1/10🧵
For over a decade, the Scottish Government quietly rewrote the legal meaning of “woman” — not through Parliament, but through policy. No law. No debate. Just guidance, data rules and admin tweaks. This was self-ID by stealth. Here’s how they pulled it off.⬇️
2/10
In 2014, the prison service let a trans rights lobbyist help draft its transgender prisoner policy. Male offenders could be housed with women. No vote. No scrutiny. Just a quiet shift, dressed as inclusion. A small policy. Huge consequences.
3/10
In 2018, the Public Boards Act was redefined to count biological males as women — even without legal transition. It took @ForWomenScot and a court ruling to strike it down. The government had tried to rewrite protected characteristics by sleight of hand.
4/10
In 2021, schools were told to let boys identifying as girls use girls’ toilets and changing rooms. The guidance claimed there was no legal obligation for single-sex spaces. No consultation. Just state-sanctioned policy capture.
5/10
Then came the data. Public bodies were told to record identity, not biology. Male rapists could now appear as “female” in crime stats — and did. This wasn’t a system error. It was official guidance from the Scottish Government.
6/10
Scotland’s 2022 census allowed self-ID on the sex question — regardless of birth certificate or legal status. The rest of the UK refused. Holyrood embedded gender ideology into the national record — and called it progress.
7/10
By the time the GRR Bill hit headlines, self-ID had already crept into prisons, schools, the NHS, and official data. The bill failed, but the principles behind it were already policy. Unvoted. Undebated. Unseen.
8/10
Then came Isla Bryson. A male double rapist with post-conviction-onset dysphoria, identifying as female, sent to a women’s prison. Ministers acted shocked — but the policy that allowed it had been in place for years. The public just hadn’t been told.
9/10
In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex. The scaffolding collapsed. Much of Scotland’s guidance — on schools, crime, prisons — was now unlawful. And suddenly, silence.
10/10
This wasn’t inclusion. It was deception. Rights were redefined through admin memos. The public was never asked. And now the courts have caught up, the façade is falling. Scotland was ground zero for self-ID by stealth.
1/10
This is going to sound boring. Websites. PDF links. “403 Forbidden”. Thrilling stuff. But it matters, because it decides whether the public can find what the government has done, or whether you have to already know where to look.
2/10
In plain English: some Scottish public-sector websites are set up like a shop with the lights on and the door unlocked… but every aisle has a velvet rope and the staff keep asking why you’re taking notes.
3/10
Humans can usually click around eventually. The problem is everything else - search engines, journalists, researchers, watchdogs, archivists, automated tools. The people who spot patterns. The people who notice what changed.
1/ Here’s the Scottish Government’s defence of the policy that can place men in women’s prisons.
They want it treated as normal, lawful and beyond challenge unless a woman has already suffered the consequences.
Receipts below.
2/Their opening move is cowardice dressed as procedure.
No named woman. No concrete case. Therefore no problem.
It only counts once a woman has been harmed loudly enough, in court.
3/Then they wriggle out of plain meaning.
Single-sex prisons, they say, aren’t actually a rule at all. There is no norm. No baseline. Nothing to protect unless a claim succeeds.
🪡Scotland has been governed for 18 years by people who sell virtue as a brand. The trouble is virtue needs receipts. It needs delivery. It needs records.
This thread lays out the pattern: waste, botched decisions, standards collapsing and accountability that vanishes on contact.
Twenty scandals. One culture.
BRANCHFORM
A party that wants more power must first prove it can handle basic money and basic honesty.
Instead we got years of questions about SNP finances, “ring-fenced” funds and missing clarity, then a police investigation that dragged on like a bad smell you can’t air out.
If you can’t run a party properly, you shouldn’t be trusted to run a country indefinitely.
FOI
Freedom of Information is meant to be the public’s torch. In Scotland it has too often felt like a wet blanket.
Redactions, “not held”, delays, evasions, endless process. Not once, not twice, but as a habit.
Governments that believe they are doing the right thing don’t fear their own paperwork. Governments that fear the paperwork are telling you something.
1/ @TheSNP took power in 2007.
After 18 years, Scotland is poorer, sicker, weaker and still being lectured to.
Here’s the record. 🧵
2/ 💉Drug deaths
2007: 455
2024: 1,017
They turned a national emergency into background noise. Scotland became a graveyard and they kept the slogans. thetimes.com/uk/scotland/ar…
🏥A&E 4-hour standard
2007: 96% seen within 4 hours
2025: ~69%
The NHS front door is broken. Emergency care now comes with a queue and a gamble.
1/19
Receipts on @bphillipsonMP : a decade of trans messaging, then Supreme Court clarity, then ministerial delay. This is why nothing gets implemented.
2/19
This matters because Phillipson now controls the final step: approving the statutory EHRC code that turns law into practice. Until she acts, schools, hospitals and single-sex services are left to guess and carry the legal risk.
3/19
29 June 2010: as a new MP, she pressed witnesses on how to stop trans people being forced to use documents in a previous gender. Early instinct: make the state adapt around gender identity. publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cm…
THREAD: How the Peggie Tribunal Neutralised the For Women Scotland Judgment
1/ The most revealing part of the Peggie judgment is how the Tribunal handled the @ForWomenScot Supreme Court ruling. If you want to understand the institutional resistance women are facing, you start here.
2/ The Tribunal accepts the core holding of FWS without hesitation:
👌“Woman” in the Equality Act means biological female
👌“Biological sex” means sex as recorded at birth
This applies wherever the Act uses those terms
👌They repeat this plainly. No ambiguity. FWS is binding. ✔️
3/ So far, so sane.
But then comes the manoeuvre.
The Tribunal walls off FWS by declaring that it belongs only to Part 3 of the Equality Act (services), while Peggie’s case falls under Part 5 (employment).
The two parts, the Tribunal insists, are “mutually exclusive.”