in the whole GRA debate tbh.

Weird how Scotland seems to be suddenly at the front of this wave.

Without a doubt this is a manufactured argument designed to split the independence community.

Manufactured by and kept going by whom we should be asking?

 

[Boo Khaki]

12 minutes ago, git-intae-thum said:

Deeply suspicious of anyone who expresses a very strong opinion either way in the whole GRA debate tbh.

Weird how Scotland seems to be suddenly at the front of this wave.

Without a doubt this is a manufactured argument designed to split the independence community.

Manufactured by and kept going by whom we should be asking?

 

I doubt that very much tbh, mainly because the arguments that we're seeing in Scotland are the exact same arguments that every other country that is either going through, or has gone through similar GRA reform, is having, and as far as I'm aware, the vast majority of them are already independent nations.

I was studying this thanks to a Canadian college back in 2013-14. The arguments there were no different to those we're having now. The problem in Scotland is more that this has been allowed to fester for too long. As others have pointed out, had the SNP simply pushed through the reforms, the majority of those making claims about 'penis owners in dresses' would simply have shut up and got on with their lives by now. Grudgingly perhaps, but I believe that the people who have been listening to the GC arguments but remain undecided would never have given much thought to the entire issue. The problem is, the delays, and the Westminster government's pandering to bigots and small 'c' conservatives, has emboldened the GC lot, which, in turn, has entrenched the TRA side, so now we have a much noisier and more polarised debate that is gradually seeping into the minds of demographics that it would never have bothered with before.

Personally I'm in favour of GRA reform, but I'm not totally dismissive of all of the GC arguments. For the most part I think the claims about risk to women are largely unfounded, but there's definitely a shitstorm coming down the line about transwomen in women's sport, to give one example,  if we're determined to just push ahead with everything on the basis that 'transwomen are women' in every context, no exceptions. There's bampottery on both sides. Hysteria, bigotry, and fearmongering in some quarters, but also a degree of hyper-wokeness, bandwaggoning, and reality-denial in others. It is not a simple and clear-cut issue that has one easy solution. To pretend otherwise is just storing up problems for later. 

[git-intae-thum]

3 minutes ago, Boo Khaki said:

I doubt that very much tbh, mainly because the arguments that we're seeing in Scotland are the exact same arguments that every other country that is either going through, or has gone through similar GRA reform, is having, and as far as I'm aware, the vast majority of them are already independent nations.

I was studying this thanks to a Canadian college back in 2013-14. The arguments there were no different to those we're having now. The problem in Scotland is more that this has been allowed to fester for too long. As others have pointed out, had the SNP simply pushed through the reforms, the majority of those making claims about 'penis owners in dresses' would simply have shut up and got on with their lives by now. Grudgingly perhaps, but I believe that the people who have been listening to the GC arguments but remain undecided would never have given much thought to the entire issue. The problem is, the delays, and the Westminster government's pandering to bigots and small 'c' conservatives, has emboldened the GC lot, which, in turn, has entrenched the TRA side, so now we have a much noisier and more polarised debate that is gradually seeping into the minds of demographics that it would never have bothered with before.

Personally I'm in favour of GRA reform, but I'm not totally dismissive of all of the GC arguments. For the most part I think the claims about risk to women are largely unfounded, but there's definitely a shitstorm coming down the line about transwomen in women's sport, to give one example,  if we're determined to just push ahead with everything on the basis that 'transwomen are women' in every context, no exceptions. There's bampottery on both sides. Hysteria, bigotry, and fearmongering in some quarters, but also a degree of hyper-wokeness, bandwaggoning, and reality-denial in others. It is not a simple and clear-cut issue that has one easy solution. To pretend otherwise is just storing up problems for later. 

I agree with you that it is a very complex issue with viable arguments across the board.

However...it is also an issue that directly effects a only miniscule amount of our populace. 

It is an issue that outside certain political circles no one in Scotland really gives a shite about!!!!

It is an argument however that is threatening to deeply divide the leadership of our independence movement at precisely the time when independence is starting to appear eminently achievable. 

It is manufactured.

As I said. I am deeply suspicious of anyone who expresses strong views either way on this subject. 

[Boo Khaki]

It's not 'manufactured'. It's been ongoing since before the 2014 Independence referendum, it's just grown arms and legs since, to the point that it's now a political hot-potato because nobody bothered to deal with it when it was just a 'fringe lunatics only' issue.

And yes, it has been hijacked to hell and bandwagoned by people it never originally concerned. To begin with, it was mainly concerned with people with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, or those with intersex conditions, but now it's caused a schism in LGBTQ+ because nobody can agree with anyone else, and people are falling out with other people that they see as fundamentally harmful to their own agenda, when the only reason they were ever pitched in together to begin with was for ease of advocacy for collective issues. There's a ton of resentment towards what some people believe are simply transvestites jumping on the 'transgender' bandwagon, and the whole thing has become an exercise in finger-pointing, muck spreading, and slander between one already marginalised group or groups to the next. 

I don't think it's all that difficult to understand why people do have strong feelings about it, and not just in terms of taking a view or position as an unconnected bystander. I agree totally with the prevailing mindset that seems to be 'live and let live', but I can understand why, for example, certain groups insisting that lesbians who don't feel sexually attracted to transwomen are bigots, gets lesbians' backs up. So there you have one scenario where you'd think that one marginalised group would have a degree of empathy for another, but put it under the increasingly strained and fractured "LGBTQ+" umbrella, and you have marginalised groups suddenly standing arm in arm with other groups who have long been ideological poles apart, but rejecting utterly any comradeship with one of the other "LGBTQ+" lot. The entire thing has, as already mentioned, become a cesspit, and it's only getting more and more heated, hence the strength of feeling.

Edited December 2, 2020 by Boo Khaki

[Detournement]

The issue with GRA is that it demands that people recognise something which is contestable.

I support religious civil rights without believing in any God and the vast majority of religious people support the rights of other faiths to freely practice their religion. The Trans issue differs because there is no spectrum of difference allowed. It's either accept Gender Theory or be branded a bigot which is always going to cause problems. 

[NotThePars]

Laughing at this being an intelligence op designed to stall independence because if that was the case then the SNP have made the dumbest possible decision and Cherry is the Union’s biggest asset. Deciding to believe that.

[Academically Deficient]

10 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Who do we reckon are MI5 assets in the SNP? You'd have to put Andrew Wilson on that list.

 I'd be amazed if there were none. Guess it depends on whether they want to steer a movement in their direction or discredit it completely.

Referring to our previous discussion on G.K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday", I've sometimes wondered at what point in the future people will learn that the IRA Army Council was fully staffed with British security assets? 

I should get out more.

[Detournement]

37 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Who do we reckon are MI5 assets in the SNP? You'd have to put Andrew Wilson on that list.

Stewart McDonald and Alan Smyth are the bookies favourites.

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

45 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Who do we reckon are MI5 assets in the SNP? You'd have to put Andrew Wilson on that list.

I think you vastly over estimate the reach of mi5 and their resource levels. 

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

13 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

I'm not saying these folk are undercover agents, just that they'll have been identified as likely to be helpful in certain circumstances. Like David Leask and Oliver Kamm and the other Integrity Initiative folk, they're not paid up spies they're just used to keep an agenda trundling along roughly the right lines.

Aye no i get that, but if you consider the resources it takes to run a chis id be absolutely gobsmacked if the conspiracy theorists were anywhere near correct. 
Dare say they may be able to lean on a few of them with leverage etc but dont see there being any mad double agent stuff going on. The security services have their hands full with the CT stuff at the moment. Definitely do think it was a consideration in the 70’s/80’s though. 

[Detournement]

10 minutes ago, Inanimate Carbon Rod said:

Aye no i get that, but if you consider the resources it takes to run a chis id be absolutely gobsmacked if the conspiracy theorists were anywhere near correct. 
Dare say they may be able to lean on a few of them with leverage etc but dont see there being any mad double agent stuff going on. The security services have their hands full with the CT stuff at the moment. Definitely do think it was a consideration in the 70’s/80’s though. 

Have you not heard of the Spy Cops scandal?

The police have got to time to wine, dine, pump and impregnate female animal rights activists but they are uninterested in the UK losing a large part of it's territory......

[GordonS]

8 hours ago, ArabianKnight said:

Could someone give me a run down of why Cherry is such a demonised character? 

I tend to avoid the culture wars shite cause its a completely toxic argument mainly held on the cesspool of twitter. 

This may be a little bit of confirmation bias/limited sample size but the two trans lassys I know (who both don't even refer to themselves as "trans" cause they are post op) think a lot of the "woke brigade/young SNP" team are just social media justice warriors out for a whinge and a hill to die on as said above. 

 

To give you one example, Cherry boasted about donating to a group called We Are Fair Cop. This is a transphobic hate group that doxxes children and pushes thoroughly transphobic views online. I would compare them to someone like the EDL.

Folk are making the mistake of thinking this is about the Gender Reform Act. It isn't, that's just part of the battlefield. Folk like Cherry and McAlpine aren't just opposed to the GRA, they're opposed to transgender people. They don't believe transgender is real and they regard trans women as potentially dangerous perverts. It's all very similar to how homosexuality was views in the 1980s, when it seemed to increase in prominence but before there was widespread acceptance. I remember folk saying gay people shouldn't be allowed in changing rooms and toilets, or in prisons with people of the same sex. There were a lot of people who thought gay men shouldn't be allowed to work with children. It was all done under the guise of protecting people, same as the transphobes say they're trying to protect women.

Imagine what we'd think now of a party that put homophobes on its ruling council. In the 80s the Tories did some heinous shit like Section 28. Folk like Cherry don't just oppose the GRA, they stir up hatred against trans people and I'm sure they would go much further if they could and remove rights that already exist, like treatment on the NHS.

[Detournement]

On the issue of why Gender is such a divisise political issue here it's pretty simple. The SNP have the power to make it a hate crime to say transwoman/transwoman doesn't equate to woman/man. 

That isn't possible in the USA due to the constitution and be a live issue in England until there is a Labour government. 

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

7 minutes ago, Detournement said:

Have you not heard of the Spy Cops scandal?

The police have got to time to wine, dine, pump and impregnate female animal rights activists but they are uninterested in the UK losing a large part of it's territory......

I clicked the ‘view post’ button out of interest. Quite staggering that you don’t seem to understand the difference between Police and Security services and CHIS and Undercover deployments. I get that you are fantastically anti-policing and hostile but you could at least try and learn a wee bit about what you hate. Not that I was discussing undercover policing. 
 

Anyway, if you consider that for undercover deployments in Scotland then the highest authority is ‘Scottish Ministers’ then that means the SNP ministers would have to authorise said deployment within Scotland. In the HMICS thematic review of undercover policing it revealed that there had been 11 deployments in Scotland of ‘spy cops’ and whilst I agree that what happened in the spy cops scandal was disgraceful, its clear that these were deployed for 28 days in total for anti-terror operations and anarchist groups etc. The review is public and i’d recommend you have a read. 

Anyway, yes, the UK government will no doubt have an interest, but my point overall is that I dont believe it will be covered by the significant resource intensive madness that the tin foil hat brigade suggest exists. Do I believe that the tories etc have an interest and probably run their own wee campaigns, yes, do I think there is some overarching campaign led by the great and good in terms of undercover agents and double agents etc, no. 

[NotThePars]

I think people love to claim that personalities like Paul Mason are security service ops but I just like to believe that they’re dumb as f**k

[welshbairn]

2 hours ago, NotThePars said:

Laughing at this being an intelligence op designed to stall independence because if that was the case then the SNP have made the dumbest possible decision and Cherry is the Union’s biggest asset. Deciding to believe that.

Codename Beardilocks, licence to misgender..

[Gordon EF]

1 hour ago, GordonS said:

Folk are making the mistake of thinking this is about the Gender Reform Act. It isn't, that's just part of the battlefield. Folk like Cherry and McAlpine aren't just opposed to the GRA, they're opposed to transgender people. They don't believe transgender is real and they regard trans women as potentially dangerous perverts.

I'm not on Cherry's side of this but is this really true? Has she actually come out and said these things or is this just bit of an extrapolation from 'against GRA therefore must be transphobic'?

Isn't the "pervert argument" more that cis-gendered men would use something like GRA as a cover for committing crimes? Not that I think that's a valid argument but that seems to be the once being used to me. 

[GordonS]

10 minutes ago, Gordon EF said:

I'm not on Cherry's side of this but is this really true? Has she actually come out and said these things or is this just bit of an extrapolation from 'against GRA therefore must be transphobic'?

Isn't the "pervert argument" more that cis-gendered men would use something like GRA as a cover for committing crimes? Not that I think that's a valid argument but that seems to be the once being used to me. 

She tweeted about donating money to We Are Fair Cop, who are frankly a shower of terrible transphobic b*****ds.

She criticised Forth Valley Rape Crisis Centre for providing support to trans women who had been raped. This was their response: Standing up for rape crisis services | Blog | Rape Crisis Scotland 

When someone called Lily Madigan, a trans woman who is a Labour official "a bloke", she replied "Spot on". 

There was an article in the Edinburgh Evening News on Monday about a 16 year old trans kid who had been trolled online. Someone replied on Twitter that they were sceptical whether it had happened and she liked that tweet. She's blocked that kid on Twitter.

She refuses to use requested pronouns, which is just fucking ignorant, really. 

On top of that, she's generally an omniarsehole. She praised Neal Hanvey while he was under suspension, saying he had only been "suspected" of anti-semitism. She's been accused by her staff of bullying. And there's no doubt she's been working to undermine Nicola Sturgeon behind the scenes.

As for the GRA, the problem isn't her opposing it. The problem is why. If she had concerns about prisons and sport they could be dealt with in amendments. But she's not interested in that because she's not trying to protect cis women, she's trying to demonise transgender people. 

[GordonS]

39 minutes ago, Gordon EF said:

Isn't the "pervert argument" more that cis-gendered men would use something like GRA as a cover for committing crimes? Not that I think that's a valid argument but that seems to be the once being used to me. 

Oh yeah, and on this. They don't want to allow trans women to use women's toilets in case men pretend to be women to get into a women's toilet and attack them. Well, it's not like men have to go to such lengths to attack women at the moment, is it. It's as stupid as the argument against burkas that there could be a man under there.

But more importantly, what they're really saying here is that someone who looks like a woman, sounds like a woman, dresses like a women and has lived as a woman all their adult life should be forced to use men's toilets. Not only is that completely degrading, it's obviously a massively higher risk to them than allowing trans women to use women's toilets is to cis women.

In any case, when that argument is made the mask very, very often slips and you soon get to "people born with penises shouldn't be allowed in women's toilets."

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

12 minutes ago, GordonS said:

Oh yeah, and on this. They don't want to allow trans women to use women's toilets in case men pretend to be women to get into a women's toilet and attack them. Well, it's not like men have to go to such lengths to attack women at the moment, is it. It's as stupid as the argument against burkas that there could be a man under there.

But more importantly, what they're really saying here is that someone who looks like a woman, sounds like a woman, dresses like a women and has lived as a woman all their adult life should be forced to use men's toilets. Not only is that completely degrading, it's obviously a massively higher risk to them than allowing trans women to use women's toilets is to cis women.

In any case, when that argument is made the mask very, very often slips and you soon get to "people born with penises shouldn't be allowed in women's toilets."

Can I just say, as someone who has dealt with sexual assaults of all types and levels for over a decade that I can genuinely recall one transsexual person being done for a sexual crime which didnt occur anywhere near a female toilet or changing room (think they threw a condom at someone outside). 
if a sex offender of any gender wants to sneak into a toilet and abuse someone they will regardless of the legislation in place to recognise determination. The chances of this happening are the the same as if the legislation wasnt passed.