A new voice is being heard and it’s defending common sense (as well as scientific reality). At the Scottish Parliament yesterday @AllianceLGB was quoted in the committee considering proposed new questions about sexual orientation in the Scottish census.
2./ You might remember the NRS who organise the census in Scotland suggested they’d add ‘Other’ to the sexual orientation question. Now given that sexual orientation is a legally protected characteristic under the Equality Act (2010) LGB people were concerned by...
3./ ...the introduction of an option of a sexual orientation (Other) that has no legal status; not least because the next census will be the very first to ask a question about sexual orientation. We want the census to get it right. Imagine our horror then when the NRS trialled..
4./ ...a drop down menu of options under ‘Other’ that included ridiculous suggestions like ‘demiromantic’ and ‘scoliosexual’. This undermines the seriousness of the question, opens it to public ridicule and implies LGB people’s orientation is just some sort of..
5./.. fetish. Here’s Peter Whitehouse from the NRS’s attempt to justify what was surely an unintentional assault on LGB people as well as the Equality Act’s hard won protections. What’s revealing throughout his submission is his reference to stakeholders whose ...
6./ ..advice they sought. What stakeholders could they be I wonder? Who would suggest ‘scoliosexual’ as a word the average person might want in a drop down menu? It means by the way “someone attracted to non-binary people and/or trans”. I haven’t met a single..
7./ ..person who had heard of this word before this row so it’s a revealing clue as to the little woke hermetically sealed bubble that the NRS has blown around itself. In that bubble it consults only with the usual trans lobby suspects. It’s hardly worth a Freedom of ..
8./ ...Information request for as night follows day you know Stonewall, Scottish Trans Alliance and the Equality Network will have been round for tea and worked themselves up into their usual lather. Well hello boys there are some adult voices here now. For long enough...
9./.. you’ve captured policy making in Scotland and created a toxic atmosphere in which biological reality and science have been sacrificed in your organisations’ relentless pursuit of influence and public largesse. Many thanks to the Committee and its Convenor @JoanMcAlpine ...
10./...for raising our objections. Mr Whitehouse, we do hope you’ll think again and listen to respectful criticism from organisations till now excluded from consultation. If you do you may find your reputation as Scotland’s lead statistician enhanced not undermined.
You can watch the whole session of the Culture, Tourism, Europe etc committee here. scottishparliament.tv/meeting/cultur…
And here’s the @AllianceLGB submission being cited.
