Fresh horrors for Scotland

I'm assuming this is how that teacher with the gigantic comedy breasts managed to keep teaching in Canada.

Surely, people will be capitalising on these rules in order to protest?

I honestly can't get over this nonsense. It's truly insane. With a hugely sinister motivator.

Thank you. Lots of reading material there.

This is such a dark, depressing state to be in. People in this country are going hungry, dealing with unsuitable housing and homelessness, NHS is falling apart, teachers striking. What warped priorities these people have.

Affirmation only at any cost? Absolutely chilling. We heard from the whistleblowers at the Tavistock at the level of homophobia within families presenting there. Kids in Scotland deserve better than this.

And next on the list they ‘have accepted the majority of the Working Group on Non-Binary Equality’. Of course. The SNP, the Greens and the Lib Dems continuing their anti-reality crusade with not a care about the harm this causes to women and children.

This issue has been raised for many years, both by non-binary young people themselves, and by schools and local authorities across Scotland.

Really? Non-binary was a term entirely restricted to maths and science until very, very recently, surely? Perhaps the word 'many' is now transquantity.

@Minusthree I'm at the point where I'd be scared to contact my MSP and express my views given the direction of travel. And there's no way I'd want a Green MSP to even know of my existence, given their links to TRA extremists.
Surely it's not right to feel like this in a democracy?

The recommendations wrt Education are on this page, Artfully:

'These recommendations were shaped by a paper submitted to the subgroup by LGBT Youth Scotland.'

www.gov.scot/publications/non-binary-working-group-report-recommendations-march-2022/pages/8/

Excerpt from section on SEEMiS:

'Work with the developers of SEEMiS to (a) ensure that there are options other than male or female for recording pupils, alongside a field for recording pronouns; (b) review automatic linking from SEEMiS; and (c) produce updated guidance for schools to reflect these changes

Non-binary young people frequently point out that the requirement to be recorded as male or female on SEEMiS is a considerable barrier to them participating equally at school. This issue has been raised for many years, both by non-binary young people themselves, and by schools and local authorities across Scotland.

This issue means that teachers and staff can be unaware of a pupil's gender identity, and so the pupil may be required to come out repeatedly, and to many members of staff, in order to have their identity recognised and respected. Being recorded as either male or female means that pupils are much more likely to experience misunderstanding or misgendering from teachers and staff, who are interacting with them on the basis of accessing incorrect information about them on SEEMiS.

An update to SEEMiS should also include a new optional field in which pupils may have their pronouns recorded. This would give pupils who want teachers to be aware of their pronouns the ability to do so more easily, and it would give teachers the confidence that they are addressing pupils in a respectful way. Pupils should be able to have the details recorded in this field updated on request'

Sadly I am not surprised. I said on here before about a broadsheet article I read written by a woman which minimalized violence against women and basically argued women had it too good with all their rescues and focus compared to men. I was reading in horror thinking is this modern woman and then the author revealed they were a transwoman. My immediate reaction was that explains it because you grew up male bodied and I grew up female bodied.

Now I have seen those same arguments being used by men on social media - friends of my friends - arguing more men are harmed by men than women therefore why do women need special protection and provision .

Ironically when I have written to my Scottish MP and MSP they completely ignore me and I feel I have no voice - the same men who tell me we need Independence because we do not have a voice in Westminster. I don't have a voice in Scotland - the First Minister herself has dismissed any concerns out of hand.
Scotland is becoming a very depressing place to live

Same page:

'Organisations such as the World Health organisation and the Royal Statistical Society[4] define gender as:

a social construction relating to behaviours and attributes based on labels of masculinity and femininity;

gender identity as:

a personal, internal perception of oneself and so the gender category someone identifies with may not match their sex at birth;

what an individual experiences as their innate sense of themselves as a man, a woman, as having no gender, or as having a non-binary gender –

where people identify as somewhere on a spectrum between man and woman'

Oh my god @arabella. Teachers expected to update SEEMiS to inform the state about our children's sexual orientation? Who owns this data? How are they going to store this data? Who gets to see it? How do we know it's secure? Because it will be cheap software and systems admin will be paid a pittance.

'The Scottish Government does not have an official definition of gender.'

www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202000116319/

It's going to make rules about school uniform unworkable. Or works dress codes, actually clothes might become optional. I could see a hairdresser being arrested for cutting someone's hair too short, even if the customer was happy with the cut. Unless someone's come up with the definitions of 'gender expression', etc. this is going to have all sorts of unintended (?) consequences.

'Structural organisation of some faiths is not centrally regulated –
mosques, Hindu temples and Sikh Gurdwaras are guided by individuals
as their own entities. This means that diverse schools of thought can
exist, and that some are set up with ideologies analogous with
conversion practices. This affects the ways in which conversion
practices occur – conversion practices can happen in an unorganised
and more hidden setting, for example in a small temple or in a home
setting.' p 40

Keep an eye on those diverse schools of thought in the home.

Just to save me some time to those who've read it, is it likely to affect trans widows as well as parents?

@ArabellaScott I agree it's created opportunity for a malicious agenda.

Governance and participation in scotGov and NHS Scotland and other organisations have created are the conditions that enable harm.

People generally can't be arsed volunteering for organisations as a "person with lived experience". Unless you have an agenda.

I feel the same way. Though I'm Irish and home is equally captured.

*The CHI number system should be reviewed, and sex should no longer be hard-coded within patient numbers.'

'Reintroduce a non-binary response option in Scottish Government core surveys, and introduce a non-binary response option in the next Scottish Census'*

This is useful if writing to your MP about S35 and pointing out the subsection on conflict with our international obligations.

How could purposely not using and collecting data on sex - and designing it out - undermine our obligations as part of CEDAW?

Children's Rights Bill is also pertinent - accusations from both sides that this is being used as a political football:

'The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill was passed in 2021, with a view to enshrining the agreement in Scots law.

But the UK Government stepped in, with Scottish Secretary Alister Jack referring the legislation to the UK Supreme Court, which ruled it affected powers reserved to Westminster.

The Scottish Government stressed its desire to bring the Bill back to Holyrood, but that is yet to happen'

www.heraldscotland.com/politics/23216885.snp-accused-delay-childrens-rights-bill/

There has to be some kind of rationale to why someone would bring in these policies, repeatedly, at some point? It can't surely be sheer accident?

I agree it’s not sheer accident. There are powerful interests able to manipulate this for various ends.

But it’s not coordinated strategy by a single dictator. There’s a confluence of several problematic agendas here.

And some wonderfully convenient incompetence. The SQA/CFE debacle is particularly convenient. And, like much of the other areas where actual evidence is viewed as dangerous to rhetoric, Scottish education is another area where the government took deliberate action to reduce independent evidence with which to evaluate things (withdrawing from several international comparisons, for example). As well as suppressing (or just denouncing) any evidence that doesn’t fit the preferred narrative.

The Scottish government’s weird attitudes to evidence are wonderfully convenient to all sorts of agendas. Policy-driven evidence is very much the order of the day. Ideally they seem to aim to make it impossible to generate inconvenient evidence of any kind. Lack of evidence can then be used to build all sorts of nightmares upon.

The non-binary working group's recommendations are also worth looking at. Just a few excerpts:

'Medical records should also be able to describe patients as non-binary. Being recorded as male or female can create barriers to accessing all forms of healthcare for non-binary people....

The CHI number system should be reviewed, and sex should no longer be hard-coded within patient numbers.'

'Reintroduce a non-binary response option in Scottish Government core surveys, and introduce a non-binary response option in the next Scottish Census'

'The Scottish Government should include stakeholders specialising in LGBTI+ equality, and centre the needs of LGBTI+ children themselves, in further developing their vision for a Bairns' Hoose in Scotland. This should include a scoping exercise to understand the specific detriment that non-binary children (and all LGBTI+ children) may experience, both as victims or witnesses to abuse or violence, and when accessing services as a result. This will ensure that when this vision is delivered by 2025, non-binary children, and all LGBTI+ children, will truly benefit.'

'...if pupils use a different "known as" name at school, or if their pronouns are recorded in the register, this information may be shared with unsupportive parents or guardians, disclosing pupils' trans or non-binary status when it is not safe to do so. A review of when and how information recorded on SEEMiS is shared with parents or guardians should identify such issues...'

www.gov.scot/publications/non-binary-working-group-report-recommendations-march-2022/pages/6/

Action plan for this due out in April 2023.

Agree with so much of what you say @onyttig.

Chilling to look back and realise how much damage to safeguarding was done with the participation agenda.

The damage done to children and YP and people with disabilities in the name of Participation or advocacy. Vulnerable people used as props in the " Look how progressive and inclusive and enlightened we are" shows put on by NHS Scotland at the SECC. YP becoming professionals at telling adults what should be done. All helps to alienate parents and older members of the family.

I even saw a local woman get flamed on reddit the other day for saying she felt uncomfortable in a mixed sex bathroom

I saw that thread. It was extremely depressing and enraging.

For context:

This is part of the Scotgov's LGBTI and gender recognition strategy.

www.gov.scot/policies/lgbti/

I wrote to my MSPs before Christmas about the Conversion Therapy Bill. I tried to point out that the definition of "conversion practices" the committee had come up with was deliberately so wide and vague that they could mean just about anything - the committee had left "conversion practices" undefined! -
but none of the MSPs seemed to get it. It's worrying when a politican tells you a practice is "abhorrent" regardless of what it actually means! Obviously I'm not up for bullying and coercion, but those are abusive practices anyway and would be illegal or get a therapist struck off with or without a bill. The Conservative MSPs seemed to think the bill was a Bad Idea in general which I suppose is an improvement. Everyone else who responded thought it was tickety-boo.

For this bill to make sense, you have to believe that gender identity is as hard to change socially as sexual orientation. If that were true than any attempt to change someone's gender identity would be just as ineffective and just as damaging as an attempt to change their sexual orientation. But in reality for many young people, gender identity is much more subject to social influence and it's much easier to change their gender identity than their sexual orientation. And having a gender identity that's incongruent with physical sex leads people to do physical damage to themselves - binding, tucking, surgery and hormones. So this bill actually criminalises attempts to promote a physically healthy gender identity.

So if a parent kept their child off the internet so that the child couldn't ruminate endlessly online about their gender identity and have their incongruent identity affirmed online, and/or if a parent insists their child goes out and is physically active instead, then that in itself could count as a conversion practice. Because if you do that then your child is less likely to develop or maintain a gender identity that's incongruent with their physical sex. The Bill is being set up so that anything an adult does hoping to increase a child's congruence can be presented as an "abhorrent" conversion therapy. While affirmation - which is more likely to decrease congruence - is explicitly allowed and encouraged and mustn't be considered a conversion practice even if a child is being affirmed as transgender to try to stop them growing up as simply gay.

Does anyone remember Section 28 of the Local Govt Act, the one that forbade the promotion of homosexuality in schools? The Conversion Therapy Bill is Scotland is (ironically) very similar in its broad intent - to stop adults promoting a forbidden ideology to young people, regardless of their actual wellbeing.

There are so many examples of
this stuff.

We should always be extremely wary of anyone who is keen to alienate children from their parents (because you don’t necessarily need to physically remove them if you can cow a whole generation into believing they are the villains and all
their values are shameful wrongthink).

This is, of course, why child protection proceedings take a long time and are supposed to be scrutinised very carefully on an individual basis. Sometimes it is most definitely in the child’s best interests to have the parental relationship severed entirely (or reduced to letterbox contact). But it’s rarely a straightforward decision, and it can have profound implications. That’s why it involves multiple agencies and legal processes.

Government policy that seeks to lower the bar for removing children to not enthusiastically affirming their gender identity is terrifying. Not least because it will very effectively silence any dissent. Those dreadful TERFs will shut up if we take their children away.

Incidentally, controlling women through their children in this way is exactly the sort of thing you hear the Scottish government loudly criticising when it happens in Afghanistan or Iran or similar… The message is still ‘do as you’re told or you’ll lose your children’, and the justification is still in the vicinity of protecting the dangers of irrational and unreasonable women and their terrible ideas, but somehow it’s ‘progressive’ when the Scottish government wants to do this.

Another 1984 quote:

'We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.'

I don’t think this is some clever conspiracy by the SNP or even those dangerous fools the Greens to use children and academic ideas around the social construction of childhood to enact a grand strategy. It’s a set of different effects that emerge from a confluence of problematic ideas and practices and an easily manipulated political system full of people determined to be seen as the most progressive and enlightened (so they do not want to look too closely at anything).

Yes, the degree of malice/stupidity in the govt is uncertain, but I would say there are enough dangerous elements around who know how to take advantage of the subsequent opportunities to ensure that it is and will be used by bad actors. Perhaps less visible than the front-facing politicians. There has to be some kind of rationale to why someone would bring in these policies, repeatedly, at some point? It can't surely be sheer accident?