TL;DR

There is a deep sickness within left politics, within the Scottish left and YES, that sees men, and women sadly, attack survivors of sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape, this sickness is patriarchal misogyny.  I have previously briefly discussed this issue in  ungagged  however I want to go a bit more in-depth. This sickness was never more clear than in the case of Alex Salmond and the Salmond vs Sturgeon war which wages on currently - and has since GRA reform was announced. Salmond, as we all know, was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault and rape (*he was subsequently acquitted). However, I do not want to get into the legalities or details about the case itself, that is not what I’m here to talk about. The content of the discourse around this issue has been and still is, truly horrifying to me as a woman in a supposedly progressive, feminist Scotland and this is what this article is about.   Leftist YES men and ‘feminism’ I don’t think ther...

  I am not going to go too much into this but t here has been a lot of talk over the past few days about the fascist attacks on the Capitol building and many of us have been addressing the elephant in the room, that gender critical feminism and transphobia, as with homophobia, are right-wing ideologies and have a part to play in the rise of fascism to action and power. Many of these left-wing gender critical ‘feminists’ have been laughing at the very idea that they could possibly be enabling fascism. I mean, I wouldn’t think that was funny but ok. It begs the questions, what do they think fascism actually is and how do they believe it comes into power?  to quote an article I read  in regard to the Capitol building and Trump, "fascism does not arrive on the scene with full uniform and programme".  Would we even really recognise fascism if it comes to us in a way in which it appears to be our ally? T hese are, in truth, not questions that need me to answer them, th...

Today I want to talk about bodily autonomy. I have touched on this before (sensory pun there) here in a brief discussion about the gender-critical 'feminist' obsession with women's bodies and how we have to police ourselves in the world.                                                                     Photo credit Engine Akyurt pexels However, I think we can go a bit deeper into this issue and go a slightly different way, the title of this piece says it all, this is about the nature of knowing who we are in our own body, and the impact it has on us when others who are not in our body attempt to control our experience in it. What is Bodily Autonomy? Bodily autonomy is the concept that all people have   the right to determine how their body interacts with other objects and other bodi...