A brandy at bedtime
More stupid stuff to round out the day:
Humza Yousaf has
hit back at[retorted to] JK Rowling over her “ludicrous” outspoken attack on his plans to ensure biological men identifying as female are protected by a new misogyny law.The Harry Potter author accused Mr Yousaf of displaying “absolute contempt for women” on Tuesday after he said transgender women would fall within the scope of the legislation.
…
He insisted that extending the law to transgender people did not diminish the protection being offered to women as he
hit out atrebuked “bad faith actors” who are “intent on turning every issue into a culture war”.Mr Yousaf also accused them of “deliberate disinformation” and argued it made no “logical sense” for Rowling to accuse a government bringing forward misogyny legislation of having no respect for women.
It makes sense because it’s an afterthought. Yousaf produced his shiny new hate crime law that ignored women and the hatred women deal with. Yes, bro, that is misogyny.
The new hate crime laws, which came into force in Scotland on Apr 1, gives protection against people “stirring up hatred” on the basis of age, disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.
However, sex was not included and Mr Yousaf has said separate misogyny legislation will be introduced instead.
Exactly. Why? Why “instead”? Why ignore women in the first one? Why include the very rare and specialized (not to say invented) “transgender idenniny” while excluding women?
Mr Yousaf took to X, formerly Twitter, to
hit back atdispute Rowling’s argument that trans women should not be included in the legislation.
That’s the third time this journalist talks about hitting when he means disagreeing. It’s stupid.
The First Minister said that the legislation would deal with the perception of the accused, rather than the status of the victim.
“If a man threatens to rape a woman, he is unlikely to know if the victim is born a woman or a trans woman. That behaviour should logically be seen as misogynistic,” he added.
That’s even stupider.
Because there was none being offered in the first place. Can’t get any lower than zero!
I am under the impression, please correct me if I am wrong, that “hate crime” laws would still apply in the case of a Hindu or Sikh man attacked by an assailant who mistakes him for Muslim. That is, the attack is deemed to be against a member of a protected group because that is what motivated the attacker, not because the victim was actually a member of that group. Similarly, a straight man attacked by someone who thought he was gay might be a victim of a homophobic hate crime.
(Conversely, a robbery of a gay man is not automatically a hate crime, he might just be a random victim; it has to be established that he was attacked at least in part because he is gay.)
If it is indeed the case that “hate crime” laws cover mistaken attackers: I don’t think the laws list all the groups or descriptions of people that appear to be members of a protected group but are not. It’s all based on motivation.
Thus there is no reason whatsoever to describe people who appear to be women, but are not, in this “hate crime” law that targets misogyny. There is certainly no reason to listen to men-who-claim-to-be-women, just as there is no reason to list drag queens, crossdressers, male actors playing female roles, or members of the Hasty Pudding Club. If Yousaf were genuine in his concerns, he’d see this.
There was a good post on this at Wings, too.
The link is missing.
I’d be willing to bet that for Yousaf, the proposed misogyny legislation’s validation of TiMs (through their inclusion) is more important than its supposed protection of women.
I assume the Wings link intended was this one:
https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-clown/
Good point made. “Let us not allow them to divide society into those who are worthy of protection from hatred and those who are not”, from someone who literally just passed a law specifying which groups are worthy of protection from hatred (and others, by omission, are not).
Ah, thanks; it must be.