Can’t be shared too often.

We did tell you.

In perhaps the clearest example of #ThisNeverHappens since Karen White, a serial sex offender has been charged with indecent assault over the Wi Spa incident.

As you may remember, in June, Wi Spa customer ‘Cubana Angel’ posted a viral video to social media from inside the Los Angeles spa in which she told a front desk employee that a man had exposed his penis in a female-only steam room to women and girls, only to be told that there was nothing staff could do because the man claimed to be transgender.

Which is the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it, as we’ve pointed out at least 7 trillion times. Men can claim to be transgender any time any place, so why wouldn’t sex offenders take advantage of the new Rule that we must never say “Like hell you are” under any circumstances?

New York Post writer Andy Ngo has revealed that Darren Agee Merager, 52, has been charged with five counts of indecent exposure over the incident. Ngo has disclosed additional details that are both shocking and entirely predictable at the same time.

It has emerged that four women and a female child have alleged that Merager was ‘partially erect’ when he exposed himself. Also, he is a tier-one registered sex offender with—among other felony convictions for sexual offences—two prior convictions of indecent exposure stemming from incidents in 2002 and 2003. In 2008, he was convicted for failing to register as a sex offender. 

Incredibly, Darren is also currently facing six charges of indecent exposure over a women’s locker room incident at a swimming pool in 2018.

Now let’s ask him what his pronouns are.

Following that arrest, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department issued an internal flyer that stated: “Merager claims to identify as female so he can access women’s locker rooms and showers.”

He’d be a damn fool not to, wouldn’t he.

We keep saying this is how it works, and we keep being told we’re evil slags for saying it.

The author of the post, ripx4nutmeg, includes a bunch of screenshots of The Nation, The Independent, and other outlets saying it turned out to be a hoax and it caused anti-trans violence. Laurie Penny memorably observed that it’s rude to stare at penises in the women’s changing room.

National Equalities Convener for the SNP here.

Now don’t you dare say she’s claiming gender critical protesters are fascists. Not at all!! She’s saying fascists might show up to stand with anti-trans protesters. Completely different! Not at all meant to mislead people into thinking feminist women are anti-trans fascists!

“Ethnonationalist”? From an official of the SNP? Does she recall what the N stands for? And the S?

The core point though is that protesting some of the goals of the misogynist wing of trans activism is not “anti-trans.” Gender critical feminists don’t want to oppress or punish trans people, we want to protect women’s rights, including our right to talk about our rights without being told to be inclusive of men. That’s it. Trans people can flourish without telling women to shut up about women or include men as women. Fascism is nowhere on the map.

The dogma:

Please don’t erase “trans men” and “nonbinary people” and the rest of the list of navel-gazing narcissism, instead erase women, because let’s face it, women are garbage.

Use the preferred term. Apparently the “preferred term” for women is “people who menstruate”…which seems an odd preference.

Lots to notice here. One, the guy is a medical doctor. [shudder]

Two, he claims that ridiculous and insulting phrase is “the preferred term” – preferred by whom? Who the fuck prefers to say “people who menstruate” instead of women?

Three, he says it costs nothing. It costs fucking everything, you clueless male-centered oblivious creep.

By “today” I’m assuming he meant “today as Texas ends abortion rights” – in other words today when women abruptly lose basic rights over their own bodies and futures and lives, we have to shut up about women and talk about “people who menstruate” instead.

The installation was asking for it.

An appeal for information has been launched after a sculpture in a Sheffield park created to highlight violence against women was destroyed by arsonists.

A little too on the nose, perhaps. “You oppose violence against women? Here, have some symbolic violence against women!”

The six-foot tall hexagonal installation in Ponderosa Park, in Netherthorpe, was razed during the night of August 21.

It was created by students from and funded by Sheffield’s universities to protest violence against women and was only installed three weeks before the fire at an unveiling in late July.

The wooden sculpture was handmade and included poems by members of the Our Bodies Our Streets feminist organisation in Sheffield. It was built to light up at night and project the poems in the dark in support of the Reclaim The Night movement.

Well we can’t have that.

I expect the story will soon be re-written to say that a sculpture created to highlight violence against people was destroyed by arsonists and that it was created by students from and funded by Sheffield’s universities to protest violence against people.

Still at it. They should transfer their social media person to a different job – one that has nothing to do with women’s civil liberties.

Particularly for WOMEN of color and WOMEN without resources. The matter of who is affected by this is not random.

The average Texan WOMAN and HER abortion provider.

Women women women women women women women women women women women women women women women women women women women

Even NOW the ACLU won’t say our name. It’s as if they’d deleted the word “Jews” from their vocabulary in 1933.

People, people, Texans.

People, anyone, patients.

Not a woman to be seen.

Even Kamala Harris ffs. If even she can’t say it…

WOMEN of color, WOMEN with low incomes. Not generic communities, not generic individuals, but specifically and exclusively WOMEN.

Updating with

Even worse – not just “communities” and “individuals” but also “people’s access.”

But they have to exclude, no matter what.

Will new Olympics rules exclude or include transgender athletes?

Most athletes are not included in the Olympics. That’s why the Olympics are such a big deal: they’re a contest among the very best.

Backlash against transgender and non-binary competitors in Tokyo has highlighted the problems preventing inclusion in sports at all levels

But “inclusion” isn’t a goal of the Olympics. They’re not supposed to exclude for reasons irrelevant to the competition, but they are both allowed and supposed to exclude most hopefuls, because that’s the whole point – excluding competitors over and over until there are only three left, who win bronze silver and gold.

When Grace McKenzie decided to undergo gender transition and live openly as a woman three years ago, she resigned herself to giving up team sports. 

As a child, she played everything from baseball and soccer to karate, and these communities were crucial to her well-being. But transphobia is rife in mainstream sports, and she didn’t see how she could be accepted as a transgender woman. 

It’s not “transphobia” to exclude men from women’s sports. McKenzie was right not force himself on women, and wrong when he changed his mind.

…she’s become a committed player for the Golden Gate Women’s Rugby Club in San Francisco, and a fierce advocate for trans-inclusion in sports.

That “fierce” doesn’t sound as admirable when you remember this is a man, advocating for the inclusion of men in women’s sports.

“The community let me in, affirmed me and showed me I can define womanhood for myself and not let it be defined for me,” she said. “It’s one of the most beautiful gifts I’ve been given.”

What nonsense. Men can’t define womanhood for themselves. It’s insulting and damaging and all too “fierce.”

Across the world, evolving gender norms are challenging and reshaping the way we approach competitive sports, which have traditionally been segregated into ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories. 

No shit; that’s because of the physical differences between the two sexes. If you don’t segregate them then women can’t be in competitive sports at all.

While the participation in Tokyo of non-binary athletes such as American skateboarder Alana Smith and Canadian soccer player Quinn were deemed less controversial, they were also repeatedly misgendered by commentators.

“If you compare the conversation around Laurel to [that around] Quinn, the trans [women] misogyny is evident,” Mckenzie said. “It’s only trans women who are ‘unfair’ and ‘shouldn’t compete’. Quinn is [deemed] fine because cisgender women don’t necessarily support or believe in non-binary [identities].”

Of course it’s only trans women who are unfair: because they are men competing against women. The meaningless “non-binary” has nothing to do with it unless it’s a “non-binary” man competing against women.

The article goes on for many more words, all of them as stupid as the ones above.

Yet another of these patronizing “reminders” of utter bullshit, and in this case harmful bullshit.

Here’s your periodic reminder that it is ONLY women who need abortion.

(Abortion, not “abortion care.” Is she squeamish about abortion? So squeamish that she feels she has to try to veil it?)

It is only women who need abortion. That includes women who claim to be trans men, and women who claim to be the meaningless “non-binary.” Be trans or non-binary all you like, but if you’re pregnant, then you’re a woman.

Trying to hide the fact that it’s women and women only who need abortion rights just makes it harder to fight for those rights…those rights which just took a massive blow to the knees. Distracting people with gender lies will not help anyone.

Lawmakers trying to make corporations defy the legal process.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) have warned telecommunications companies against sharing information with the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

McCarthy and Greene on Tuesday both suggested that the companies would face repercussions for complying with the committee’s request for data once Republicans are in control of the government. The committee asked 35 telecommunications and social media companies to supply it with the records on Monday.

They didn’t “suggest” it, they said it.

“This is leading us into waters that we’ve never been in in America,” Greene said during an appearance on Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson Tonight. “America was never meant to be a Communist country. But these are the tactics that Democrats are wanting to use.”

“These cell phone companies, these telecommunications companies, they better not play with these Democrats,” added Greene. “Because Republicans are coming back into the majority in 2022 and we will take this very serious… if they go along with this, they will be shut down. And that’s a promise.”

See? Not a suggestion, a promise – a promised threat.

The foul Texas anti-abortion law has gone into effect, courtesy of the Supreme Court’s refusal to do an emergency review. Reporting on the subject is badly undermined by the near-total avoidance of That Word.

A near-total abortion ban in Texas empowers any private citizen to sue an abortion provider who violates the law, opening the floodgates to harassing and frivolous lawsuits from anti-abortion vigilantes that could eventually shutter most clinics in the state.

“Abortion access will be thrown into absolute chaos,” says Amanda Williams, executive director of the abortion support group the Lilith Fund, a plaintiff in the suit that challenged the law. “Unfortunately, many people who need access the most will slip through the cracks, as we have seen over the years with the relentless attacks here in our state.”

There it is already – “people” who will need access. But it’s not “people”; if it were the law wouldn’t exist. “People” don’t get pregnant, women do. This is all political, and we can’t talk intelligently about the politics if we can’t even name the class of people that is being deprived of rights. It’s women who get pregnant, and that’s not just a random attribute, it’s a core reason women are subordinated and dominated and deprived of rights. Women are all-important because of the power to make new people, and because of that fact, women are treated as bad suspect rebellious slaves. Women, not people.

“It is unbelievable that Texas politicians have gotten away with this devastating and cruel law that will harm so many.”

So many what?

In the days leading up to the law’s enactment, Texas clinics say they have been forced to turn away patients who need abortion care at the law’s cutoff point this week and into the near future.

Women. They’re not patients if they’re turned away, and it’s important to keep it front and center that this is a full-on attack on women.

“We are all going to comply with the law even though it is unethical, inhumane, and unjust,” Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi, a Texas abortion provider and OB-GYN, said. “It threatens my livelihood and I fully expect to be sued. But my biggest fear is making sure the most vulnerable in my community, the Black and Latinx patients I see, who are already most at risk from logistical and financial barriers, get the care they need.”

Latinx? They’re Latina.

The law will force most patients to travel out of state for care, increasing the driving distance to an abortion clinic twentyfold – from an average of 12 miles to 248 miles one-way, nearly 500 miles round-trip, the Guttmacher Institute found. And that is only if patients have the resources to do so, including time off work, ability to pay for the procedure, and in some cases childcare.

Women. It’s women this is being done to.

Many abortion-seeking women are expected to be delayed until later in pregnancy and others will be forced to carry pregnancy to term or try to end their pregnancies without medical oversight, abortion providers caution. As with most abortion restrictions, low-income women and women of color will bear the greatest burden under SB8.

There we go. Finally. But do that all through.

Rob Jessel tests Scotland’s shiny new Hate Crime and Public Order Act:

As Lucy Hunter Blackburn explained in her superb analysis of the Bill, feminists were alarmed by its failure to address speech about sex and gender, arguing that it would increase the chilling effect on debate. The Scottish Government breezily responded that people would not be criminalised for making basic statements about the nature of sex and gender identity, in ordinary language. 

But they were joking. Jessel went to Glasgow Sheriff Court to support Marion yesterday along with a bunch of other people. What to wear?

As a minor but grizzled combatant in the gender wars, I have acquired a number of t-shirts stating biological facts, including one emblazoned with the basic, incontrovertible statement “Transwomen are men”. I thought it wise to ask the police if I’d be committing a public order offence or, worse, a hate crime, should I put it on.

The constables’ answer was textbook: “As far as we’re concerned, you’re free to wear what you like. But if it offends anyone and they complain to us, you will have committed a hate crime.”

Which textbook is that, one wonders. If someone complains to the police, you will have been accused of committing a hate crime. There’s a not very subtle distinction there.

At least in normal world that’s the case. Apparently in Scotland it really isn’t? The accusation really is the same thing as conviction?

This is the same Looking Glass world that Fair Cop has been exposing in England and Wales, where any complainant is automatically afforded “victim” status and the accused is recorded (often without their knowledge) as having committed a “non-crime hate incident” — all without due process of law. The difference is, however, that south of the border we’re only dealing with College of Police guidance. In Scotland, this is on the statute book.

I guess the fact that it’s recorded as an incident rather than a crime makes it ok to skip the due process part. (The cops chatting to Jessel seem to have been wrong on the facts.)

I know we’ve been around this track before but it keeps causing my brain to go into whirly mode.

Bear in mind that Marion is being charged under the old law. The new version will make it even easier for people to maliciously report other people, since they do not even have to prove an underlying criminal offence.

In this light it’s a very good thing that David Paisley is leaving Scotland.

On the one hand a feminist woman gets arrested and persecuted for gender critical tweets, on the other hand Fox News and Republican members of Congress openly incites violent insurrection with impunity. It’s like a kind of displacement behavior – the alpha male bites a junior so the junior bites not the alpha male but someone even more junior. Fox and members of Congress are powerful; feminist women who tweet not so much, so lets go after the feminist women who tweet.

In a Monday night monologue targeting the White House and military leaders over the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Carlson demanded resignations. He also said: “When leaders refuse to hold themselves accountable over time, people revolt. That happens.

“We need to change course immediately and start acknowledging our mistakes. The people who made them need to start acknowledging them or else the consequences will be awful.”

When did Trump ever hold himself accountable? Name one time.

On Sunday, the North Carolina Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn, a gadfly on the extreme right of the party, said at an event in his state that Joe Biden was not properly elected.

He also said widespread election fraud, which supporters of Donald Trump continue to claim without evidence, would “lead to one place, and that’s bloodshed”.

“And I will tell you,” Cawthorn said, “as much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American. And the way that we can have recourse against that is if we all passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states.”

We already have election security. Voter fraud is extremely rare. What he wants is voter suppression.

Can we hold him accountable?

Can you say “reversal”?

Always always ask who has the power, says Jolyon Maugham, by way of underlining that it’s women.

This was carefully timed.

To understand the careful timing we have to go back to June, and a post by Women Are Human dated June 10:

Airdrie, Scotland. A 50-year-old mother-of-two has been charged with a hate crime after an extremist transgender advocate reported her to police for retweeting a photograph of green, white and violet women’s suffrage ribbons.

Police Scotland confirmed that Marion Millar, an accountant, business owner and gender-critical feminist campaigner, was arrested. Ms Millar, who has since been released on bail, is accused of posting six tweets in 2019 that run afoul of the Communications Act 2003.

The women’s suffrage ribbon, which was tied to a chain-link fence in front of a tree outside the Glasgow studio where a BBC soap opera is shot, appears to be a central focus of the police investigation.

The BBC soap is the one that employs David Paisley.

The complaint is rumored to have been filed by David Paisley, an aged 42, heavily muscled, tattooed actor who stars as Rory Murdoch on the Glasgow soap River City. There is no official confirmation that Mr Paisley filed the complaint.

The complainant purportedly told police that the bow of ribbons shared by Ms Millar represented a hangman’s noose, putting the complainant in fear of his life as a transgender advocate who is also a gay man.

The C-list entertainer tweeted that he has fled his home and is in hiding. He claimed that police have “put my home on rapid response,” and that he is in contact with a local victim and mental health support team.

Now he’s tragically leaving Scotland altogether and it’s all the fault of those horrible witchy women.

Updating to add:

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany Room.

I have recently taken an almost obsessive interest in the study of cults. I have thus far been reading Cults Inside Out by Rick Ross, Losing Reality by Robert Lifton, and Cults in our Midst by Margaret Singer [1]. Rather than write a separate summary or review of each book, I will try to make a synthesis of what I take to be some of the main points. “Cult apologists” often dismiss the cult label as a pejorative to stigmatize new or unconventional religions. All the authors are therefore careful to stress that cults are defined by their behavior rather than their beliefs, and while many cults are religious in nature, almost any cause, ideology, or belief system can form the basis of a cult. There are cults based on political ideologies, philosophies, business plans, health fads, alternative lifestyles, self-help programs, meditation techniques, martial arts etc. Even abusive and controlling relationships can be understood as a kind of “Cult of One” (cf. Ross) and display much of the same dynamics as larger cults.

Robert Lifton provided what still seems to be the most widely accepted definition of a “destructive cult” [2] based on 3 main criteria (my formulation):

1. The group is centered around a charismatic leader (or, in some cases, a small ruling elite) with little or no meaningful accountability. The leader is believed to possess some unique insight or knowledge and increasingly becomes the subject of worship until – no matter what the group was initially supposed to be about – the “cause” mutates into “whatever the leader says”.

2. The group uses certain highly coercive persuasion techniques – known as “thought reform” or (in everyday speech) “brain washing” – to gain undue influence and control over its members, the end result being that the members become increasingly dependent on the leader and end up making decisions that are clearly not in their own best interest, but consistently in the best interest of the leader.

3. The leader uses his/her influence over the members in harmful ways, ranging from financial exploitation and the extraction of unpaid labor to medical neglect, criminal acts, sexual exploitation, violence, terrorism, mass-suicide, mass murder etc.

One common myth is that only people who suffer from other major problems join cults. While it is certainly true that people going through a difficult period in their lives are especially vulnerable to recruitment by cults, no one is immune. In fact, cults are usually not interested in “damaged goods”, but are mainly looking for healthy, intelligent, resourceful individuals who can do useful work for the group and bring in a steady stream of cash. The Church of Scientology famously specializes in recruiting celebrities – hardly a notoriously weak group – and Aum Shinrikyo (infamous for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway) disproportionally recruited scientists.

Nobody deliberately joins a cult. Indeed, another common feature of destructive cults is the use of deceptive recruitment techniques. More often than not potential members are first recruited into a “front group” with no obvious connection to the cult. The first encounter might be a perfectly innocent looking course, lecture, or seminar on some interesting topic, a political meeting, a personality test, a therapy session, a yoga class etc. Only after luring potential recruits more deeply into its web does the group start gradually revealing its true nature as well as its more eccentric doctrines. E.g. scientologists go through years of “auditing” and indoctrination before hearing a single word about Xenu the evil galactic overlord.

Expressions like “thought reform”, “mind control” and “brain washing” conjure up associations to all sorts of science fiction-like techniques for “reprograming” people’s brains and turning them into mindless robots or zombies (Winston Smith, Darth Vader, the Winter Soldier, Peeta Mellark, Dreykov’s Widows etc.). By comparison the real thought reform process is almost disappointingly mundane (or at least that’s my impression). Some cults do indeed employ more “exotic” techniques like hypnosis (in itself not all it’s cracked up to be in popular fiction), guided imagery (to instill false memories), hallucinogenic drugs, various methods for inducing hyper-ventilation and dizziness (to be re-interpreted as spiritual epiphanies) etc. Cult leaders like Jim Jones also bolstered their credibility by performing what appeared to be miraculous healings and by appearing to have access to uncannily accurate information about total strangers, seemingly through direct revelation from God. However, by far the most common (and almost certainly the most effective) techniques are all familiar from non-cultic setting, e.g. (non-verbal) social cues, deference to authority, conformity and peer-pressure, overwork, sleep-deprivation etc. What’s different about the thought reform process is both the intensity and the coordinated nature of the persuasive effort as well as the recruit’s own ignorance that any such effort is going on.

After the initial encounter the next step is usually trying to lure the potential recruit to a more isolated setting free of external influences. The recruit is met with “love bombing” and made to feel special, chosen, part of an exclusive elite on a mission of cosmic significance. By observing the other members, the recruit quickly hones in on what the expected behaviors are and learns to model his/her own behavior on theirs. Since no explicit orders or instructions are given, everything feels voluntary and even spontaneous. What follows is a systematic process of destabilizing and breaking down the recruit’s sense of self by inducing shame and guilt (the “unfreezing phase”). Depending on the particular teachings of the group this may take the form of confessing your “sins”, confronting your inner demons, or overcoming the “excuses” that are “holding you back” and preventing you from “taking control” of your life etc. The details are irrelevant, since anything other than total surrender and obedience to the leader will be turned back against you and re-framed as sinful, pathological, excuses, signs of weakness, lack of commitment etc. Through endless attacks and confrontations combined with intense peer-pressure, physical and mental exhaustion, sleep-deprivation etc., the recruit is finally reduced to a state of helplessness and dependency. In this state the recruit learns to parrot back whatever the group wants him/her to say (the “changing” phase). This in turn is met with social reward and re-interpreted by the group as a cathartic experience, a sign of progress, proof of finally “getting it” etc. (the “refreezing” phase).

To prevent backsliding, cults do everything in their power to monopolize the time and attention of their members and cut them off from other perspectives or sources of information. This can include anything from geographical isolation to demands that members shun friends or family members that are critical of the cult. Another method is simply keeping the members engaged in endless cult-led activities, which has the double benefit of limiting communication to other cult members while simultaneously keeping everyone too busy to think too deeply or carefully about anything. Most cults also develop an internal jargon that encourage circular reasoning and reliance on thought-terminating clichés while at the same time making it significantly more difficult to have an intelligible conversation with outsiders. Finally, cult members learn to fear and demonize everyone outside the cult, engage in self-censorship, and only trust information coming from the leader. Ironically, one common perception is that people join cults because they’re too “trusty”, or “naïve”, or “gullible”. On the other hand, most cults are into all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories and quite often see themselves as the only people on the planet who have not been “brainwashed”, “taken the blue pill”, “drunk the Kool-Aid” etc. It’s the “sheeple” and the “systemites” outside the group who are living in the Matrix while the enlightened few on the inside are the ones who have taken the red pill, had their eyes opened and see the world as it really is. Apparently extreme distrust, suspicion, and cynicism (especially of the selective kind) can be manipulated as easily as trust, naivety, and gullibility.

I don’t think any of the authors specifically mentions cognitive dissonance or justification spirals, but it’s clearly implied in various places. Once a concession to the cult has been made, you have a stake in defending it: “If this were a con game, only an idiot could fall for it. But I’m not an idiot, so it can’t be a con game”; “If this were immoral, only a despicable person would do it. But I’m not a despicable person, so it can’t be immoral”. The same justifications used to rationalize concessions a,b,c make it very hard to resist concessions d,e,f without looking inconsistent or hypocritical even to yourself (practically the definition of cognitive dissonance). On your path over to the dark side, you never “cross a line” where things instantly and abruptly change from “definitely ok” to “definitely not ok”, and before you know it you have gone all the way to x,y,z and burned all bridges behind you, and now there is no longer any “face-saving” way of turning back. There is also the closely related Sunk Cost Fallacy: More misery may be easier to accept than the realization that all those former sacrifices were in vain.

[1] I have also been watching Jonestown – Terror in the Jungle, The Jonestown Massacre- Paradise Lost, and Going Clear – Scientology and the Prison of Belief, all available for free on YouTube.

[2] It has become a bit of a cliché to talk about how a certain group or movement (trumpists, QAnon, TRAs etc.) is “just like a cult”. Others are quick to identify the various ways in which said group/movement does not meet the formal definition of a cult and conclude that any comparison is therefore fallacious in principle. As Timothy Snyder has pointed out we see something similar in the case of “fascism”. There are people eager to portray everything about the current surge of authoritarianism as just “like the 1930s”, while others argue that since what we’re seeing now is not like the 1930s in every way, there are no lessons to be learned from the history of fascism that are at all relevant to our current situation. The latter clearly doesn’t follow. A movement can display cultish or fascistic traits to a lesser or greater extent, and the differences can be as enlightening as the similarities.

The Beeb:

Marion Millar faces homophobic and transphobic charges

Do journalists/headline writers get no training these days? They don’t mean the charges were “homophobic and transphobic” but that’s what they said.

A feminist activist has appeared in court accused of sending homophobic and transphobic tweets.

Marion Millar, 50, allegedly behaved in a threatening or abusive manner between October and June within the Glasgow area and in Rutherglen, South Lanarkshire.

Prosecutors state she repeatedly posted content on social media that was of a “homophobic and transphobic nature”.

Bollocks.

Joanna Cherry told the court why she wanted “to continue without a plea”:

“The first is practical. Miss Millar only saw the complaint, with charges from the Crown, 10 minutes prior (to this hearing).”

“The second is that the communication charges are not compatible with guidelines, so it’s not appropriate to plead with.

“The third is it raised serious questions about Miss Millar’s European human rights.”

We have a human right to say that men are not women and that we have the right to say so.

Perhaps I can help. Yes, this prosecution does go against Marion’s human rights. We can see that from all the way over here.

What kind of tweets don’t get prosecuted in Scotland?

You know.

But Marion does.