You can be born anywhere.
That’s chance.
The rest is… choice.
Choose the sun in Naples
and the rain in Glasgow.
Choose heading to a World Cup.
Choose tattie scones on a Tuesday
and pizza on a Wednesday.
Ignore everyone telling you it’s easier the other way
and embrace being the underdog.
Choose a skipper that’s always on duty.
Choose getting absolutely written off
and getting up and showing them anyway.
You can’t decide where you’re born.
But you can decide who you stand with.
CHOOSE SCOTLAND 🏴
Lovely big screen tribute to Donny Strathie,Tartan Army footsoldier who died in Boston last Sunday, hours after win over Haiti. He was 76. Fans have been invited to take part in a minute's applause in 76th minute tonight. As his picture faded, Loch Lomond blared over speakers
Scotland fans have donated nearly $30,000 to charities in Providence as a thank you for welcoming them for their World Cup matches.
• $10,000 to the children's hospital cancer unit
• $10,000 to soccer for underprivileged kids
• $6,500 to help kids learn bagpipes
The mob is out in force. The more I see of this cruel “activism,” the more convinced I am that I do not want them anywhere near me or my music, however that may affect my career. I won’t be held to ransom—no more blackmail. What I see more than anything is a spoiled and entitled childishness. I am not interested in being their “mother” or “queen”; these babies need to grow up and allow artists like myself the dignity of opinion and the space and freedom to create. Or let them have AI pop star avatars that never question them. Let the music industry do its worst; let it continue to infantilize and exploit them. Let them have a hologram, perfectly designed for an insular, echo-chamber culture. Perhaps I’ve lived through the last moments of the best period in popular music and, in fact, it’s over—or at least it is at the beginning of the end. If that is so, I have nothing to lose.
Just for the record, I have zero hate toward trans people; I do not deny anyone’s existence. The post that has caused such frantic panic among the trans activist mob is a graph that shows a steep decline in trans and non-binary identity in young people over the past few years in the USA. My declaration “it was never real” refers to the contagion that was undoubtedly aided by the submission of the media, captured medical institutions, and social media derangement. Recently, this wilfully blind and irresponsible behavior has been curtailed to some degree, as more and more people affected by it stand up and demand a long-needed audit of trans ideology, which continues to stamp its boot across anyone who decries its negative consequences. Children, families, women, and gay people have all been adversely affected by the insane belief that one can change sex—the core hallucination of this destructive and insidious movement—while bad faith actors have lined their pockets.
The arts as a whole are a shadow of their former free and inclusive selves. I’ve had the most free and fun time possible making the music I believe in over the past 30 years. If being a compassionate artist is to be my downfall now, then so be it. I know in my heart that one day, I will be remembered as a brave person, both morally and artistically uncompromising. In the long run, that will be my legacy.
The Sandie Peggie employment tribunal is currently exposing, as perhaps no court case to date has, the issue of class as it relates to the top-down imposition of gender identity ideology in the workplace.
'Diversity officer' Isla Bumba has now admitted in court that she didn't bother consulting the 1992 regulations guaranteeing single-sex spaces when she told a trans-identified male, Dr Beth Upton, to use the female changing room at the hospital where he was working. Bumba justified this decision with comments that I assume sounded really clever and convincing, inside her own head.
'I don’t know anything about Beth’s body. I didn’t at the time. I don’t now. I don’t need to know. But it wouldn’t be something that I would ever have the information of exactly what she is made of, biologically.'
Kate Searle, a consultant in emergency medicine, backed Bumba up, expressing outrage on the witness stand that anyone would be so insensitive as to ask about Upton's chromosomes.
‘I could only imagine how upsetting and invasive a question that would be for Beth, and also not relevant to a colleague to ask another colleague. Beth identifies as female, and it does not matter what her chromosomes are to her.’
In Bumba and Searle's world, a belief that gender identity trumps biological sex is proof you're intellectually and morally superior to women like Sandie Peggie, so I'd imagine it's come as a shock to discover, in a blaze of public and press scrutiny, just how idiotic and cruel they appear to people outside their dinner party circle.
When Upton, a 6' tall, 28-year-old ex-rugby playing male, claimed that a petite 50-year-old female nurse was making him feel 'unsafe', his word appears to have been taken as gospel. Searle, Bumba and management fell over themselves to coddle the middle-class doctor who shared their voguish post-modern views on gender. What did Sandie matter? She's just one of those ghastly uninformed bigots who still thinks sex is real and important - so embarrassingly gauche and simplistic! Whisper it - she probably drinks red wine with chicken, too.
According to @tribunaltweets, an emotional Searle blurted out on the stand 'I am kind.' This is not something genuinely kind people need to say. Genuinely kind people don't find themselves compelled to explain in court why they helped whip up a witch-hunt against a woman whose only crime was wanting to change her clothes without a man watching.
Well, the nurse who was supposed to shuffle off in disgrace wasn't having it. Sandie Peggie refused to be sacrificed on the altar of elitist ideologues who believe themselves to be higher and better than she is. She fought back, for herself and for every other woman who's currently being silenced, persecuted and punished by a smug management class that preens itself on its virtue while imposing rampantly misogynistic policies on its workforce.
Sandie Peggie is a heroine. The woman NHS Fife thought they could treat abominably without any consequences to themselves has succeeded in shining the brightest spotlight yet upon the brain rot and compassion deficit suffered by supposedly intelligent people when they embrace gender identity ideology. Women everywhere owe her a debt of thanks. Whatever the outcome of this tribunal, Sandie Peggie has already won.
I’ve posted this before. I think it bears repeating.
****
I’ve noticed a lot of comments lately from MtF trans people saying that those of us who refuse to call them women are hateful bigots who just want to bully trans people.
Since the people making those claims seem totally disinterested in putting themselves in women’s shoes in any non-literal sense, I’ve tried to reframe it in a way that doesn’t ask them to try.
Imagine a group of white people saying that they know what it’s like to “feel black,” and that because of this feeling, and their enjoyment of stereotypically “black behavior,” they are now not just black themselves, but the most marginalized and vulnerable type of black person.
Imagine them insisting that they should be the main focus of all activism meant to help black people. Imagine them having operations to darken their skin and mimic stereotypically black features.
Imagine them walking around in blackface, and saying it’s the same thing as being black.
Imagine them being honored as black citizens at the White House and supported by celebrities, with laws passed to make white people who identify as black a protected class.
Imagine these people demanding membership in black organizations, insisting that they receive a share of the reparations that CA is about to pay, and demanding they be given awards created specifically to honor black achievement.
Then imagine them getting their way.
Now imagine mobs of them showing up to black events that don’t include them to drown out any speakers with noise, and coming up with slurs for any black person who doesn’t accept that white people are black if they say they are.
Imagine them calling for the rape, torture, and mass murder of any black person who disagrees with them. Imagine them getting black people doxxed, harassed, assaulted, fired from their jobs, and investigated by the police for saying that you have to be born black to be black.
Now imagine the government supporting their demands.
That’s exactly the position that women are in right now, with a few extras, like being locked in cells with dangerous men, the sexual predation of lesbians via coercion, and the increased risk of sexual assault in formerly female-only spaces.
Our greatest oppressors are now claiming not only the right to oppress us in whole new ways, but the right to erase our identities as women and rewrite the meaning of womanhood in ways that suit - and include - them.
If you wouldn’t support this kind of behavior towards black people, you have no business supporting this kind of behavior towards women.
#TransWomenAreConMen
At the tribunal for Peggie v NHS. There’s been a delay. Tribunal service normally has two security guards on but today only have one. We’re waiting for another to arrive.