Sometimes I get the feeling we live in parallel worlds.

The Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill sits on the edge of passing through the Scottish Parliament this week – and all it took was six years of undelivered manifesto commitments, two public consultations and one online apology for failing to deal with transphobia in the SNP from the First Minister herself. Not that it changed anything.

Oh no not public consultations! Obviously laws that contradict reality should be passed instantly with no public consultation at all.

Six VERY long years, where Britain’s chattering class lost its collective mind in service to a relentless campaign of anti-trans misinformation; a conspiratorial crusade that falsely claimed, among many other things, that child murderer Ian Huntley was actually transgender, and that Scotland’s LGBTQ+ community was trying to lower the age of consent.

Says a columnist for The National. If that’s not chattering class what is?

But more to the point, “a relentless campaign of anti-trans misinformation” is debatable at best. At worst it’s just a casual lie, which reflects how easy and automatic it’s become to call lucid feminist women rude names and accuse them of bad behavior.

For our queer and feminist communities, it has felt closer to an eternity.

And feminist?

Trans ideology is profoundly anti-feminist. This piece itself illustrates how, with its bullying and lies and taking it for granted that feminism is for everyone but women.

Having wasted no time in perpetually branding the legislation as “controversial” until it inevitably became so…

Read your own writing, pal.

The conclusion of the bill in the Scottish Parliament, whatever the outcome, will at the very least provide a degree of breathing space from the keyboard warriors and sock accounts that have made obsessive discussion of the lives of trans people an all-consuming hobby. Once they’ve tuckered themselves out anyway.

No. Wrong again. We really don’t care about the lives of trans people (more than anyone else’s life), we care about what trans ideology is doing to women and children and adolescents. The issue isn’t how anyone lives, the issue is law and policy and rights and telling the truth.

Throughout the process of bringing this bill through Parliament, the so-called gender-critical movement has been given near everything they wanted, with the exception of throwing the legislation out entirely.

…

Harmful opposition flourished in the space left by the Scottish Government’s inaction – and having pushed a vulnerable community onto the stage, the SNP made a quick exit and left us under the fire of a wealthy cohort of middle-class reactionaries who wanted to cosplay the rebel faction.

There it is. There’s that unabashed hatred of women. “Mummy said no!!”

It’s for that reason that any victory on Wednesday will be a bittersweet one indeed. The hurt caused by the cowardice of the Scottish Government won’t be made wholly right by the passing of this bill, nor will it bring back those lost to the violent rhetoric left to spread unchecked in the promise left behind.

Those lost? Who would that be? Name one.