Fresh horrors for Scotland

[HirplesWithHaggis]

wingsoverscotland.com/raise-all-of-the-flags/#more-134015

"Gender expression, of course, is simply how a person presents themselves in terms of dress and general appearance. So under this law, if your 13-year-old son is meeting some friends for a movie and comes down the stairs wearing only a nappy, a ball gag and an adult bib with “CUM SLUT” printed on it, and you say “You’re not bloody going out dressed like that!”, you’ll be committing a crime for which he can have you arrested as long as he claims it’s part of his gender expression."

There's more, so much more.
😥

'To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink'

Yes… you are right.

This is so fucked up.

I wouldn't normally feel this was relevant in looking at a politician's views and policies, but NS has no children, I believe. Surely, however, a good many of her colleagues must have? Is it a case of nodding this stuff through because they are confident that they won't be affected by it, just the plebs?

I really really feel sorry for the parents of autistic girls in Scotland.

Autistic girls who feel more comfortable with short hair and boys clothes for sensory reasons are not boys.

Makes me sick.

I suspect that the Scottish government’s determination to lower the voting age as far as possible is caught up in all this.

Alienate children from their parents. Encourage the idea that older generations are harmful to their well-being. Give young people increasing political and personal power. Fetishise the concept of ‘participation’. Demonise the concept of safeguarding - except where it’s useful in removing children from the influence of their parents.

And, at the same time, ensure that Scottish young people are increasingly poorly equipped by the Scottish education system. Shout about how wonderful and progressive your curriculum is and brush the successive international comparisons that suggest the outcomes do not match the claims being made.

Thing is, 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).

It’s incompetence more than anything else. Gross bloody incompetence. Dangerous incompetence.

And the dreadful state of Scottish politics, plus the ways in which it’s structured (both internally and in relation to Westminster), just makes this stuff worse.

I actually think parents are not well represented in the SNP. The average age must be much lower than other parties and there seems to be quite a lot of gay men.

I agree with this, but just to state the blindingly obvious, any girl or woman who prefers to have short hair and to wear trousers, flat shoes etc is still female. It's like Richard Feynman's marvellous concept, cargo science. Adopting the outward trappings of a thing doesn't change the substance or perform a magical transformation. Who would have thought 10 years ago that this would need spelling out in relation to see and clothes?

But, like all those who want to take children away from their dreadful
parental influences, they believe they are guardian angels, saving poor children from
the wrong kinds of parents.

There’s always an othering at work. Their children would never be at risk because the whole project is to stop those dreadful, uncivilised, unenlightened parents from endangering their children’s bodies and souls. None of this could apply to them because they are enlightened and properly educated. Their own parenting is always driven by the best interests of the child because they simply know better than these inferior types. It’s absolutely right to intervene, because it would never happen to you (until, of course, you find yourself on the ‘wrong side of history’ as the ideology grows more extreme - but you won’t speak up or challenge it because they might fail to recognise that you are not the wrong type of parent).

It is exactly the same logic that enabled people who were parents themselves to implement the mass removal of indigenous children from their families, or to remove babies from the influence of their dreadful and immoral unwedded mothers, and so on. And then to use the results if trauma inflicted on individuals and communities as evidence that you did the right thing by taking the children out of the awful environments they might otherwise have her raised in.

You don’t have to go on a long historical detour to find this stuff. It’s all happened within living memory.

I agree with this, but just to state the blindingly obvious, any girl or woman who prefers to have short hair and to wear trousers, flat shoes etc is still female

My daughter is autistic and is often mistaken for being a boy.

Autistic girls are vulnerable. It is easy to see how they can be manipulated to believe the opposite of the blindingly obvious.

It is wholly wrong that parents who point out the blindingly obvious, that there is no wrong way to be a girl, can be guilty of conversion therapy in Scotland and have their daughters taken away from them.

I know 3 girls who are very similar in their presentations of autism who are now proudly transboys or non- binary. In Sturgeons Scotland they are the girls who will go on to be sterilised. It's just so fucking awful.

It is exactly the same logic that enabled people who were parents themselves to implement the mass removal of indigenous children from their families, or to remove babies from the influence of their dreadful and immoral unwedded mothers, and so on.

The removal of indigenous children from their parents is something that's been uncovered to an extent in Canada recently. It's very upsetting if you go to find it and read about it. The stories from Ireland are as well, but ones that have been covered more in the UK. There was also the migration of children from the UK to parts of the Empire - often under the pretence their parents had died. They hadn't.

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?

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.'

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.

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.

For context:

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

www.gov.scot/policies/lgbti/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

*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?

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

@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.

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

'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.