Why aren’t I more afraid of Scotland’s Hate Crime Act?

The arrival today of the SNP’s Hate Crime Act has set many on edge. The new Scottish law gives the increasingly desperate trans lobby one of its most powerful weapons yet in its ongoing war on women and reality. A friend just told me he is deactivating his X / Twitter account in anticipation. Stuart Campbell, who runs the Wings Over Scotland website, has no trust that Scottish police, sozzled on the rainbow-hued unicorn piss poured into their canteens by the likes of Stonewall, will be able to resist chucking him in a cell or seizing his laptop and phone for the foreseeable.

Trans activists cannot contain their glee at the new hate-speech law coming into force. A man named ‘Suzie Sparkles’ warned me last week that I had ‘five days’ before the cops came for me. As one of the biggest targets for the trans lobby, I should probably be more anxious. But I’ve discovered by now that once you’re strapped into this particular rollercoaster, there is really not much you can do except enjoy the ride. Since I started speaking out against the sterilisation of children in gender clinics and the hounding of women expressing basic feminist opinions, I have been approached by the police three times, been refused accreditation by Greater Manchester Police to the Conservative Party conference, had a West End musical cancelled, lost most forms of income and been sued three times – by those same lunatics who called the cops on me.

The activists don’t scare me, they never have. They are silly people. Plus, a spell in jail would do wonders for my memoir, Tough Crowd, which is available right now if you can figure out where in the store the Waterstones staff have hidden it. I may lose my Twitter account again – I was banned in 2020 – but as my ignominy is somehow baked into the algorithm, my account is strangled anyway. If you search my name, my impersonators come up instead. I have no idea whether I’m reaching any significant percentage of my 556,000 followers, a number which has not moved up or down since the day I arrived back on the platform back in 2022.

I’ve downloaded my Twitter archive, just as I did the day before my last ban. Back then, I sent it to various people as proof that I had never misgendered anyone on the site. In the old days, I was terribly polite as I, too, fell for the middle-class belief that misgendering was a terrible sin, which would drive a vulnerable cohort of society to madness and suicide. This, I quickly came to realise, was a load of bollocks.

I do tend to throw my weight around a lot more these days. Trans activists are the worst people in the world and they deserve everything that comes their way. But instead of the rape and death threats favoured by their side, our side’s tools are derision and contempt for their parroted opinions, of which there are only about six:

1) We don’t need single-sex spaces because men will rape women anyway.

2) There have always been trans people, we’re just noticing them now.

3) Your toilet at home is unisex.

4) Puberty blockers are just a pause button and are fully reversible.

5) Trans rights are exactly like gay rights because they both include the word ‘rights’.

6) Why can’t you just be kind?

I don’t always give both barrels to those delivering these copy-and-pasted arguments. Many of these accounts belong to people who grew up believing these absurdities because a conspiracy of lunatics had been installed in institutions across society. If the media, the police, the health service and their own teachers insisted that their presents at Christmas are smuggled down the chimney by an incredibly fat, bearded man dressed flamboyantly in red (also a description of many ‘transwomen’), they would likely still believe that, too.

But there are others – the conmen, the predators, the incels and the misogynists – who have found in trans activism not only a way to safely threaten women from the comfort of their homes, but also a way to be celebrated for doing so. Scottish women won’t have a way to defend themselves from these men now that the Hate Crime Act has come into force. Because while imaginary ‘gender identity’ is protected by Humza Yousaf’s new law, the reality of sex is not.

There are three cherished legal changes that trans activists want to see, in order to push their upside-down moral vision on society. The first is self-ID, which failed in Scotland after the darkly comical case of Isla Bryson / Adam Graham, the double rapist almost placed among Scotland’s female prison population. Secondly, a ban on ‘trans conversion therapy’, which aims to concretise the process by which gay kids are rendered straight by surgery and pharmaceuticals. Finally, there are hate-speech laws, which aim to make the conversation around the first two horrors impossible. Given that there is no stable definition of ‘transgender identity’, then none exists of ‘transphobia’ either, which means that, under the new Hate Crime Act, anyone can be arrested for it at any time, for almost any reason.

That said, I still don’t fear the Hate Crime Act coming into force. Because this unworkable, authoritarian, Kafkaesque law will surely send Humza Yousaf clattering into the same bin currently inhabited by his predecessor, Nicola Sturgeon, who was similarly undone by her capitulation to trans ideology.

I’m in the antipodes at the moment, and I’ve noticed the same dynamics playing out everywhere I visit. On one side, you see failing media, captured institutions and increasingly desperate activists, and on the other, a public that is awakening to the madness of all this. There may be a few circuits left on the rollercoaster ride, but if you can hang on just a little bit longer, we’ll soon be back on solid ground.

Graham Linehan is a former TV comedy writer best known for sitcoms Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd. Follow him on Substack.