They appointed an expert group
Scotland is contemplating a rather intrusive new law…
The Scottish government is on a collision course with the courts again as it prepares legislation criminalising conversion therapy, according to a KC.
It all depends on how you’re defining “conversion therapy.” Conversion from what to what, for a start, and then conversion by what means, and for what reasons, and so on.
The SNP-Green alliance is considering plans to outlaw any activity – including parental chats, prayer and preaching – deemed to be an attempt to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity.
Those are two radically different things. Sexuality, aka sexual orientation, isn’t spooky or magical or based on fantasy. It’s both pointless and cruel to try to talk people out of a sexual orientation, but on the other hand parents surely can talk about it without damaging their kids. At any rate, “gender identity” as we know much too well is not the same kind of thing at all. It rests on beliefs, and the beliefs happen to be very bonkers. Everyone should be free to talk about it.
They appointed an expert group which made a series of recommendations for a new criminal offence, which it claims will be within Holyrood’s devolved powers.
Ah, an expert group according to the SNP-Green alliance – we know what kind of “experts” those are likely to be.
The opposition reported here comes from the Christian Institute, so it’s theocracy versus gender idenniny, which makes it hard to pick a side.
Simon Calvert, a deputy director at the CI, said his organisation is preparing the ground for legal action similar to the named person challenge.
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“Church workers, feminist activists, mums and dads – all sorts of innocent people could find themselves on the wrong end of a prosecution if this becomes law. And I think Scottish taxpayers will eventually find themselves picking up the legal bill for another court defeat.
“LGBT people are rightly protected from physical and verbal abuse by existing law just like anyone else. But these proposals go much, much further. The Scottish government is considering a law that could criminalise churches and gender-critical feminists alike simply because their conversations around sex and gender don’t conform to a narrow, state-approved brand of LGBT politics.”
The root of the story is a report produced for the Scottish Government by something called The Expert Advisory Group On Ending Conversion Practices (henceforth “the Group”). Its membership is a Who’s Who of the sort of people the Scottish Government likes to pay to agree with it.
Most of the “experts” have an institution after their names but several hail from “lived experience.” It seems the Scottish government thinks “lived experience” of thinking of yourself as the other sex is a credential. Fantasy=credential. What could go wrong?
So it’s already pretty evident that the Scottish Government has heavily stacked the makeup of the Group in order to produce the conclusions it wants. But what ARE those conclusions? On reading the Group’s report, it’s hard to avoid the view that if anything Aidan O’Neill KC has in fact played down its ramifications in his comments in Scottish Legal News.
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In short, your children CAN consent to irreversible hormone treatments and surgeries rendering them permanently infertile and incapable of orgasm, and should be actively encouraged to do so, but they CANNOT consent to talking about their mental health in any way which might result in them changing their minds about that path, because to do so would render any person they talked to a criminal.
In other words, it will be legal to help them transition to a different “gender”, but a crime to help them detransition, or even to persuade them not to do it in the first place.
That sentence sounds self-evidently absurd and mad (although it does help to explain why we never got any answers to these questions), but it is the unequivocal recommendation of the report. Read the screenshots above. Read the entire document for yourself. It’s simply what it says.
From John Knox to this. In a weird way it makes sense.
I don’t mean to be a sexist, but we all know the danger of packing important boards and groups with “yes-men.” It’s one of the first chapters of any “Business Admin 101” courses. It’s dangerous to not have any “naysayers” in a meeting or on a board, people to say “this is not a good idea.”
It’s obvious that there are forces at work in Scotland bulding a “thought blockade.” And as more detransitioners start to come out and tell their stories, the higher the walls will be on this blockade.
Ah, so if a gay man flirts with a straight man, that would be a crime? Or a straight man asking a lesbian on a date? Or anyone asking an asexual on a date?
Were George Orwell still around, he might have something to say.
From what I understand this awful law is something that could be struck by Westminster.
Women don’t have “lived experience?” This is what the whole “cis” idea gets you, the disregard of women’s lives because their sex “aligns” with their “gender identity.” TiMs believe they’ve earned their delusional “womanhood” because they’ve had to work at it; it wasn’t just “assigned” to them on a silver platter at birth. Never mind that TiMs aren’t interested in the lower pay, scutwork, and subordinate staus that seems to come with that “assignment,” though perversely, some of them seem ready enough to accept harassment as “validation.”
That and, even more, TIMs believe (or pretend to believe) that women have more power and status and privilege, that women are to TIMs as rich people are to poor people, bosses are to workers, white people are to people of color, etfuckingcetera.
Ah yes, women as the spiteful, all-powerful “gatekeepers,” out to deprive TiMs of their “validation. Their anger is misplaced, and futile. The real gatekeeper goes by the name “Biology.” Biology doesn’t take shit from nobody. Just ask surgeons who specialize in “gender affirming procedures.”
Not even from Physics.
We are Biology. Biology is Chemistry. Biology is us. We are Chemistry. Just because somehow we managed to evolve into culture and language does not change the basic primal truth.
I strip you naked and stand you out in the savannah in front of a hungry lion, you will understand. Biology rules not only us but lions…tigers…bears…spiders…snakes…etc etc etc
We’ve used our intelligence and technology to smooth over some of the rough edges of material existence. Unfortunately we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we’ve completely escaped all that biology stuff, and that we are beyond the jurisdiction of the rules that govern the rest of life. In a very short time, most of us in the West have become divorced from the basic processes that sustain the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed. Food comes from a supermarket. Electricity comes from a hole in the wall. We can get almost anything, from anywhere, delivered to our doorstep with a few clicks of a button. We’ve come to believe our own press clippings, and think we’re a self-made species. “Natural Selection what? Underclass who?” This ease and this ignorance has come at a price. In the process of creating our comfortable, insular lifestyle, we’ve degraded and destroyed the natural foundation upon which it’s all actually based. It’s now a disaster to be without electricity, or the internet. People will die without them; this is how dependent we’ve become on the civilizational sandcastle we’ve built for ourselves. This second order dependence masks the deeper dependencies we thought we’d left behind on the savannah. Much of what passes for wealth is completely disconnected from the physical facts of material existence, and depends on data in computers; a mighty Empire built on nothing, calling the shots. Even now, while the world burns, trillionaires-in-the-making are planning their moves; our fate is in the hands of the spiritual heirs of Ozymandius. But while their influence is indeed powerful, it is not supernatural. We are all on the savannah; it’s right outside the office cubicle, waiting. You’ll get by for a lot longer without a bank than you will without clean air, clean water and food. Unfortunately, the banks have discovered that we can live (for a while at least) on dirty air, dirty water, and a bit of food, which is fine, so long as we pay our credit card bills every month, which are the only bills they think are important enough to pay.
We’re told all the time that we shouldn’t live beyond our financial means, that we should avoid debt. (Or at least that’s what we non-billionaires are told; restraint is for you, not your betters.) Well, we as a civilization are living way beyond our physical means, overextending our “credit” against what the planet can support in anything beyond a very short term. In 2022, Earth Overshoot Day (“the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year”) was July 28. Anything used after that day was either from the proceeds of theft, or burning up capital. If you eat your seed corn, you have nothing to plant. This is also true if you buy, or steal your neighbour’s seed corn and eat it. At some point there’s nothing to plant and nothing to eat. Bankers seem not to have cottoned on to this concept, nor have they realized that at some point, they’re going to run out of clean air, clean water, and food. It’s all connected, and all the high-finance shenannigans in the world won’t change that.
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