Another victory! For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers in prisons case

[TheNoWord]

It’s just been on the news in Scotland. More to follow….

I suspect it might be this thread:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1ua0bxp/transgender_prisoners_should_not_be_held_in/oski9yq/

James Morton and Steven Whittle: the administrators of the UK trans movement.

Shame on them both. May they live to see everything they've done dismantled.

It is truly wonderful to see everything they have acheived by stealth, dismantled piece by piece. And it's not coming back.

Thank you to those of you who have posted comments that have explained things about the judgement, I always appreciate the clarification comments.

This has been share before but I'm posting it again because if fucking awesome

'We welcome today’s ruling in the Outer House of the Court of Session that the Scottish Prison Service policy on transgender prisoners is unlawful.
For over a decade the SPS has housed some of Scotland’s most violent men in the women’s prison estate. Taking its lead from activists who ‘strategised’ that securing ‘self-identification’ in prisons would pave the way for similar policies in schools, hospitals and other settings, the SPS decided to treat vulnerable female prisoners as collateral damage. Yes they flaming did 😤
It should not have taken unpaid women campaigners years to restore centuries-old protections for female prisoners, and to suffer vilification and abuse for doing so. No it fucking should not have 😡
That Scottish Ministers defended this sexist and regressive policy for so long, and even went to court to do so, leaves a permanent stain on the reputation of every individual politician involved.' Agreed a million time over, you bunch of bastard's🤬

First Minister, John Swinney told BBC Scotland Lady Ross's judgement was complex and the government will take time to consider its implications.

It's as clear as day: men cannot be in the women's estate. End of. Make other arrangements.

But yes, the new political way to deny women's rights - sit on legal judgments for over a year while you whine how hard it is to understand (and yet don't find anyone who could explain it to you) and how carefully you're going through it line by line, and carry on ignoring the law. It's about time the voters started trying that one on. 'Oh my tax bill is complicated, I'm going through it and considering it very carefully and I MIGHT get around to doing something about it in a year or two-'

Next court case: accountability for these ridiculous tactics that in essence leave women, quite intentionally, in illegal, discriminatory, distressing and in this case dangerous circumstances while a lot of politicians, predominantly male, try to find a way around having to permit women their legal equality of humanity.

I'm equally not willing to believe - and I don't think a judge would either - that the SPS and Scots Govt had made absolutely no action plans or preparation as to what they would need to do in the event of the case going against them.

Because that would be utter incompetence.

I'll open the book now on the next whinge being 'but it's too expensive to get a small number of men out of women's prisons and make other arrangements'. That one hasn't had a run around in a few weeks.

Most trans identifying males are housed in HMP Edinburgh on the wing for vulnerable prisoners.

But don't forget the Scotgov's claim that one 'trans' section would mean family having to travel further.

To be fair, I did not have this as a gotcha on my bingo card, but it appears to be genuine:

😂
There's nothing desperate transactivists won't use to try to get their own way.

I'm still taking pleasure from seeing the comprehensive dismantling of the "but mothers with male toddlers in changing rooms mean middle aged men must be allowed in" whine. 😁

Genuinely stupid as per.

Gender is not binary - so what? Prisons and other services are segregated on the basis of sex, not gender.

Yes, transmen who commit crimes, of which there are a miniscule number of as opposed to the prevalence of transwomen who do, should be placed in the female prison estate.

Is that numpty really pushing for transmen to be incarcerated in the male prison estate to suffer the fate of the transmen who was placed on a male mental health ward and brutally raped within an hour of being there?

Their sheer unadulterated hatred of women never fails to show itself.

Fwiw the vast majority of comments on social media relating to this outcome I would class as 'no shit sherlock'.

I actually admire that level of blithe fuckwittery.

Aren't transmen already in women's prisons? (Please say they are. Lie if you have to. The alternative is unthinkable.) And not causing any kind of problems there?

There were lots around on Reddit wondering at our stupidity that now there will be “men” in women’s spaces.

I’m pretty sure most if not all are. On the thread in r/politics there’s a guy who says he’s a prison officer and he didn’t know of any in his men’s prison (8 sex offender TIMs though, several who “transitioned” inside) I’ll have another go at finding the posts.

I had it on my bingo card along with “not in Pride Month!” and “it only involves a tiny number” and “this isn’t about women’s rights it’s about persecuting trans people” and “mean old JKR in her mouldy castle funding court cases”

They keep trotting that one out as if it is so clever, they are really not blessed in the thinking department.

Oh and they think there should be Nuremberg style trials when the revolution comes for everyone who supported this.

I think many of these people can retreat into their opposite world “reality” so much, especially in complete validation chambers like Reddit, that it really does seem to them that way. It would make an absolutely fascinating psychological study.

It would, it would keep psychologists busy for years.

It's not even that they can retreat into Opposite World; it's that they must. Because only in Opposite World does, "I have a vulva, a vagina, and breasts, and I am a man" make sense, so if they want to believe that they are in any way the opposite sex, they have no choice but to let go of the real world.

I've explained before that I didn't last long in the trans community. There were several reasons for that, and this systematic gaslighting was one of them. On one of my very first group support sessions, I tried to mourn the fact that I would never be a biological father like I am a biological mother. I was told in no uncertain terms that I was a man like any other, and that topic was shut down, while I baffled internally at the sheer lunacy of what I'd been told I was supposed to believe.

They are in a cult which has completely warped their thinking. So yes, to them, all this nonsense makes perfect sense. Sadly :(

I'm sure there was one TiF in a men's prison in Scotland who refused to move out. But time has passed now, so maybe she's on the outside.

@Wishesandhorses - are your comments about ScotGov & incompetence tongue in cheek? Because I will readily believe that level of arrogance/incompetence from them.
I read the other day about the achingly progressive new Scottish primary school in court for failing to provide proper sanitary facilities for girls and which had, along the way, created menstrual huts for them. Their defence was that they were following the guidance (to which the judge said 'guidance is not law'). So - the can follow guidance when it suits them but not when it doesn't (EHRC guidance following FWS/Scottish Ministers). Other examples are available: Peter Murrell - I rest my case.

And how curious that the poor TW can't be housed in a separate unit away from a main prison estate because their families wouldn't be able to visit, when all female Welsh prisoners have to be housed in England due to lack of a women's prison in Wales.

But, y'know - they're only women.

I can imagine, I’ve seen similar on social media while lurking in TRA spaces.

Legal Queen Naomi Cunningham with a further insightful comment on case-by-case (and the concept of "bright line rules") on LI:

I haven't had time yet to read For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers (no.3) properly yet, but one point that has already jumped out at me is the extensive and robust treatment of "bright line rules". The exclusion of men from women's prisons is a bright line rule to which no exceptions are permissible, and the court is clear that that does not render it unlawful.

A constant insistence on "case by case assessment" has bedevilled the law in this area for years. Public lawyers in particular appear to have contracted a bad case of bright line phobia. I've suspected for a while that this is attributable to concept creep from the rule against fettering of discretion.

I'll explain. If legislation gives you a discretion to exercise, you're not allowed to decide to exercise it always the same way, or substitute hard-and-fast rules for the exercise of that discretion; that's "fettering" your discretion, rather than exercising it as you were told to.

My suspicion is that that perfectly sensible and well-established rule has left lots of public lawyers with a kind of unthinking nervousness about hard-and-fast rules, and that has morphed over the years into an unfounded belief that bright line rules need some very special kind of justification to be lawful.

When you think about it, that's nonsense. The world bristles with bright line rules. You can't buy alcohol in a pub or vote until you're 18. Seatbelts must be worn. No entry to the building site without a hard hat. No-one under 5' may use the fairground ride. No peanuts in the kitchen. No climbing on the roof of the school. (I've always thought this last rather a shame - why aren't primary schools designed, low-rise, with rope ladders up to the roof and slides and zip-wires back down? But I digress.)

Sometimes legislation confers a discretion, and when it does, it has to be exercised without recourse to hard and fast rules. But often legislation, or someone else with power to make rules in a particular situation, lays down bright line rules instead, and that's perfectly fine.

"Women only" is the kind of rule that normally makes no sense at all unless it's treated as a bright line rule. That's because if you tell women this space is for women only, they need to be able to be confident that they won't meet men there. As I've said before, it's like peanut-free meals: you have to leave the peanuts out, or it's not peanut-free.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/naomi-cunningham-3332a716_i-havent-had-time-yet-to-read-for-women-activity-7474001102972059648-e5Bx