As you have certainly been made aware of by the BBC's "unbiased" reporting on the subject, the Scottish Parliament has passed the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill by 86 votes to 39, which now waits on some old guy to put a stamp on a printout of the bill, at which point we drown the Registrar General with statutory declarations. Probably.
Reported by probably one of the more tired and vilified reporters, Beth from the lands of Twitter, it was made clear democracy nearly was subverted and blockaded at Stage 3.
A start was made when - mostly TERFs - submitted 150 amendments to the legislation that caused two day-long debates from 2pm to 12am on Tuesday evening, and another from 1.15pm on Wednesday evening to 1.15am the next morning. Lots of the amendments were immediately shot down on account of being against main portions of the bill e.g. changing the age back to 18, re-introduce talking to medical professionals, standardising ID requirements, forgetting sex offenders are people, standardising evidence requirements, changing the time you have to have lived in your gender for...
Of course, this was only the start of the wonderful art of conservative filibustering. Lots of us nearly (or actually) fell asleep from boredom, as the Conservatives took us on rants about anything vaguely relating to trans people.
At one point on Wednesday, while they were going through and rejecting a bunch of bigot amendments, one managed to pass by one solitary vote. Quickly everyone and their Blåhajs woke up and start searching through the amendment list until they realised it was an amendment that did absolutely nothing, but as it was placed in by SNP TERF Ash Regan, so it came in to Conservative applause. The amendment, Amendment 71, says that the bill does not affect the ECHR Article 10 (freedom of expression, p8) and its impact on Scottish law. Which it cannot do in any case so it being on the cover of the bill is absolutely unnecessary and only seeks to delay the bill.
On Thursday, we also saw the wonderful wonders of speeches uttering such utterances as:
-The bill maybe calling transgender refugees from the rest of the UK to Scotland
-The bill causing sex offenders to go into single-sex spaces (Rachel Hamilton did this one a lot despite forgetting that a GRC does not and has never done this)
-The bill causing sports to be bullied into accepting transgender people (which went hilariously, this is all the one speaker):
-Intersex people could cause issues if the rules aren't clear (not to do with the GRA)
-To allow trans women into women's sports means they will win (not to do with the GRA)
-Which is comparable to East Germany when they doped all their athletes, but 10000s of men break that record every year.
-The Q-angle gives biological males more strength or something or other, apparently, seeing as most of us had long since tuned out.
At that point the person saying that said (roughly) "I didn't think I'd need to mention the Q-angle in this chamber" which is just blatantly a filibuster because he, point-blank, did not need to. As I have said, the GRA doesn't do anything with sport, and the Q-angle is about 3 levels removed from that. That is the level of filibuster we had to deal with keeping us up and scuppering our plans for our Thursdays.
So, we got through what the MSPs had to say about delaying the bill. How about the absolute farce that was the Scottish Feminist Network's attempts?
For context, the Scottish Feminist Network (SFN) is a group of TERFs under a Microsoft Paint logo that like to harass, be hypocritical, mass-report, but most importantly for today, subvert democracy.
They started long before the debate, going around their network and getting everyone to go to their local Tory MSPs and ask for 5 tickets for the public galleries (for free of course), the maximum one could get, each, knowing full well they wouldn't use them. Very quickly they had to stop MSPs submitting ticket requests as the chamber was nearly fully booked suspiciously quickly. This was because they "couldn't afford TRAs [TERF lingo for Trans Rights Activist, or decent human being] getting in" and therefore needed to block them participating in our democratic process and celebrating. Maybe they were worried we might scupper their plans?
On the Tuesday of the debate, not so far into it, it was suspended for around half an hour as just after Russell Findlay's 'sex offenders can't have rights' amendment failed as the SFN decided to start screaming about that - claiming that there was "no democracy in here" - and they simply got escorted out (after some coaxing) and most came back in. The rest of the debate was over-amended and filibustered as predicted, and on the Wednesday nothing much happened.
On the Thursday, when the final debate vote was to take place, however, it was much more interesting. To open, Rachel Hamilton asked the Presiding Officer if the bill still fit inside of the financial memorandum after the amendments, which if it wasn't would mean the government would need to redo the memorandum, this being a clear delay tactic. The Officer immediately shut that down on account of being inherently wrong.
Afterwards, not only did we get the East German Q-angle rant, but we had multiple interruptions by the SFN. When Shona Robison, who was the main defender of the legislation, was giving her closing remarks she said something about the bill having no negative impact. Almost immediately, someone said: "Lies! It's lies! There's loads of negative impact! But nobody is taking any notice! Nobody will listen to women!" before being cut off by the Official Parliament Audio Slider™.
That was a bit dodgy to say the least coming in the same parliamentary session as Sue Webber complaining about the same group of people being threatened with arrest, presumably for disrupting democracy. The rest of the debate passed to the vote, in which as aforementioned we won 86-39, with no debate over who won. Immediately after the secession of the applause, screams of "sHaMe oN yOu" were heard from many a SFN member, leading to this now-infamous clip (downloaded, clipped and helpfully subtitled by yours truly) of the Presiding Officer quickly changing her mind over the continuation of the business of the day.
Within this riot, prominent TERF Elaine Millar went "If you are not going to be decent, I am going to be indecent", and promptly lifted her skirt to show her premeditated merkin imitation of lady parts, which cause Mumsnet to think it was some crazed trans person and that only a man would do that. Go figure.
Now, I do live in a house with a GC (he refuses to be called a feminist) who I do still speak to, and he praised the TERFs and filibusters and democracy subverts, but had assured himself that the UK Government would "shoot it down anyway", which while debatably possible, is highly unlikely and an unpopular position for an unpopular party ran by unpopular people to take.
TL;DR:
TERFs don't like the democratic process, and will seek to throw it off course at any possible point.
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