Scottish civil servants have been told that biological sex is a “falsehood” created by the medical establishment to “consolidate white supremacy and gender oppression.”
The Scottish Government’s taxpayer-funded LGBTI+ internal staff network — a devolved administration roughly equivalent to a state government in the United States — was allowed to run its ‘Trans 101’ course for civil servants during work hours, promoting what critics described as “highly political and discriminatory material” in comments.
A ‘trans language primer’ mocked so-called TERFs, or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, and suggested they be renamed FARTs, or Feminism-Appropriating Ridiculous Transphobes.
“TERFs are transphobes loosely organised into a trans hate group” who have an “obsession with trans people in sports”, the primer asserts.
“While they hate all trans people, they attack trans women especially aggressively as trans woman challenge TERFs’ view of biological essentialism around the identity and experience of womanhood,” it accuses, further alleging that TERFs have an “unhealthy fascination with trans kids and work especially hard to make the lives of trans kids miserable”.
In addition to dismissing biological sex as a “falsehood” invented to “reinforce white supremacy” in some nebulous way, the training criticised the “outdated” terms biological men and biological women, as well as male-bodied and female-bodied.
“Wo/men have fe/male bodies, regardless of their trans status,” a slide on the subject declares, insisting that “wo/men are both biologically and genetically wo/men, regardless of their trans status.”
This statement appears to be a direct shot across the bows of people like Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who has previously mocked the idea that a “penis” who commits a rape should be considered “a woman.”
Susan Smith of the For Women Scotland organisation — which the trainers might describe as a FART group — commented on the training, asking how women could trust that “civil servants, potentially including those drafting legislation like gender recognition reform, have any care for our rights when they are being trained to call us offensive names and told we are hate groups?”
Smith also suggested that the training was illegal because it was politically and unobjective: “Perhaps the Scottish Government believes they are above the Equality Act and other laws on workplace discrimination — they are not,” she said.