Frankly it was her fault
Hmmmm, which team was it who made the debate toxic?
Nicola Sturgeon has reignited her feud with JK Rowling by blaming the author for creating a toxic debate over trans rights and stoking “vile” attacks which left her fearing for her physical safety.
So Sturgeon is saying Rowling created the debate “over trans rights”?
But that’s absurd, because Sturgeon had already staked out a position on “trans rights” long before Rowling said a word about the subject.
In her memoir Frankly, the former first minister claims the Harry Potter writer wearing a T-shirt branding her a “destroyer of women’s rights” was a turning point in which “rational debate” on the trans issue became “impossible” and “any hope of finding common ground disappeared”.
Frankly, I think it was Sturgeon’s insistence that men can be women that made rational debate impossible. I also think that insistence is indeed lethal for women’s rights. How can it not be? How can women have rights if any man who feels like it can bounce up and say he’s a woman so give him the job as CEO of the rape crisis center?
The author posted the image as a show of “solidarity” with a protest organised by the For Women Scotland campaign group that day against Sturgeon’s gender reforms, which were then making their way through Holyrood.
But of course from women’s point of view they’re not reforms, they’re an attack on women’s rights, hence the T-shirt.
In her long-awaited memoir, which is was due to be published on Thursday but which went on sale in some book shops on Monday, Sturgeon reveals she now wishes she had “hit the pause button” over the legislation, which was passed within three months of Rowling’s attack and was later blocked by the UK government.
The pause button?
Legislation that demolishes human rights for half the population isn’t ok if we just wait a month or two. Pausing a misogynist law is not enough.
She goes on to claim that there are “few issues” more important to her than protecting and advancing women’s rights, “so to hear myself described as a destroyer of them wounds me deeply.”
Well tough shit, because that’s what you are. Think more about the injuries you’ve done to women. Think about the Edinburgh rape crisis center. Think about it. Never mind you, never mind your ego; think about the consequences.
In Frankly, Sturgeon states that while political opposition to her reforms were growing in 2022 and that campaigners’ anger was “bordering on hysteria”, she did not believe the gender issue was causing much concern among the wider public.
She admits this changed early the following year as a result of the Isla Bryson scandal — the biologically male double rapist initially placed in a female jail — and suggests she now wishes she [had] had the “courage” to admit she considers the sex offender a female.
…
In her memoir, Sturgeon admits she was “completely blindsided” by the Bryson case, which erupted within weeks of her self-ID law, which would have allowed Scots to easily change their legal gender, passing at Holyrood.
Well whose fault is that??? She had no right to be blindsided by it, because it was the whole point. If you insist that men are women if they say they are, and the state must agree with them, then Isla Brysons are inevitable. As we said. Loudly and over and over again. How did she manage to be “blindsided” after all that? Absolutely pathetic.
Sturgeon writes that the case gave her critics a “monster” who “brought vividly to life” what until then had been “abstract” concerns. The story then “went nuclear” and left her “fighting a fire that was already out of control”, Sturgeon said.
Well they fucking shouldn’t have been “abstract.” If she really considered them abstract then that’s her fault. We did explain. A billion times we explained.
She said she was then “like a rabbit in the headlights” when faced with questions over whether she considered Bryson, previously known as Adam Graham, to be male or female. At the time, Sturgeon repeatedly refused to directly answer the question.
She maintained that position in an ITV interview broadcast on Monday night to coincide with the publication of her book, but added that she now believes anyone “who commits the most heinous male crime against women probably forfeits the right to be the gender of their choice”.
There is no such right.
Sturgeon writes: “Whatever the reason, when confronted with the question ‘Is Isla Bryson a woman?’ I was like a rabbit in the headlights.
“Because I failed to answer ‘yes’, plain and simple, to the basic question, I seemed weak and evasive.
“Worst of all, I sounded like I didn’t have the courage to stand behind the logical conclusion of the self-identification system we had just legislated for.”
Whooooosh point totally missed.
You never should have legislated for that self-identification system. It’s a very bad, horrific, lethal for women system. You have something wrong with your brain.
The more I read about what she had said and written, the more I believe that she’s some kind of sociopath. She’s apparently incapable of understanding any point of view other than her own, to the extent that she can’t bring herself to believe that other points of view are actually possible, let alone might be reasonable. No, in her mind anyone raising objections to her gender self-ID bill is doing so for the sole reason of upsetting her, because she is so certain she is in favour of women’s rights, it’s not possible for her to have got this wrong.
I am gobsmacked that her takeaway from the Adam Graham fiasco was that she should have said that he’s a woman, not that she was wrong about gender self-ID being a good idea.
Welp, if Sturgeon thinks doubling down now on claming to truly believe that the rapist Bryson is an actual female… good luck with that. That’s the final nail in the coffin for her legacy, right there. It’s almost certain that in the future she’ll deeply regret having said so so unambiguously and so… frankly.
Maybe she oughtta start planning a follow-up memoir to “Frankly,” entitled, “OK this time I mean really frankly” in which she admits that she wasn’t being “frank” when she stood by the claim that the rapist was female…
I wonder if she truly believes that the world is just a figment of her imagination, as if she’s dreaming lucidly, and if she had only stuck to her lines – and not been confused by that horrible interviewer asking her the wrong question – then she’d still be in control and the dream wouldn’t have turned into a nightmare. All she has to do is go back to where she was before that interview, replay it with the words she thinks she ought to have said, the words which she had been saying all along, and then everything will reset and everyone will be back to doing whatever she wants them to.
And she’ll be able to ignore all the voices telling her to wake up. Including JKR.
The phrase she wants is “deer in the headlights”.
Rabbits don’t freeze in headlights: they scurry off into the underbrush. Which–frankly–she’d have been better off doing than trying to defend gender ID with babble and sophistry.
Well, it gave her critics another monster to add to the LIST of monsters they’d been compiling for years. That she refused to acknowledge the inevitable outcomes of this policy, outcomes predicted and documented by feminists, shows how unfit she was to lead a government.
Why the refusal? Perhaps shame? Embarrassment? Good. Too bad a little reflection and self-examination hadn’t come before this exploded in her face. Not for her sake, of course, but for the women who were forced to pay the price for her “abstract” around Self ID, and the simple, straightforward truth that men can’t be, or become, women.
Funny how she uses the same phrase they use to describe puberty blockers. Everyone wants to hit the pause button, right? Some things, like puberty, shouldn’t have a pause button. It’s necessary for growing up. Other things, like gender self-ID, needed to hit the STOP button, not the pause button. Possibly the REWIND button might be good, as well. Rewind back to when we understood that men can’t be women.
Maybe her followup could be “Unable to Think Things Through.”
The point at which rational debate on the trans issue become impossible was the point when the trans activists took irrational stands and insisted there could be no debate about them.
It wasn’t the moment when someone pointed that out.
Nicola Sturgeon didn’t become a destroyer of women’s rights when JK Rowling pointed it out. She became a destroyer of women’s rights when she started destroying women’s rights.
What were things like in her home when she was a kid? Did she steal shortbread from the tin and then blame her theft on her little sister for telling her parents? “I was never a shortbread thief until Gillian said I was! That made not having stolen shortbread impossible!”
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who flourished at around 500 BCE, proposed that all of reality is in constant change, and in transit from being something to being something else. If he were around today, he would possibly incline to take that word ‘transit’ and slip an ‘h’ into it, thus allowing it to become ‘transhit’ – which neatly sums up, IMHO, the philosophical position of Nicola Sturgeon.
On the face of it, I would say that Sturgeon is tired of politics, and has her future income post-retirement, nicely secured. From here on, every XY rapist who dresses up as an XX woman and assaults some innocent and genuine XX woman in a females-only dunny, restroom, or whatever will probably cost her 5% of the vote per assault, with the result of Sturgeon being chucked out of office on her ear. Then she will be able to transhittion to something else.
I dunno. She could perhaps pursue a literary career, writing about the adventures of a kid called Harry Shitter..
So she simultaneously believes
and
So what is it?
“Self-ID is a right you can forfeit if you prove to be not a true
Scotsmantrans woman” or“Yes, Isla Bryson is a woman”?
Unless I misunderstand something, even now she holds two contradicting views simultaneously, states them within a brief time interval and does not even realize this.
[Yoda-voice] The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one.
So much muddy thinking packed into such a short sentence… So if a biological male, whose “gender of choice” is “man”, commits “the most heinous male crime against women”, he has probably forfeited the right to be a man? Well, what does he become then? A woman? Non-binary? Feel free to explain.
Haven’t we been repeatedly told that trans people simply are the gender they claim to be, and choice has nothing to do with it? What, then are we supposed to make of “gender of their choice”? People have been called TERFs and transphobes and cancelled for far less than this. If it simply is the case that TWAW – the same way it simply is the case that I am currently 50 years old, say – then any talk of “rights” or “choice” should be irrelevant. I couldn’t choose to be another age if I tried, and whether or not I have the moral or legal “right” to be the age I am doesn’t make any fucking difference. The Earth’s orbit around the Sun doesn’t care about our laws or moral judgements. Again this amounts to an indirect confession on Sturgeon’s part that “gender” is all in the human mind and not something that objectively exists out there in the real world to be discovered (as opposed to invented). I smell Thoughtcrime.
Bjarte, you have arrived at the crux of the matter. If Sturgeon is, as I suspect, a pathological narcissist, then she cannot conceptualise an objective reality outside her mind. Thus both these can be true to her: that gender is all in the mind; AND that she can, at her discretion, withdraw any right she might have bestowed on the NPCs populating her imagination, without consequence to her.
“NO DEBATE!” was supposed to help bypass both accountability and justification, and shield people like Sturgeon from having to answer embarassing questions that highlighted the fact that the ideas behind Self-ID (and the legislation that it spawned) were a dangerous patchwork of incoherent, self-contradictory bullshit. The only thing they put any thought into was enforcement and punishment. If you can bully and intimidate, you don’t have to explain anything. Fortunately the timely, “Man bites dog” story of “Isla Bryson” helped to stall the juggernaut that was supposed to sweep Self-ID into Scottish law. Its failure left Sturgeon unprepared to face questions that weren’t ever supposed to be asked..