IN DEFENCE OF REALITY

As part of their coalition with the Green Party, the Scottish Government have pledged to introduce gender self-identification within the first year of the present Parliament.

For the reasons I have previously given, this means that men will legally become women just by saying they are, and women will become men just by saying they are.

This will not be regarded by the Scottish Government – or by the police or Crown or Scottish courts – as a legal fiction, but as the simple expression of reality.

We as a society will be expected to believe that people can literally change sex, and there will be sanctions if we don’t.

If the Scottish people do not rise up against this and stop it, we will all have surrendered to collective insanity.

I have been able to tell a girl from a boy and a man from a woman for the entire period of my living memory, a period now extending to well over fifty years.

The evidence of my own eyes and ears over that same period tells me that everyone else who is not in some way physically or mentally impaired has the ability to do it too.

I am confident that the ability that I know I have is one shared by the entire human species.

I am confident that this is so because being a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, must be one of the most overdetermined realities that there can possibly be for human beings.

It would make no sense if we could not recognise that reality in one another, instinctively, as a trait of being human, and without the need for active thought or any training or education of any kind.

It is as fundamental, and as little requiring of justification or explanation, as the ability to recognise the face of your own mother or father or sister or brother out of every other human being on the whole planet.

I say that the ability is overdetermined because if I search my mind, I can think of myriad factors that must enter into it, and I’ve listed some of the obvious ones previously, but if you ask me for some “theory” of how I am able to do it, I can only shrug my shoulders.

It doesn’t matter at all to me how I am able to do it, just that I can, and that it is one of the most fundamental realities on which I base my life.

If the Scottish Government, or anyone else, have a “theory”, or offer to produce an “expert” to tell me I can’t do this, then I am as sure as I am of anything in my life that I am right and they are wrong.

So when they tell me that what I know is a man is in fact a woman or that what I know is a woman is in fact a man, I know that they will be lying to me, trying to get me to accept as a fact something I know to be a fiction.

If the proposed legislation is allowed to pass and Nicola Sturgeon self-identifies as a man, gets a gender recognition certificate to that effect and uses that to get a birth certificate that says she is of the male sex, I know as surely as I know anything that this will be a lie.

If John Swinney self-identifies as a woman and goes through the same process to legally change to the female sex, I know as surely as I know anything that this too will be a lie.

No more nor less that The Party in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Scottish Government will be imposing on me a version of “reality” that I – and they – know to be an utter fiction.

No more nor less than The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, they will be seeking to punish me, and everyone else who knows what reality is, by charging us with “hate crimes”.

It is completely irrelevant to me what their motives are for doing this.

There is no motive in the world worth surrendering reality for, and this is for a simple reason, one that Orwell and his protagonist Winston Smith understood all too well.

If even just once you are prepared to surrender reality and choose to believe in something you know to be false – for any reason, and with any motive – you have lost yourself, and you’ll never find yourself again.

I desperately hope that my fellow Scottish citizens, men and women both, will rise up in defence of reality and kill this insanity stone dead.

But if they don’t, let me use the privilege I have of putting something on the public record, here and now, for the many thousands of readers of this blog.

Boys are not girls, and girls are not boys, no matter how much they think or say they are.

Men are not women, and women are not men, no matter how much they think or say they are.

Males are not females and females are not males, no matter how much they think or say they are.

“Gender identity” is not real.

Sex is not a choice.

I’ll defend reality till the day I die, and they can lock me up if they want to.