Apparently it’s a “trans panic”.
I’m quoting in medias res because the first few paragraphs are too boring to share.
The whole website brouhaha is another great example of For Women Scotland and the gender critical movement using rhetorically loaded lingo with a sprinkling of statistics to cover what is fundamentally a whiny moral-panic argument.
Objecting to men calling themselves women and stealing everything we have won is a “moral panic”? Men sandblasting women’s rights is no big deal?
The real problem for women in Scottish politics is that, according to research by feminist group Engender, a record number of women MSPs chose not to stand for re-election this year. When asked why, two of the reasons for leaving were misogynistic abuse (including on social media) and threats to safety. None of their recommendations for dealing with the reasons women leave politics had to do with defining womanhood.
The Jo Cox Foundation found that between 2023 and 2024, abuse towards women MSPs increased more than a hundred-fold, and in a 2025 survey, 84% of women councillors in England and Wales reported experiencing abuse or intimidation. Step back a bit further, and the wider reality is that domestic abuse incidents in Scotland surged 25% from 2024 to 2025, alongside a 21% rise in indecent communications and a 20% increase in indecent images of children.
How does any of that mean or imply or hint that knowing men are not women is beside the point? If we’re not allowed to know which MSPs are women MSPs, how can we find out how much abuse toward women MSPs increased? Or anything else along those lines? Talking about abuse of women MPS becomes meaningless, so why is Marissa MacWhirter talking about it?
For Women Scotland rhetorically claims to be “working to protect and strengthen women and children’s rights”, but in practice, its campaigns and legal actions focus largely on opposing trans inclusion. I scoured their website and statements in mainstream media and found no evidence of any campaign, statement, press release, or public condemnation specifically addressing online abuse, misogynistic trolling, threats, or harassment of women politicians in Scotland. Talk about invisible women – their silence is telling.
See above. How can we talk about online abuse, misogynistic trolling, threats, or harassment of women politicians if we can’t say which people are women?
How do they not get it? How do they not get that redefining women to include men who say they are women makes it impossible to track or prevent online abuse of women and all the rest of the armory against women?
In March last year, sociologist Sally Hines published a peer-reviewed paper tracing the history of trans-exclusionary politics in the UK from the 1970s to the present.
Ah well. She cites Sally Hines. A hopeless case.