FFS Friday: Scottish Women

April 5, 2024

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Last week, I announced that I was launching a new series called Female Free Speech Friday. That post was to honor Christina Goeke, who bravely testified in opposition to a Colorado bill that would allow convicted sex offenders to change their names legally (and to thereby obscure their sex on legal documents). The bill is called “Tiara’s Law” and it’s named after a man named Duane who calls himself Tiara. It later passed.

During Christina’s testimony, the committee chair overseeing the hearing repeatedly interrupted her and tried to silence her by banging her gavel and announcing that there would be “no misgendering or deadnaming.” Christina calmly explained that she had every intention of speaking the truth and exercising her First Amendment rights. An X user dubbed the committee chair “Judge Bang-Bang,” posting a gif of Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett from the show Quantum Leap donning a tiara.

Last week, I said I would call the series FFF (for “Female Free speech Friday”) but a commenter suggested I should call it FFS Friday, which is much better. So, FFS Friday it is!

This FFS Friday honors Scottish women, who have spent the past week doing battle with Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act of 2021, which went into effect on Monday April 1 (also known as April Fools), and daring Scottish officials to arrest them for calling men men.

According to the BBC, the law “creates a new crime of ‘stirring up hatred’ relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or being intersex” and establishes a maximum penalty of seven years in prison. Scottish feminists have for weeks been, quite understandably in my view, worried that they could be arrested for calling a man a man on X (or elsewhere).

Here are a few of the things these brave women had to say on April 1, the day the law went into effect.

JK Rowling (who lives in Scotland) took matters even further by posting a thread about ten men who claim to be women, sarcastically referring to them as women and using she/her pronouns for them. She ended the thread with “April Fools!” and the hashtags: #ArrestMe #AprilFools #HateCrimeActScotland.

The Times published a great piece about it titled “JK Rowling’s challenge to police: Arrest me for misgendering.”

Sarah Phillimore is not Scottish, but the Scottish government’s position is that anyone can be arrested under the law if anything published anywhere is read in Scotland, so:

With this series, I’m hoping to highlight the speech of women who are less well-known than JK Rowling because their voices deserve to be heard as much as hers does (a sentiment with which I suspect she would agree), but she makes it extremely difficult to do so because she keeps coming out with searing sentiments like this:

Evidently this man advised her to TAKE DOWN HER POSTS and was later incensed that she refused to do so, in a DELIBERATE ACT OF DEFIANCE (of him, apparently).

It took exactly one day for the police to announce they would not arrest JK Rowling for hate crimes. And just like that, she got Police Scotland to acknowledge that it’s not hate to call a man a man.

This was her response:

When someone pointed out that of course the police were unlikely to go after a woman with the means to defend herself, she took matters even further by saying that if the police go after even one woman for calling a man a man, she’d repeat that woman’s words so the police might charge them both at once.

So, Scottish women, this is for you. As the queen says, may every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of sex be reassured by this announcement and may all women - irrespective of profile or financial means - be treated equally under the law. And may Scottish women never wheesht.