Another victim of the crossfire:

AS Scotland emerged from lockdown restrictions in the summer of 2021 Mandy Rhodes began to feel deeply uncomfortable at her work. As the long-time editor of Holyrood magazine, Ms Rhodes is one of Scotland’s most influential political journalists. Her workplace is the Scottish Parliament where she has been reporting and commenting on the business of government for nearly 20 years.

Well we know how that’s going to go.

In recent years she’s become one of several prominent feminists who have found themselves targeted by transgender activists for espousing gender-critical views. Yet, nothing in her long career had prepared her for what she calls the malice beginning to filtrate Scotland’s corridors of power.

Infiltrate, I think he means. Or insinuate it way into, or similar.

She recalls a day in August 2020 when she says it became clear to her that the Scottish Parliament could no longer be considered a welcoming place for women like her who were refusing to remain silent over trans issues.

“I was applying the final touches to a magazine looking back at that term in Parliament and had asked each of the party leaders to reflect on what they felt had been achieved in the preceding months. We were sitting almost on deadline, waiting for Patrick Harvie’s piece to come in.”

Patrick Harvie:  Scottish Green Party, MSP for Glasgow.

“Eventually, it came through very late at night. Basically, it was a diatribe about how Holyrood magazine was part of a transphobic campaign and how much I was personally part of it.

“No one who knows me would ever describe me as shy and retiring. Yet I sat in my office crying. It felt like I was – and I don’t like the term ‘bullying’ as it’s used far too much – under siege at that point. I found it very disturbing that a political leader would send me something I’d requested for publication in the nation’s only political magazine and which is part of the architecture around that parliament and use it to call me a transphobe. So, for me going into Parliament now in the knowledge that there are people there who think I’m a bigot is truly astonishing.”

The term “bullying” does get used a lot, but on the other hand there is a lot of it, so that’s at least part of why it’s used a lot. Often it’s the only word that really names what we’re talking about, so we end up having to use it.