Wings is telling everyone that he has some red-hot exposé coming out at eight in the morning. Something to do with the SNP and Green elected representatives knowin exactly what sort of scumbags they are in bed with I think.
www.wingsoverscotland.com
Now up
https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-grooming-of-holyrood/
The main focus, Beth Douglas, seems very peripheral but has done something with the Scottish Greens, and is photographed recently (22.12.22) with Maggie Chapman.
What emerges, however, is a rather graphic portrait of Extremely Online trans activists complete with fund-raisers for medical care, expulsions and dissolutions of groups, repeated fantasies of violence, posing with knives and axes, and reports from former partners of abuse. The normalisation of violence in this little milieu is the most startling aspect; it's more the sustained repetition of it (throatpunching TERFs a recurrent meme) rather than any particular example, since there have been far worse (cough 'decapitate TERFs' cough).
Wings' commentary unsurprisingly labels Douglas as sociopathic and mentally ill; in the everyday sense of observe-a-loon these are fair comments, not diagnoses. This is how Douglas comes across to an outsider: someone so far down a rabbit hole they may not even realise how they look, and might not care.
Note that I'm saying everyday sense; one cannot diagnose remotely over the internet, but one can still draw conclusions and back away as fast as possible from someone who comes across as a headcase. The sheer amount of social media and interpersonal drama swirling around one individual is rather impressive, and I'm basing that on interacting with a variety of nutcases (again: in the everyday sense) on the internet for 17-18 years. Back then, one might find that a particular internet troll had serial form trolling different forums on different topics, or invented multiple socks to peddle a particular obsession, and those types are still around. The advent of social media simply amplified this into a hall of selfie mirrors and bitter exchanges.
The personalities discussed are so Extremely Online and so self-important that generalising from them to all trans activists or all trans women would be wrong. But the levels of engagement in those groups are so high that the phenomenon is not a one-off. Trans online culture seems acutely narcissistic and toxic, even set against the generally narcissistic and toxic social media cultures of this era. I don't see a lot of difference between this culture and the MAGA online culture that gave us January 6th and a variety of domestic terrorist acts. It's likely the smaller size of the trans culture that is why the acts of violence tend to be disproportionately sexual offenses and common assaults at demonstrations. The more progressive orientation plus these examples being in the UK would also be why we've not seen more cases of these rage monsters going postal and shooting up crowds.
Again: one case does not invalidate LJ's 'valid identity' mantra, but this one case shows someone whose supposedly 'valid identity' is a license for serial abuse, at the very least rhetorical and verbal, and likely also interpersonal going by the trail of broken relationships left in this guy's wake.
It'd be nice to think that in a few years, trans culture will have self-diagnosed the toxicity of this era and cleaned itself up. Other subcultures managed, why can't they?
