More What Fresh Hell is This?

 There's been a feeding frenzy in the British press, this week, as they stick their pickling forks into wee Nicola, over the utter foolishness of her stance on transgender persons, the Gender Recognition Reform Bill and allowing male rapists to serve their sentences in the female prison estate. Here in Ishmaelia, mr mongoose said "I saw Mrs Fish getting into a terrible tangle yesterday about the meat-and-two-veg matter. (She's looking tired, I thought)" and mr mike expressed his honest Aussie bewilderment: "I'm curious about this tranny stuff. Seems another Western phenomenon, fin de siècle sort of thing. Another excuse for laziness, and academic failure. Victim culture; somebody else's fault".  Just as a matter of interest, mr mike, is Australia part of the "global south" that has replaced the term  "Third World countries" in politically correct circles?

Anyway, as we reported on Sunday in What Fresh Hell is This? there are three violent male offenders in the Scottish criminal justice system, one a paedophile, one a double rapist and one convicted of multiple appalling crimes of violence against women. All three have adopted female names, choose to cross dress and to say they are women, although they are biologically male. All three wish to be housed in the female prison estate, where they will have access to female prisoners, most of whom have been multiply victimised by men prior to their own incarceration. Because Scotland's prison system has been operating the principle of accepting gender self-identification, two of them, now known as Isla Bryson (the tattoed double rapist with the birth name of Adam Graham) and Katie Dolatowski (the paedophile), have ben housed in Scotland's women's prison, Cornton Vale.

In 2014, the SPS published its gender identity policy which works to ensure that the prison accommodation chosen ‘should reflect the gender in which the person in custody is currently living’. The guidance to prison officers was unambiguous: ‘People in custody should be rubbed down and body-searched in accordance with the social gender in which they are living, rather than according to their physical body’. Stonewall and the Trans Alliance had convinced the SPS that this would pave the way for self-declaration across all public services. 

Andrew Burns, who now calls himself Tiffany Scott, the other member of this unholy trinity, applied for transfer to Cornton Vale, in 2016, but was prevented due to the courage and intransigence of the then governor, Rhona Hotchkiss, a staunch defender of women's rights, common sense, and deeply experienced in the drive, ability and manipulative strategies of imprisoned men in pursuit of their goals. Writing in the Spectator, Rhona Hotchkiss states: "this was an individual who, over his years of offending, had committed multiple acts of serious violence, including to prison and health care staff. From prison, he stalked a 13 year-old girl and intimidated a female member of staff so completely she left her job. He was so dangerous and disruptive that, on one occasion, he couldn’t be taken into court to be sentenced for an attack on an officer. He even tried to change his name to ‘God Almighty’, so he could humiliate the staff around him whom he thought would have to address him as such."

Sturgeon's cack-handed attempts at social engineering have failed: the GRR Bill has been blocked and she has now, in the light of outraged public opinion, performed a complete U-turn, and stated that male sex-offenders will not serve their sentences nor be remanded in a women's prison. As Debbie Hayton, a transwoman writer and teacher, says,  Sturgeon's policies have done the greatest damage to  "transgender people themselves. They have now been indelibly linked in the public mind with sex criminals and ‘trans rapists’.... trans people are more vulnerable to suspicion and mistrust than we were in 2016 – but it is not the fault of JK Rowling, or anyone else grounded in reality. The responsibility lies squarely with those who were so naïve they thought they could sweep away safeguards, and that selfish and abusive men would not take advantage."

So, is this the issue that will unseat Sturgeon, who has been as entrenched in power as the head of a corrupt African State or, indeed, of Russia? She has survived the embarrassment of her schemes becoming widely known to blacken the character and see off her predecessor, Salmond, the trousering of many thousands of pounds donated for a supposedly ring-fenced  campaign for Scottish independence (they kind of got lost in the general pot of SNP funding), presiding over a state which has the ignominy of being the drug-death capital of Europe, the appalling performance of NHS Scotland, and destroying the Scottish Education system, which used to be quite highly regarded. She sailed over the Scottish ferry-building fiasco, (remember, they painted windows onto one ferry to make it look completed for its 'launching'), where the costs mounted to dizzying heights. 

Probably not. As long as she stands firm and gives out the emotional Braveheart rhetoric, there's no unseating her.