The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht: Voices from the Front Line of Scotland’s Battle for Women’s Rights
This month I’m looking at women who fought back and survived, women who have stories to tell or be told, making this weeks book The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht: Voices from the Front Line of Scotland’s Battle for Women’s Rights, edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn. The accompanying cocktail is Courage and it is 1.5 oz Amaretto, 1.5 oz Southern Comfort, 1.5 oz Coconut Rum, 1.5 oz Blue Curacao, 2 oz Orange Juice, 2 oz Cranberry juice, and 2 oz Pineapple juice. So lets do this
So the book starts with a definition. Wheesht means a plea or demand for silence; to silence or to be silent. So the women who contributed essays to this book refused to remain silent in the face of being ordered to do so and to give up their rights in favor of men.
And yes, much as the women in this book told it like it is, I’m not going to pull punches. I’m not going to dance around with politically correct non-sense. Transwomen are not women. They are men. In woman face. And believe me, I was shocked that this matter of trans-rights kicked off in Scotland of all places. It seemed so unlikely. Paris…Berlin…Rome…hell London, was a more likely place for this insanity to peak. So why Scotland?
Well, gay rights were late coming to Scotland, and so in an effort to be seen as more progressive than Britain, Scotland raced ahead with the gender recognition, starting in 1995 with a transgender support group getting incorporated into Reach Out Highlands, an LGB charity. And two years later the nascent Equality Network held it’s first community conference that featured a transgender issues workshop. By 2003 an LGB youth project which had started in Edinburgh in 1989 had evolved into LGBT Youth Scotland. And with all of this…comes money. Which is slowly funneled towards politicians in the form of lobbyists.
In 2014, Nicola Sturgeon is made First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party and pretty immediately starts pushing for gender recognition certificates and trans rights, all at the expense of women’s rights. And no matter how much women argued against it. No matter how many women spoke with their representatives and argued that putting trans rights above their own safety was harmful, they were ignored. This despite mounting evidence of exactly that.
And this book is filled with essays, heart wrenching essays, by the women who fought back against this absurdity. Starting with the forward, where the author has given birth to a daughter. Happy news regardless, but the daughter was born with a severe learning disability. And in the future, will need full time care. Care to guess how many special needs children are abused by male care takers? Enough that there are laws in Scotland mandating female care workers for such children. Except now, with Nicola Sturgeon in charge pushing that transwomen are women, there’s a very real chance that a transwoman…born a man…will be caring for her child in the future.
Remember a few years ago when I read Dr. Debra Soh’s book, The End of Gender. We learned that a lot of transgender women….are actually fetishists’. They fetishize women and being woman. Including children in their fantasies at best makes them pedophile adjacent. And in reality, including children in your sexual fantasies, makes you a pedophile. No wonder the author wants to ensure that a biological female will have the care of her at risk daughter in the future.
Now, I am not saying that all transgenders are pedophiles. I would actually argue that most of them are just…garden variety paraphilias. However, that paraphilia can still be extremely violent towards women. And we have essay after essay of women in the book reporting exactly that. Threats of extreme violence follow anyone who speaks out. And what’s crazy is they’re not even saying that transgender people don’t deserve rights. They’re saying that women’s rights should be protected and not lost at the expense of an extreme minority of the population.
Like…. the episode of South Park where they hang the sense of shame in the public square kept running through my mind. Because we as a society have truly lost all sense of shame, which is why people letting their fetishes fly in public.
So, Nicola Sturgeon’s ministry made it so all you had to do was say you feel like a woman, and you were entitled full access to women’s spaces. Spaces like rape crises centers. The women in this book fought tooth and nail to get legislation passed that they could request a doctor of their same biological sex in case of sexual assault. Because otherwise, they could get a transgender woman collecting their rape kit. I mean…can you see why someone freshly traumatized by violent sexual assault might not want a man looking at them down there? Well, apparently, Nicola Sturgeon couldn’t understand it. And those who pointed out the trauma of such were themselves threatened with sexual assault by trans-activists.
And starting in 2018, the voices got louder as the women in Scotland began organizing their resistance, forming several groups, among them For Woman Scotland and Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, and they took this to social media. Where it still remained mostly small and localized until JK Rowling entered the chat.
Now, every essay in this book is outstanding, and gut-wrenching to read through, and not a few made me cry. But it would be remiss not to mention who is arguably the most famous and famously outspoken of the TERF’s. And understand, I do not mean this in a derogatory way at all. Although one of the essay’s in here notes that this term is spoken derisively, usually by a man, to mean a woman who won’t shut up about men invading their spaces. So…I’m reclaiming this as a good thing. If you’re called a TERF… OWN THAT SHIT!
So what made JK Rowling speak out?
Well, one of the essays in this book is Courage Calls – A Case Study written by Susan Smith. And in it she talks about a small group of women who got together in January 2019 and created For Woman Scotland. And the courage demonstrated by this small group of women created ripple effects, which called more women to the cause of women’s rights in Scotland. One of those ripples would eventually be Maya Forstater, who did not feature in this book, but in 2019 she worked in a think tank in England, and took her bosses to court for discrimination after she stated her belief that human beings cannot literally change their sex….basically transwomen are men. Forstater lost her initial case, although she would win on appeal. But after her initial loss, Rowling famously tweeted:
“Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya”
And HOLY SHIT did all hell break loose. With that single tweet, Rowling painted a big old target on her back for the trans activists to aim at. And God bless her, she has never ducked. The reason she finally spoke out was guilt. She was effectively shamed into action by the courage of the women who were risking and losing everything to state the truth. Courage called to her, and she answered. And has been vocally outspoken ever since.
Also, she references a blog post she wrote on this matter which is on her website, I’ll link it below. It is, of course, well written. And Kind. She’s not trying to kick anyone who’s down and truly struggling. Just trying to provide context for why this all matters so much, and why she has come out in favor of women’s rights over men’s in this instance.
So that tweet was December 2019. The battleground of trans politics has gone back and forth, with winning some ground and losing some ground. I think above the biggest wins was when Nicola Sturgeon, after years of pandering to the transactivists, was forced into a very awkward interview where she tried to justify her trans women are women stance, while explaining that violent convicted rapist Adam Graham, who claimed to be a transwoman Isla Bryson…who is a woman because transwomen are women…but won’t be housed in a woman’s prison…she danced around and refused to say if this…with the lovely bulge in the front of his leggings….was a man or a woman. Shortly after this debacle, on February 15, 2023, Sturgeon resigns and Scotland’s Secretary of State, conservative Alister Jack, blocked self-ID. And the hypocrites breathed a quiet sigh of relief that they no longer had to argue in favor of what they knew to be bullshit.
The women of Scotland are still fighting this battle. Hell, from The Scotsman TODAY…literally, like a few hours ago this posted, nurse Sandie Peggie has brought a case against the National Health Service and Dr. Beth Upton, a transwoman, for unlawful harassment under the Equality Act as Upton insisted Peggie use the changing room while Upton was in it. Which Peggie was quite uncomfortable doing, because Upton is a man. So yes, the women who won’t wheesht are still fighting this battle.
So are we, by the by. I know President Trump just signed into law HR 28, The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. Which passed on outstandingly party lines. No joke, 218 yeas to 206 nays, 1 voted present and 9 abstained. Of the 206 nays, ALL were Democrats. 2 Democrats crossed party lines and voted yea, those two were Henry Cuellar from TX and Vicente Gonzalez from TX. Shows how far the Democrats have strayed from God. And as much as that was a win, Google assures me America is as fucked as Scotland has been as women’s only spaces have been ruled discriminatory by the Supreme court in January 2022. So much for my idea to create a women’s only cult. Back to the drawing board on that one!
So the battle rages on, on both sides of the Atlantic. This book was more of a rallying cry than a summation of a battle fought and over.
Seriously, this book was outstanding, the voices are clear and strong and I’m very pleased to have Scotland as part of my heritage. And that’s it for this week.
