Good morning,

I am deeply grateful to everyone who commented, helped, donated, retweeted or read any of my work on For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers over the last three days. If you're new here - welcome. It's good to have you on board. I'm just going to set out all the material from the last three days in this newsletter so you have a ready reference to everything that has happened - particularly if you only caught a few of the live tweets and would like some reading material over the weekend!

The easiest way in (possibly) is to read my write-ups of each day's proceedings:

For Women Scotland back in court - Day 1
Dawn of the Intervenors - Day 2
Suicide is Shameless - Day 3

I am still reeling from the Scottish government's approach to the three day hearing. There was a hell of a lot of tortuous legal argument, but yesterday even Gerry Moynihan KC could not stop his client's determinedly mad ideology seeping through into the courtroom. We were told quite plainly that sex classification was a matter of "semantics" and an "artificial parameter", and the suicide trope was held by the shoulders and marched around the courtroom until it became a direct challenge to the court - Be Kind or a Trans Convict Might Die. It is perhaps no surprise For Women Scotland's Aidan O'Neill called their logic something you would find "through the looking glass, into Wonderland".

Here are some more useful documents:

FWS written submissions (petition and note of argument)
Scottish govt's written submissions (answers and note of argument)
SHRC's written submission (case intervenors)

The EHRC have not, to the best of my knowledge, published their written submission anywhere, but they did send it to me, so I have published it at the bottom of my report of Day 2, which is when Janys Scott KC made her oral submission.

You can also read Rhona Hotchkiss's affadavit, which has recently been published on the FWS website, and I have just now uploaded Linda Pollock's affadavit for the Scottish Ministers at the bottom of my Day 3 report.

Also do have a read of this excellent briefing pack written ahead of this week's hearing by the team at Murray Blackburn McKenzie.

I am indebted to Andrew of the Dark Arts for wrestling the live tweets from the last three days onto the GenderBlog live tweets page. Elon Musk does not make this easy, but Andrew had spotted I was covering this case and did all the necessary technical work to get the tweets imported into GenderBlog without even being asked. The threads contain many more thousand words than my reports, and might be of interest if you want to scroll through them. They're there as a record, anyway.

Other takes

Day 1:

Campaigners challenge Scottish policy on transgender inmates in female prisons - The Guardian
Women’s Group Back in Court Over Men in Women’s Prisons - The European Conservative
Woman prisoners 'traded as pawns for political gain' by 'Orwellian' Scottish government policy, court told - Sky News
Women treated as 'political pawns' in trans prison row - The (Scottish) Herald

Day 2:

No automatic breach of rights from trans women in female prisons, court told - The Herald
Watchdogs raise concerns over transgender prisoners - BBC

Day 3:

Banning trans prisoners from jail of chosen gender could 'create risk of suicide', court told - The Scotsman
Ban on trans inmates in women's jails would be 'fundamental denial', court told - The Herald
Judge rises to consider ‘complex’ arguments in trans prisoner legal challenge - Perspective Media

Photos

Covering a court hearing remotely is tricky, and I am deeply grateful to some of the terven on the ground who got some of the protagonists to pose, and then kindly sent me their photos. This is my favourite...

For Women Scotland's Trina Budge, with supporter Jo Williams on the left

There are plenty more dotted through the write-ups. Sadly the legal teams (even FWS') were apparently camera-shy, hence the stock headshots.

Other stories

Given I have been focused on the above case I haven't done a huge amount of reading this week, but here are a few things which caught my eye...

The Rise and Fall of Youth Gender Medicine - The Free Press (requies sign in, but this Free Press horror - Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex from 2021, doesn't)
Algerian Olympic Boxer Imane Khelif Admits To Having Male Sex Chromosome For The First Time - Reduxx
Imane Khelif’s latest propaganda campaign should fool nobody - Daily Telegraph (£)
Trump Admin Hires Glenna Goldis, Lawyer Fired By Letitia James - Daily Wire (The left lose yet another ally because she knows sex is real. I like Glenna Goldis - her work for the Gender-Critical Law Society is always really helpful for a lay reader)

Finally the Cambridge Society of Women is having its first open (ie for non-students and even them men) event at a central Cambridge venue on Friday 13 Feb at 7pm - that's a week today.

It's called Modern Feminism - Movement or Minefield? An evening with Joanna Williams. You can get tickets here on a pay what you can basis. Do go and support them if you can.

Laters, taters

Thank you to everyone who has dropped me a line this week. I'm going to spend most of today going through that correspondence, whilst also trying to put together a quiz for my son's school, which I am compering tonight. I'll slip some gender questions in, just to amuse myself.

Have a great weekend.

Nick

This is the GenderBlog newsletter. If you have been forwarded it and would like to join the mailing list so each newsletter (and GenderBlog blog post) drops, freshly-baked, directly into your email inbox, please consider making a small one-off donation via the donate page on my GenderBlog website. Thanks.

© Nick Wallis 2026