Scotland's War on Women

A New Law Makes It a Crime to Accurately Describe Biological Sex

Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which went into effect today, criminalizes “stirring up hatred" on the basis of disability, age, religion, race, sexual orientation, and transgender identity.

What is missing from the protected classes?

Women.

The Scottish Parliament had earlier voted down an amendment to add sex to the protected groups.

That means the law, which was the brainchild in 2021 of Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s First Minister, protects men who claim they identify as women. Someone who calls one of those self-identifying trans men by the pronouns he or him, could face prosecution leading to a hefty fine and a prison term of up to seven years. Or at least that appears to be what the law provides. Even some of its supporters admitted its language was ambiguous and that it threatened to encourage a tsunami of complaints to the police as well as having a chilling effect on free speech. Yousaf tried downplaying concerns about the law, claiming that, “Unless your behavior is threatening or abusive and intends to stir up hatred, then you have nothing to worry about in terms of the new offense that has been created.”

J.K. Rowling wasted no time in calling out on Twitter, where she has 14 million followers, the ludicrousness of the law. She first put up ten tweets featuring well-known and sometimes notorious trans men, including Isla Bryson, a convicted rapist initially sent to a women’s prison; Amy George, who dressed as a woman to kidnap and sexually assault a young girl; and Katie Dolatowski, a trans pedophile who assaulted a ten-year-old girl.

Rowling emphasized that the people she listed “aren't women at all, but men, every last one of them.”

She then laid out the why the law was an outrage.

In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women's and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.

For several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by their government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable. The re-definition of 'woman' to include every man who declares himself one has already had serious consequences for women's and girls’ rights and safety in Scotland, with the strongest impact felt, as ever, by the most vulnerable, including female prisoners and rape survivors.

It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls, or address the current assault on women’s and girls’ rights, unless we are allowed to call a man a man. Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.

Then Rowling thew down a challenge to the Scottish authorities.

“I'm currently out of the country, but if what I've written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”

She invited others to share her tweet and add the hashtag #arrestme

Rowling’s activism matters because Edinburgh is her home. She is subject to Scottish laws.

Bedlam broke out on social media and in the UK press. Hundreds of protestors to the law marched spontaneously in front of the Scottish Parliament. By late afternoon, even the U.K. Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, had weighed in. He came to Rowling’s defense: “People should not be criminalized for stating simple facts on biology. We believe in free speech in this country, and Conservatives will always protect it.”

Siohbian Brown, the Community Safety Minister for the ruling Scottish National Party, seemingly brushed off the law’s omission of women by admitting that “more work needs to be done” and maybe a “misogyny bill” would be introduced at a later date. As for Rowling, Brown initially said that misgendering would not fall under the law. However, as trans activists weighed in on Twitter, attacking Rowling as “pathetic” and “completely deranged,” Brown changed her tune late Monday and said it would be “an operation decision” by Scottish police to decide if what Rowling said was criminal.

How will the Scottish police determine whether some language or conduct constitutes malice or ill-will that reaches the statutory definition of hate speech toward one of the protected groups? The police had to take a two-hour online course last year to provide “them the criteria on which to base their decision.” Senior officers in the police are privately worried that they will become unwanted referees in social media wars and the law will “damage public trust” in the police. The Scottish Police Federation warned the law was a “recipe for disaster”.

A former deputy leader of the Scottish National Party, Jim Sillars, has started a campaign to resist the law and work for its repeal. “Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act,” said Sellars, “inflicts a deep wound on the face of Scottish society.”

When reporters asked Humza about Rowling, he said the police would investigate if a crime had been committed and the Crown Office would decide “if there is a sufficiency of evidence to charge.”

In his seminal book, 1984, George Orwell listed doublethink slogans from his dystopian world: War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength; 2+2=5. Now Scotland would have everyone believe that when a man says he is a woman, he is a woman. If you disagree and have the boldness of J.K. Rowling to call out the lie, then the government will force you under threat of criminal penalty to change your mind. Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act is a not very subtle form of big brother censorship, a tremendous diminution of free speech and a century of protections built for women.

Today, in our own small, personal protest of the law, we cancelled a long-planned summer holiday in Scotland. We work too hard to spend our money in a country that seems intent on mimicking Orwell’s Oceania.

#Arrestme #Arrestus #HateCrimeActScotland