You may have thought that the Scottish government had abandoned gender metaphysics after the collapse of the ‘Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill’ last year. Think again. The SNP government appears to be heading back down the non-binary rabbit hole. This week it issued official guidance to public bodies suggesting that they should record public identities under no fewer than 24 gender categories. These include, in no particular order, genderqueer, genderfluid, bigender, androgynous, non-conforming, pangender, and neutral.
Do they never learn?
The LGBTQIA+ community will no doubt be worried about the absence of several gender that have featured prominently in the literature on non-binary identity, such as ‘two-spirit’. The cancellation of the two-spirit people will surely be of concern to the Bipoc (Black, Indigenous People of Colour) community. It refers, of course, to non-binary people who identify as members of the First Nation and other indigenous cultures of Native America. This is surely denying the very existence of two-spirit people.
There may be little evidence that Scottish tribal communities embraced two-spirit identities in the past, though I’m sure there must have been non-binary Picts. Either way, people should surely have the right to identify as two-spirit if that is what they sincerely believe themselves to be. I mean, who are the Scottish government to arbitrarily exclude them?
It is easy to mock all this, but it is genuinely disturbing to learn that this quasi-religious nonsense is still being peddled by public bodies. More egregiously still, the Scottish government guidance says the members of the public ‘whose gender identity corresponds with the sex registered for them at birth’ can be defined as ‘cisgender’. This is a term many women find deeply offensive. Trans ideology is also being promoted, post-Cass, in Scottish primary schools with the apparent endorsement of the first minister.
Do they never learn? After the Isla Bryson scandal, when a double rapist was placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison, the whole gender pyramid of piffle collapsed. The ‘Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill’, which began the whole gender inflation and had been passed by the Scottish parliament in December 2022, was laid to rest. Even the First Minister John Swinney agreed that it was not safe, or even lawful, to allow men to become legally female merely by declaration and therefore gain access to women’s spaces.
Indeed, John Swinney appeared to go further in July when he agreed that there are only ‘two genders’. But that message doesn’t seem to have penetrated the Scottish government deep state – or rather shallow state – where trans ideology is deeply embedded in the Scottish public sector, schools, and academic institutions.
The Scottish Prison Service is still apparently sending prisoners to prisons that don’t match their biological sex. However, Police Scotland’s chief constable, Jo Farrell, has accepted that rapists are men, and should not be allowed to to change sex after being charged. Other offenders, though, even potentially violent ones, could still be recorded as women and housed in the women’s estate.
Gender ideology is, as the author JK Rowling notes, turning Scotland, home of the Enlightenment, into a seat of what she calls the ‘Endarkenment’. It is a condition in which highly-educated people start talking utter nonsense, fearful that by not speaking the language they will lose their jobs.
Rowling wonders why people should not be able to record their astrological identities if this differs from that which they were ‘assigned at birth’. It’s a good question and one that will no doubt be addressed the next time the Scottish government expands the identitarian dictionary of neologisms. There’s certainly evidence that Swinney was born under a bad sign.
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