The ever-entertaining A Thousand Flowers blog has resurrected its Weekly Wanker slot for the Herald newspaper columnist Iain McWhirter, who has appointed himself as defender of women against the sinister trans agenda. It’s an amusing read, but it’s also fuelled by righteous anger.

If you aren’t familiar with ATF, it’s a Scottish blog that often does the basic legwork supposedly respectable, responsible journalism doesn’t – so for example while major Scottish newspapers were running scare stories about trans people’s threat to women’s refuges and other crucial resources, running op-eds wondering what Scottish women’s groups might think, ATF actually picked up the phone and asked all 40+ of those groups. The response: they’re already trans-inclusive and the newspapers were misrepresenting them.

Back to the Weekly Wanker.

Iain’s a long established Scottish hack who’s perhaps best know as The Da of The Yes Das, one of the few mainstream journos supportive of independence in the run up to the 2014 referendum.  More recently though, his failed attempts to understand the basics of the emergency facing Scotland’s trans community has resulted in a string of absolute shitfests.

As ATF points out, McWhirter appears to be completely ignorant of the current legal situation, of science and of the trans-inclusive policies of Scottish women’s groups. And he’s not the only person spreading fear and long-debunked bullshit, for which the Scottish media seems to have a huge appetite.

in reporting uncritically on these dodgy new groups and amplifying only the views of a tiny, vocal minority of loudly “silenced” transphobes, space simply isn’t being given either to trans groups or to the women’s groups on the front line. Under the comments to Iain’s latest outburst, there were further attacks against groups like Rape Crisis Scotland, Engender and Womens Aid – and their staff – who were accused of actually being secret bigots who were just too scared to say so, SILENCED, in case they lost their funding or jobs.  We’ve already refuted this lie, by calling every Women’s Aid group in Scotland, every group we spoke to said they were trans inclusive already – but the transphobes won’t believe these women, it suits them to call women who work with survivors cowards and liars instead.  Who’s silencing who exactly?

…

These targeted and relentless attacks against women’s groups by the anti trans lobby are deeply sinister and we need to continue to resist them.  The people who peddle lies and bigotry won’t rest until Rape Crisis Scotland has been replaced by a random website run by people hating on orange cats and Women’s Aid is just a badly filled in form about the “dangers” of trans kids.  They want to undermine the credibility of women’s groups so they can claim that space and funding for themselves.

Women and men, cis and trans people, gay people, bi people and lest we forget the “heteronormative” lesbians Iain’s been bashing out his one handed columns about, all need to speak up for those being attacked and undermined by the latest wave of moral panic which has infected the Scottish media.  Otherwise, we risk both trans groups and women’s groups being undermined by bigotry and hatred.