Kevin McKenna: Scotland's political elites are cancelling what it means to be a woman

They’re often commandeered in the treacherous and dangerous terrain on which the current debate about the rights of transgender people proceeds. And specifically when feminists, women whose liberalism is real and not ornamental, wish to defend their sex-based rights.

Simply for pointing out that transgender women are transgender women and never biological women they are deemed to have disappeared ‘down the rabbit-hole’. As though what they believe has been born of ignorance and fantasy and not the unalterable truth – underpinned by the laws of the universe – it actually is.

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Yet, what if this isn’t ultimately about transgender rights at all? What if we’re seeing the start of a dystopian experiment in government by group-think? Sure, the old party names remain but only to serve as a veneer of democracy; an echo of it: one that signals to the outside world there’s nothing to see here. A Caledonian Handmaid’s Tale with a touch of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Thus Scotland is added to that list we were all once told about. You know: those countries whose citizens fear the 2am knock. China with its one-child policy was always on that inventory and East Germany too, a place where all your neighbours were in the secret police.

Have you heard about Scotland? They’ve cancelled women and have state-approved misogyny. Mis-gendering can never be accidental; only criminal. The crime of rape is now maybe not rape at all if you claim the asylum of womanhood. A woman can get collared if she demands that an intimate medical examination is conducted by, you know, an actual woman. Visit Scotland by all means – the scenery’s great – just maybe avoid it if you’re more than eight months pregnant.

This abduction by stealth of what it means to be female has all happened because the police; the judiciary and certain sections of the press have been complicit in it. Even the churches and trade unions – traditionally the conductors of grass-roots resistance when basic human rights have been trampled – are curiously silent.

In a dictatorship of the mind the primary targets are the very words we use. Once a ruling class has safely distorted the language so that it can mean anything they want it to mean, it becomes easy for them to turn it against undesirables; to criminalise and to target them. If you are the unchallenged source of all funding and all appointments then 14 years (and counting) of soft influence can also be used. Those who don’t participate in this public genuflection before the new super-class can be taken in the second sweep once the laws have been changed.

You hesitate to call this dystopian because ‘dystopian’ indicates something that’s far in the future. But this is happening now, sponsored and manipulated by the highest levels of government and in the main bodies where a government gets to exercise punitive and exemplary power.

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The very concept of womanhood is being slowly eroded here by men. All the protected characteristics of women are disappearing, including the words exclusive to them – especially those specific to reproduction, sex and sexual health. These are being replaced by an ugly suite of contrived portmanteaus designed specifically to erode much of what wakes women women. If a government can successfully do this then the rest is easy. Nothing can be considered beyond its absolute control.

The absence of any opposition in Scotland – from left or right – places this administration in a uniquely advantageous position. From here it can virtually assume full control by using the tyranny of these words and the laws constructed around them to remove all party and tribal allegiances. Thus, anything can be deemed criminally offensive and the unwary can be trapped on the wrong side of a constantly indeterminate red line that can be moved backwards and forwards to suit.

This government is engaged in the removal of the simplest means of protest – words written and spoken – and the meaning that they once possessed. With them also goes the means to move others. It’s then set to rule for as long as they will it and by any means they deem necessary. This is where we are in Scotland in 2021. Independence, it now seems, was just an ethereal construct to dope up the masses and keep them occupied while the real purpose was concealed.

The chief weapon of marginalisation is a new concept and a sort of philosophical legerdemain; that those defending human rights – specifically women’s sex-based rights – are deemed to be transphobic and reactionary. The contortions required to reach this conclusion are dizzying. They require you to leave behind what you thought you knew and replace it with absolute obedience to a will that believes itself to be almost divinely-appointed.

Most of all though, it simply requires a lie: that defending your own sex-based rights somehow tramples all over someone else’s. That being a feminist is threatening rather than liberating. So you must either drop your feminism or change it to mean something else.

Nicola Sturgeon and the cast of second-rate glove puppets she’s gathered to herself are leading this. It’s not about the rights of transgender people. It’s about power and how to cling to in perpetuity. This is not equality; this is a kind of fascism.

Many of those engaged in this gender struggle are being used as cannon fodder by a political elite who fear both women and transgender people. If you are a political player and you are weaponising this issue in any way then you should be ashamed of yourself. And if you are deliberately slandering people in public life who seek only to defend women’s rights then shame on you too.

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