The 'anti-TERF' misogyny that has contaminated the SNP

All of these charming epithets have been aimed at women – usually by men – who insist on defending women’s sex-based rights, including the entitlement to the security and privacy of those spaces when they are at their most vulnerable.

In Glasgow on Saturday though, during a demonstration called to protest the UK Government’s plans to thwart Holyrood’s GRR legislation, they settled for slogans such as “Decapitate Terfs” and “I eat Terfs”. A small knot of the SNP’s Westminster contingent were filmed adding their voices and in very close proximity to the men advocating for women to suffer violent deaths.

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These politicians all had several features in common: none have advanced the cause of Scottish independence one inch (the main purpose of their being at Westminster); none have ever demonstrated as much enthusiasm as they showed on Saturday for the cause of independence and none have achieved anything by way of alleviating poverty and social inequality in the communities they represent.

Most of them have since moved to record their disgust at the sentiments being expressed on the placards. Their defenders insist they didn’t know what was being brandished behind them. Aye right. The protest lasted for a considerable time and the placards would have been prominent throughout. Why did they even think it was advisable to join a mob brandishing and yelling such slogans?

It’s not as though the sight and sound of such threats were unknown to them. Such expressions of violent intimidation against feminists and lesbians have been a major characteristic of similar protests across Scotland. They must also have been aware of the three-year campaign of violent abuse targeting their Westminster colleague, Joanna Cherry.

It’s been suggested that the threatening placards were all a big joke: ha-ha! Perhaps they might want to ask Joanna Cherry if she thinks it’s a joke. One trans rights activist has already been sentenced for threatening Ms Cherry with violent, sexual assault. In the next few weeks she is to give evidence in another case where a trans activist has threatened to kill her. How must she feel about having to share her workspace for several hours each day with colleagues who seem impervious to the constant threat she faces?

The violent abusers prominent in some sections of the trans lobby have surely been encouraged by the callousness these MPs displayed on Saturday. Just as they’ll have been fortified by the failure of the SNP over several years to deal with the numerous complaints from members who have also endured violent intimidation by some party members.

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But then what else might you expect when the First Minister of Scotland chooses barely to acknowledge the constant threat endured by Ms Cherry and others, simply for expressing mainstream feminist views?

In the world of tribal politics you can dismiss a party with whose politics you profoundly disagree as unsound, ineffective or downright corrupt, especially when scrutinising the conduct of the UK Tories in the last few years. Individual politicians of all parties have been found to be sleazy or fraudulent or dishonest.

The SNP though, has become creepy and sinister. They’re an outfit you wouldn’t let into your home unless they were under supervision or some kind of tracking device. You wouldn’t be comfortable having your children near many of them.

Previously, their creepiness extended merely to having a curious and slightly malodorous obsession with what Scottish families did and said in their own homes. And especially if these families were considered not to be quite in their class, which is to say they lived in those edgier neighbourhoods they’d describe as troubled. Or if they weren’t quite educated to their standard.

This, roughly explained, is of a standard that requires you to be on message with things you should and shouldn’t say. It’s not good enough to say you were unaware of the gaseous index of words and phrases now considered inappropriate. For ignorance proves that you’re a bit suspect and "for the watching".

There seems no iniquity that these impostors won’t entertain. They’ve even used very real concerns about conversion therapy as a cynical tool to detach children from the influence of their own loving parents. No parent wants a child to suffer alone the psychological confusion of changes in their minds and bodies at a vulnerable time in their lives. Maggie Chapman of the Scottish Greens and others seem to be obsessed with issues around children’s sex and gender. Yet parents seeking to counteract such chilling propaganda may soon risk prosecution.

Once, if an adult stranger asked a child these sorts of questions they risked being questioned by police. But our national police force is beholden to Stonewall and its campaign to marginalise anyone who disagrees with their gender ideology.

The warning signs have been evident for a while now. We had the introduction of the disquieting Named Person concept and the proposed Hate Crime legislation which, among other alarming measures, encouraged family members to be vigilant for any loose talk around the dinner table by their parents.

Those seeking to model Scotland on the doublethink of East Germany in the 1970s represent the dregs of political life in Scotland. They freely mix with and tacitly encourage men who advocate violence against women. Many of those who falsely accuse these women of transphobia do it for the sole purpose of justifying their own hatred.

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And so in Scotland an entire political class has been captured by a lie. And what a convenient lie. It frees them from having to do anything truly radical, or life-changing. And it masks their own abject failures in achieving anything substantive for Scotland’s most marginalised communities whom they’ve abandoned in favour of a middle-class caprice.

Even worse are the cowards in the SNP and Scottish Labour who know that what’s being said and done in their name is wrong. We all know who they are. They remain silent though, so that they can cling desperately to their featureless and unremarkable careers.

This has contaminated the SNP and you’re tempted to say that it’s also contaminated the wider cause of independence. But this isn’t so. The professional SNP have long since ceased to have anything but the most vestigial connection with that cause anyway. The wider movement remains happily free of the violent misogyny that has hollowed out the SNP careerists.