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Tim Hopkins has been polluting the letter columns of Scotland under the auspices of his "Equality Network" for decades, making vague legal threats to anyone daring to disagree with him.

He was one of those who started the trend of making up some pressure group to give oneself the aura of representing some larger remit rather than one's own hobby horses. Lazy journalism failing to fact check did the rest - credibility out of nothing.

Little surprise since then there's been a plethora of cranks and weirdos from wacky Christian cults, bedsit secularists and wind conspiracy theorists getting sizeable media platforms to peddle their madness.

As the people in East Anglia discovered in the 17th century, never trust a Hopkins.

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Susan,

You might consider making a a story of why Maggie Chapman and Iain 'Big Tent' Anderson of Stonewall have refused to respond to my proposed solution to the GRR (Scotland) Bill and the GRA that I sent to Alister Jack?

https://open.substack.com/pub/mneill/p/no-response-from-stonewall-or-msp?r=zfazk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

The solution is quite simple:

1. Replace the GRC with a DNIBS certificate that indicates that the holder Does Not Identify as his or her Birth Sex;

2. Include a second sex marker DNIBS (in addition to birth sex) on official documents where sex is relevant and necessary;

3. The person retains their birth sex

The GRA has been made redundant by the laws on same-sex marriage and civil partnerships. The GRA needs to change.

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Thanks for shining a light on this. After the past few weeks, perhaps the cracks are beginning to appear in the monolithic "TWAW and no debate" edifice? Here's hoping so anyway! Good to see that more and more people appear (however belatedly) to be waking up to the problems inherent in extreme trans activism. The capture of so many NGO's, interest groups and charities which depended on public funds by this deeply regressive, misogynistic an illiberal movement will go down in history as a huge mistake. Its up to all of us to ensure that capture and funding stops, is reversed where necessary, and that public bodies are held accountable and do not over-reach in their often faulty application of guidance and/or legislation.

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How thoroughly and rapidly a government falls for this Emperor's New Clothes movement is a great index of how healthy or unhealthy the democratic process is, in that nation. Malta, you expect, bunch of gangsters that they are. Ireland, well, they've a bit of a reputation perhaps - but in their case it was done very much on the sly,

with major expansions in scope after the consultation process ended.

Scotland, though ...

That one really hurts.

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Very interesting indeed!

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To pin the blame on one man is inaccurate. Arguably, this culture has feminist roots. The idea that gender and even sex are performative goes back to Simone de Beauvoir 'one is not born but rather becomes a woman'. This view has been developed by Judith Butler who believed that sex as well as gender were socially constructed. That leaves people free to construct themselves as any gender they choose.

Similarly, papers such as the Guardian and the BBC have presented men and women as interchangeable widgets. For example, misreporting a cycle race to claim the female cyclist had caught up with the men race that started 10 minutes earlier. https://toxicfeminism.blog/2020/07/01/a-feminist-cycle-race/ - This kind of misreporting made it easier for men who wanted to compete in women sports.

The intellectual roots of trans ideology are complex and varied. To focus only on the men is perhaps misandrist?

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