I was going to write this article yesterday, but 2024’s miserable damp squib of a summer unexpectedly delivered a beautiful day – a perfect 20C of unbroken sunshine with a refreshing slight breeze – so I went for a nice walk instead.
Rather than my usual bird-feeding and bear-patrolling beat along the river and canal, I headed off on what used to be my standard summer stroll: up the long steep hill to Beckford’s Tower and its associated cemetery with stunning views over the city.
I’ll scatter a few pics from the walk throughout this feature, as otherwise I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit depressing and angering.
Because it’s about this.
The tweets referred to some newly-published findings from the delayed and botched 2022 census, which revealed that just 19,990 people in Scotland claimed they “were trans or had a trans history”.
But even that figure is highly misleading. Almost half the people included in that total identified as “non-binary”, an undefined term which is in no way interchangeable with “transgender” (because “trans” means changing from one thing to the other, whereas these people might always have considered themselves to be something neither male nor female), and almost a quarter gave equally undefined “Other” answers.
If you also strip out “trans men” – about who nobody is very bothered because they don’t present a rape threat to women or have any advantage in sport – there are just 3,090 self-identified “trans women” in Scotland, which is 0.057% of the population, or one person in every 1,754.
(These numbers, incidentally, now that they’re finally public, make the sexual offending stats for transwomen much much worse than previously thought.)
And that microscopic fragment of a sliver of a rounding error of a section of a minority is what the independence movement has been destroyed for.
Those 3090 people were NOT being persecuted. There are almost no recorded cases of violence against trans people in Scotland – none at all since 2019 – and not a single one has ever been murdered. In the UK there is approximately one murder of a trans person a year – with no evidence that any of those had been killed for being trans – which means that trans people are in fact, per capita, much, much LESS likely to be murdered than the general populace.
(Which is consistent with the statistics worldwide.)
Nor is there a scrap of evidence that they were being discriminated against in any way. Trans people in Scotland have every single human and legal right that everyone else does, plus some extra ones denied to the rest of us (under the Equality Act and the Hate Crime Act). Yet there are NO recorded cases, as far as we know, of a successful prosecution or tribunal claim showing that a trans person has ever been the victim of unlawful discrimination in Scotland.
Trans activists complain endlessly about (among very, very, very many other things) the process of obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate as if nobody else ever had to fill in any forms in their lives, or wait for elective/cosmetic medical treatment.
But very few have any interest in getting a GRC anyway, even after the cost was reduced by the UK government from £140 to £5. Only a tiny minority ever apply, even though it’s a straightforward process and 97% of applications are successful. Even prominent hardcore transactivists admit it.
There’s nothing remotely “tortuous” or “degrading” about it. All you need to do is prove you are what you say you are – the same thing you have to do if you want a Railcard.
(And yet nobody wrings their hands and wails and waves flags and goes on protest marches and has special months for all the people who aren’t eligible for Railcards, who are unquestionably being materially discriminated against and disadvantaged. Why should a poor 31-year-old have to pay 50% more for the same train ticket than a rich 29-year-old?)
The figures below (the most recent available) are for the whole UK, so we can safely assume we’re talking about maybe 30 or so applications a year in Scotland, which is just 0.5% of the supposed trans population. 199 out of every 200 trans people don’t bother trying to get a GRC.
(Extra-alert readers will have calculated that the desperate urgency of both Scottish and UK parties to “simplify” the process of obtaining a GRC is therefore being pursued and prioritised for the benefit of just 0.00059% of the people of the country – or one person in every 169,492 – which apparently has no more pressing matters to address.)
In short, then, there was no problem to solve regarding trans people in Scotland. Yet as a result of the Scottish Government’s deranged obsession with pandering to the transactivist lobby in search of Stonewall Points and invites to fancy London galas for Nicola Sturgeon and her “travelling squad of Scottish lesbians”, a ruinous trail of utter destruction has been wrought.
The SNP’s commanding position in Scottish politics has been destroyed, trashing a 26-point lead in the polls and turning it into a pretty consistent Labour one of 4-10 points in just over a year and a half since the party and its Green allies forced the Gender Recognition Reform Bill through the Parliament.
The SNP itself has been ripped in two, both ideologically and numerically, with 60,000 members out of 125,000 leaving in the last few years. (And even those dogged souls who are left are still thoroughly scunnered.)
(It’s also an odds-on bet that its Westminster representation will be slashed by at least the same proportion next week.)
The credibility of the Scottish Parliament itself was undermined when the GRR was found to have been so badly drafted that it was illegal, gifting the UK government an unprecedented chance to flex its muscles and slap Holyrood down, all while enjoying the support of the majority of the Scottish electorate.
Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, and untold amounts of political capital, have been squandered on toxic organisations and lobby groups, all to no avail.
The rights and safety of women, children, rape victims, gay people and more have been grotesquely undermined to the point where they no longer exist. With the sole exception of Beira’s Place, there is nowhere in Scotland that women can go and be assured that they will be safe from the presence of men.
In 2021, independence was supported by 60% of Scottish women. By 2022, after Sturgeon embarked on her GRR crusade and the Scottish Government first started insisting that “trans women are women”, that number had plummeted to just 43%.
And what’s been achieved for trans people by all this carnage? Not a single, solitary thing. The GRR is not law. The Scottish Government abandoned its attempt to redefine “woman” after another court defeat. The Hate Crime Act – created to pander to transactivists who thought it’d give them the right to endlessly torment feminists with vexatious reports – made a laughing stock of the government and a cult folk hero out of the Hate Monster, while the police have quietly filed the avalanche of complaints in the bin. To our knowledge, not one prosecution has been brought.
And as a side effect of the tin-eared, pig-headed and arrogant way these policies have been (unsuccessfully) pursued, trans people – along with the unlucky LGB people they forcibly attached themselves to – have found themselves the subject of growing hostility and resentment, to the point that governments across the world are starting to remove and restrict their existing rights, let alone giving them any new ones.
Labour are now talking – though only a fool would trust them – about rowing back on their previous “trans-inclusive” policies in the wake of the Cass Review (which they’ve also pledged to implement in full).
Awkwardly, they’ve even explicitly cited the Scottish Government’s shambolic attempts at railroading self-ID through as a key factor in their turn against the policy.
The contemptuous dismissals of people like Hunter about a “culture war” and a “moral panic” play incredibly badly with a public reading horrific newspaper stories about obviously dangerous rapists and paedophiles like Isla Bryson and Andrew Miller and Tiffany Scott and David Smith and Katie Dolatowski.
(Breaking news: it’s actually fine to panic at the thought of finding yourself in what you thought was a female-only space with a rapist.)
The louder and more stridently the Scottish Government’s transactivist lobby has shouted about “trans rights”, the more public support for them has nosedived. The more voters find out about gender ideology the less they like it. “Gender recognition” used to be supported by a margin of 40 points, now it’s opposed by a margin of 30, and nobody wants transwomen anywhere near women’s spaces.
And yet even now they still won’t be told and won’t learn.
The SNP, then, have hurt trans people almost as much as they’ve hurt everyone else – the wider electorate and themselves – in their blind pursuit of the unfortunate mentally-disturbed 0.37% of the Scottish population that doesn’t know what sex it is. They’ve alienated and insulted half the country, made the tiny number of trans people in it the object of bitter loathing, and dynamited their own rule, for absolutely nothing.
Because for all the sound and fury, the list of things they’ve actually achieved for the “trans community” is a blank sheet of paper.
(Although ironically, their unwilling, ham-fisted failure to make it easier for vulnerable and confused children to be sterilised and mutilated and have their entire future lives destroyed might well turn out to be the greatest service those children were ever done. The Scottish Government does not consider people to be fully “adult” until they’re 25, so the majority of Scotland’s “trans” people are by that definition children.)
One thing’s for sure, though: there certainly ARE people who “should be taking a long hard look at themselves” today, as a grim reckoning at the ballot box looms for the decade of incompetent, hubristic misrule by the SNP that has and will set the cause of Scottish independence back for a generation, undoing 90 years of hard digging and blocking any foreseeable path to the party’s supposed goal.
To find them, Mhairi Hunter would be well advised to start with a mirror.
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