Ep12: A Magdalen Berns Night Supper- Transphobia in Scotland

In this episode, we’ve invited a guest on, in order to explain the weird and wild landscape of Scottish politics, and how it is bound up in a wave of transphobia. Dalm who is an organiser with the IWW , and is based in Scotland, has kindly agreed to come on the show.  with her help we have a general look at how Scottish politics has been shaped in a surprisingly reactionary mold, despite the country's progressive political reputation.

 

A note from M: This episode touches on a wide range of topics, including the rise of the SNP and the fall of scottish labour, the role of the Salmond scandal and how it has affected the internal political dynamics of the independence movement, and the historical legacy of various sources of conservative thinking in scottish domestic politics. I think that its a fairly good explanation of the broad strokes of scottish politics with relation to transphobia and eactionary strands of thought in scotland, but its by no means complete. We kind of dip our toes into several discussions, where each of them could easily have an episode devoted to them. For example the brief section about sectarianism and organised religion barely touches on the structural involvement of the Orange Lodge in Scottish political party organisations, and we dont even mention the long term cultural impacts of now relativley minor traditions such as Calvinism. Not to mention the hours of comment that could be offered on modern millenial progressive politics in Scotland post 2014! While editing this episode I found myslef getting a bit annoyed with myself in retrospect for not including more about this sort of stuff in the episode plan but you cant do everything! Future episodes about Scotland are entirely plausible, given that in many ways we barely scratch the surface in this one, and how important the SNP has become in mainstreaming radical transphobia, and  if and when we do them I hope to flesh out the stuff in this episode a lot more.

 

Our music for this episode is by Marina Crustacean

 

Content warnings: transphobia, discussion of sexual assault, religious sectarianism, eyewitness descriptions of transphobic organising in a cult like environment.

 

Many Thanks to Dalm, our guest for this episode.