Attack, Smear, Gaslight: The Playbook for Bringing Down Feminist Politicians

The Holyrood elections are coming up, and with rising global misogyny, this election feels particularly important and nerve-wracking.

The global landscape is terrifying — and nowhere illustrates that more starkly than the United States. The President of the United States was famously ruled to have raped E. Jean Carroll, with no repercussions to his career or reputation. Trump took advice from the Christian right and appointed the Supreme Court judges who overturned Roe v Wade. Since then, we have seen hundreds of women and girls arrested on abortion-related charges, while zero men — including Trump — have suffered any detriment from being in the Epstein files. A 10-year-old rape victim was forced to leave her state for an abortion, and a dead woman’s body was used as an incubator, prolonging the agony for her family.

Investigative journalists have revealed that American organisations are pouring money into Scotland to curtail the rights of women and LGBTQ people. There are concerning reports of escalating school violence and increasing misogynistic harassment of schoolgirls and their teachers, as more and more young men are groomed by misogynistic influencers. Horrific sexual abuse deepfakes are being easily created, and girls have already ended their lives after falling victim to this. An online “rape academy”, where men can learn how to obtain drugs to rape their partners, had 62 million hits in February this year. This is a terrifying time to be a woman or a girl.

It was deeply frustrating, in this climate, to see the SNP kick the promised misogyny bill into the long grass. So, when I realised that Gillian MacKay, currently the only woman party leader in Scotland, has pledged to get misogyny written into criminal law, it was a no-brainer for me. A politician treating the epidemic of male violence against women and girls as the emergency it is. And MacKay already has an excellent track record on women’s issues. She is the Green MSP whose member’s bill saw “safe access zones”, also known as buffer zones, become law.

This followed years of horrific scenes, such as men screaming through sound systems outside the Glasgow Sandyford Clinic that women were “murderers”. The clinic offered a range of services at the time, including counselling for survivors of rape and sexual assault. The Scottish Family Party, responsible for the hideous anti-abortion leaflets people are receiving through the postal system, made an ominous threat to “brick up” the clinic. One 17-year-old girl in Edinburgh was called a “baby murderer” when she visited Chalmers Clinic after a sexual assault. Often, over 100 protesters would gather outside the Queen Elizabeth Hospital under the instruction of the Texan organisation 40 Days for Life as part of their “closing vigil”.

As someone who loudly supported the Back Off Scotland campaign, I know only too well the threats and abuse women receive for publicly defending abortion rights. The abuse I received — which included stalking, doxing and bizarre antisemitic memes, even though I am not Jewish — was on a tiny scale compared to what MacKay, as the architect of the bill, experienced, especially after Vice President JD Vance spread the obvious myth that safe access zones are an attack on Christian rights. This led to rape threats against MacKay while she was pregnant.

The Herald and the War on Women

After all of this, it is utterly galling to see anti-abortion writer Kevin McKenna use his Herald platform to take regular swipes at MacKay over her pledge to get the misogyny bill done. This isn’t scrutiny. It isn’t accountability. It is gaslighting. This week, McKenna described a woman who got landmark feminist legislation passed in Scotland as a mere “list MSP” who is part of “job creation”, and sneers that she has “never won an election”. 

McKenna writes: “The Scottish Greens say they want to introduce a Misogyny Bill. ‘I’m a vegan,’ said the Big Bad Wolf.” He then cites co-leader Ross Greer, a bisexual MSP challenging the Deputy First Minister on her history of homophobic comments, as evidence of Green misogyny, while paternalistically framing the Deputy First Minister as a helpless victim — one who must be protected from hearing her own words quoted back to her. He utterly misses the point of the misogyny bill. It is almost as if that is deliberate.

In another recent column on the Scottish Greens, McKenna wrote: “They consider my protected beliefs about sex and gender to be problematic, that I would contaminate their purity.” Let’s be clear: McKenna’s beliefs on sex and gender are that women do not have rights to our own bodies. When Ireland repealed its anti-abortion laws, which killed women, in 2018, McKenna wrote that it was “thinly concealed hatred of Christianity and an anti-Irish racism similar to that recently espoused by some high-profile Scottish politicians”, and framed pro-choice activists as a “hunting pack of the liberal elites”. I vividly remember the needless and tragic death of 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar in Ireland, who died because she was denied an abortion. She was told by staff that she was “in a Catholic country” and died from septic shock.

Returning to McKenna’s apparent concern about misogyny in the Scottish Parliament, surely he would agree with the banning of harassment outside Scotland’s clinics? Indeed not. Along came another sneering article, crying religious persecution:

We simply can’t let sophisticated overseas visitors think that Catholics are given freedom to roam about the place with their provocative, irresponsible and irresponsibly provocative praying.

Most people know that there were horrific scenes outside Scotland’s clinics, and if it had only ever been “silent prayer”, nobody would even have noticed these people.

Back when he was bemoaning the repeal of Ireland’s abortion ban, he further mused: “In modern Scotland, and now in Ireland, to believe in the fundamental right to life of an unborn child is to risk being accused of fanaticism and — the worst sin of all — anti-feminism.” This seems contradictory to the faux concern for a Deputy First Minister receiving entirely fair criticism from junior colleagues.

I think perhaps one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in the run-up to this election was an article claiming: “Maggie Chapman, the Green MSP, wanted eight-year-olds to get hormone treatment.” This referred to something Chapman said several years ago, during the gender recognition debate, about supporting young people who are trans. Chapman did not mention hormones. It is hard to think of anything more misogynistic than distorting a woman’s words purely because she does not submit to your conservative beliefs on gender.

This is only one man, but he is very typical of the media’s hypocritical treatment of progressive women, especially women in the Green Party. It is also representative of the decline of The Herald – a paper which used to pride itself on its championing of enlightened liberal views but which now in its desperation for relevance reduces itself to clickbait and regularly publishing such repugnant views which disrespect so many people in Scotland. 

By all means, hold your archaic beliefs about women. But don’t smear and attack progressive women improving our lives — and pretend it is about protecting us.