Pulse of the Nation

Nicola Sturgeon nails her colours to the mast in the ongoing debate about whether men should be able to declare themselves to be women.

  

If your auntie had a beard, she'd be your uncle! (04/02/21)

I don't know the origins of the phrase, "If your auntie had a beard, she'd be your uncle!" although the words make their  point perfectly. 

Yet that is the position Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP find themselves in after failing to answer the question: 'Can someone with a penis and testicles be a woman?"

Now common sense and science suggest that this is an impossibility, but trans rights activists insist this is wrong and that a trans person who self-identifies as a woman is a woman - end of story.

For some reason this debate is tearing the SNP apart over the practicalities of who can take part in women's sport, women's toilets/changing rooms and women's prisons.

The answer seems pretty obvious to most people, but has become a hugely controversial cause célèbre amongst Scottish nationalists with Nicola Sturgeon appearing to throw her political weight behind the self-identifying trans lobby.

Who knows where it will all end, but the only time I've ever seen 'a elephant fly' is in the movies - and a Disney movie at that. 

  

Trans Rights, Women's Rights and the SNP (02/02/21)

Alex Massie wrote a thoughtful column on the civil war over trans rights and women's rights in the SNP.

"If you think this stacks the deck against women who insist sex and gender are different things, you would be correct. If concern for women’s rights is defined as a mere “guise”, then concern for women’s rights is unavoidably also transphobic. This will be news to many women.

"Actually, it is news to me, too. I am wholly happy to respect trans women’s sense of themselves while still insisting on the view that they are not, indeed cannot be, women in precisely the same way women born with female bodies are women. So, sure, “trans women are women”, but they aren’t women in quite the same way your mother is a woman. There is a distinction and an adherence to reality, to truth, requires one to recognise this."

It's a mystery why nationalists are tearing themselves to pieces over this issue, but just like the Salmond v Sturgeon affair it does seem to be a case of 'kill or be killed'.