The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht
Edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn
Constable, £22

“WHEESHT” is Scots, meaning a plea or demand for silence, is a collection of essays by women who “risked their job, reputation, even the bonds of family and friendship, to make their voices heard” and built a grassroots campaign in defence of their sex-based rights that was the key factor in defeating the Scottish government’s attempt to impose self-ID on the country.  

Of major historical, political and social significance, these essays expose regressive and reactionary gender ideology; the only supposedly “progressive” social justice movement ever backed by state institutions, political elites and corporate finance, and the real consequences for women of policies like self-ID, championed not just by the Scottish government, but the country’s political Establishment.

The “ill-defined” term “gender identity” entered the “Scottish public space” through the lobbying of public institutions, business and politicians with the aim of obtaining the right “for anyone over the age of 16 years old to obtain legal recognition as a member of the opposite sex”, or of being neither sex, by a simple administrative process.