The Scottish government's new hAte sPeeCh law went into effect on Monday, outlawing "stirring up hatred."
Stirring up hatred means threatening, abusive or insulting behavior toward race, ethnicity, or any of the following characteristics:
- age,
- disability,
- religion or, in the case of a social or cultural group, perceived religious affiliation,
- sexual orientation,
- transgender identity,
- variations in sex characteristics.
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling posted the following thread in response, naming the Group That Shall Not Be Named:
That April Fools' post ended in the following scathing take:
Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren't women at all, but men, every last one of them.
In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women's and girls' single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women's jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.
For several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by their government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable. The re-definition of 'woman' to include every man who declares himself one has already had serious consequences for women's and girls' rights and safety in Scotland, with the strongest impact felt, as ever, by the most vulnerable, including female prisoners and rape survivors.
It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls, or address the current assault on women's and girls' rights, unless we are allowed to call a man a man. Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.
I'm currently out of the country, but if what I've written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Will the Scottish authorities dare to arrest a beloved, massively famous children's book author because she called a man a man?
If there were more people like her, we wouldn't be in this insane position in the first place.
Resistance is the only path forward.
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