Scottish Anti-Trans Group Wants to Compile a List of Transgender Athletes
They say it’s not for anything sinister, but we have the receipts
The anti-trans group For Women Scotland Sport (FWSS), in collaboration with fellow anti-trans group Sex Matters, has put out a call on Twitter/X for followers to contact them with details of any “teams, leagues, competitions that are allowing males in female sports”, referring to any sports teams that include transgender women.
The group is an offshoot of For Women Scotland, a ‘gender critical’ group first established to oppose Scotland adopting gender self-ID laws which are already in place in 30 countries, regions and states around the world.
FWSS say they intend to ”map the trans identified males that are competing in women’s sport in the UK”.
It’s not wild speculation to assume that the anti-trans group intends to compile a list and make it publicly available, or at least available to their followers, for the purpose of ‘outing’ and harassing trans women.
FWSS tried to deny this by backpedalling, claiming they didn’t want a list of individuals just the teams they play on (as if that isn’t troubling enough).
This attempt to deny their sinister intentions was quickly shot down when it was pointed out that Mara Yamauchi, a member of the Sex Matters sports advisory group, tweeted to ask her 25,000 followers,
“do you know of males competing in the female category in sport? Please tell FWSSport & SexMattersOrg about them — who they are, which sports, how many positions, medals etc they’ve stolen from females”
— ‘Gender critical’ activist Mara Yamauchi, via Twitter/X
Yamauchi’s tweet makes it clear that Sex Matters and For Women Scotland Sport do, in fact, want to compile a list of transgender women athletes.
Anti-trans witch hunt
As Trans Safety Network point out, there is no doubt as to how FWSS’s ‘gender critical’ followers would interpret this: it’s a call for a witch hunt, and that’s what will happen. This could arguably be considered incitement to stochastic terrorism.
While these groups initially claimed to be voicing ‘reasonable concerns’ about the inclusion of trans women in sports, their desire to make a list of vulnerable minority group members makes it obvious that they are intent on targeted harassment.
In the UK being trans is a protected characteristic and it is illegal to discriminate against us — not that the law has stopped a huge rise in anti-trans hate crimes in recent years. Nonetheless, what FWSS intends to do would almost certainly be illegal.
Imagine they were talking about compiling a list of any other minority group like this — disabled people, Jewish people, or Muslims for example — and the seriousness of their plans becomes obvious.
This is not normal or acceptable behaviour — but they think it is, and are now bold enough to make these calls publicly after years of being given a platform by our transphobic media, successfully spreading anti-trans hate and stymying progress on trans rights, to make these calls publicly.
Behaviour fit for a Nazi
The desire to compile a list of transgender women to target them is very much in the realm of Nazi behaviour.
The Nazis did just that, compiling a list of trans people before they rounded them up, along with other members of the LGBTQ+ community, and sent them off to concentration camps where many of them were murdered as part of the Holocaust.
Transgender women already face a huge amount of discrimination in UK society — in part thanks to ‘gender critical’ groups like For Women Scotland and Sex Matters.
This ‘gender critical’ movement they’re a part of is linked to far-right groups, anti-LGBTQ+ Christian groups, and the broader anti-gender and anti-feminist movement which is sweeping Europe and North America.
This is according to the international rights group UN Women, which has called the ‘gender critical’ movement “anti-rights”. The UN has highlighted how ‘gender critical’ activists have attacked and fuelled hatred of transgender people by falsely alleging that LGBTQ+ rights are harmful to women.
Anti-science
‘Gender critical’ groups like For Women Scotland and Sex Matters have never provided any valid evidence for their claims, relying on disinformation and generalising individual cases of trans people doing bad things to foment hatred.
Meanwhile, they ignore evidence that shows the trans-inclusive policies they oppose have no negative impact on cisgender women.
This includes emerging evidence that demonstrates that the supposed issue of transgender women retaining a so-called “male advantage” after medical gender transition is more complicated and that trans female athletes have a disadvantage compared to cis women in some cases.
There’s an important conversation to be had about the inclusion of trans women in sports. That conversation includes whether categorisation by sex or gender is the fairest option for everyone, dissecting sex stereotypes and the importance of gathering accurate scientific data on trans athletes’ performance.
But ‘gender critical’ groups aren’t interested in having that conversation. They just want to exclude trans women based on (ironically enough, given their claim to be ‘critical’ of gender) gender stereotypes and unscientific claims.
These claims, however, are harder to test when there aren’t any trans athletes to gather data from because they’ve all been hounded out of sports.
Harassing women, cis or trans
That’s likely because protecting women isn’t their real goal — excluding trans women is, and they’re more than willing to harm cisgender women to achieve that goal.
Even if FWSS did ‘only’ want to compile a list of the teams and leagues which include transgender women, this would almost certainly result in their followers harassing those teams, including, inevitably, the cisgender women who play on them.
So not only do these groups want to target and harass transgender women, but any cis women who support them — anyone “actively working against gender-critical women”, as ‘gender critical’ academic Sarah Pederson put it.
This wouldn’t be the first time groups like For Women Scotland have harassed women’s groups for supporting transgender inclusion. This year they protested Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, causing distress to women seeking support from the service after experiencing sexual violence.
JK Rowling, ‘gender critical’ godhead and a long-time supporter of For Women Scotland, has called for the defunding of ERCC after a review found it excluded one ‘gender critical’ woman (which, for the record, I think was a bad decision).
The same review also highlights that ERCC has helped thousands of women who have experienced sexual violence — Rowling’s demand to defund it would therefore absolutely harm female victims of rape and sexual violence by removing a vital service.
Again, protecting women isn’t the goal, harming trans women is.
For Women Scotland’s latest sinister stunt and the inevitable harm it will cause to women, both cis and trans, in sports teams up and down the country is proof of that.
I don't know how successful it is to claim stochastic terrorism and to do anything to fight it in the UK. Here in the US we have a stochastic terrorist running for president and even the supreme court would defend his right to tell his minions who he wants killed.