There’s something very unusual – possibly unique, we think – about the reaction of the transactivist community to this week’s tribunal judgement in Roz Adams vs Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC).
Normally in cases like these, there’s an instant and concerted attempt to rubbish the judgement, both from amateurs and activist lawyers like Robin Moira “Barry” White, Jolyon Maugham, and the anonymous “Pissed Off Lawyer” tweeting as @legaltweetz. They’ll issue spurious “analyses” dismissing the findings with jargon terms like “obiter”, and either question their correctness or attempt to minimise their significance.
For some reason that didn’t happen this time. The hyper-antagonist online trans army has very conspicuously failed to rush to the defence of ERCC CEO Mridul Wadhwa, perhaps because Judge Ian McFatridge’s conclusions were so relentlessly, brutally and comprehensively excoriating of Wadhwa’s appalling behaviour that no amount of spin or disingenuity could disguise it.
But then, on white charger, enter a hero.
Ladies and gentlemen (and non-binary genderfluids), meet Adam Ramsay.
Adam Ramsay grew up in what his family describes as a “small castle” nestled in a 1300-acre estate in Perthshire that’s been in the family since 1232.
He was educated at the extremely exclusive private Glenalmond College, which he describes as the “poshest” school in Scotland, prone to outbreaks of “chav hunting”, and whose alumni include lots of people with first names like “Torquhil”, “Crispin”, “Nairne”, “Dennison”, “Ernley”, “Beauchamp”, “Ninian”, “Logie”, “Hubert”, “Adair” and “Turtle”, none of which we have made up, as well as figures known to Wings readers like Scottish Secretary Alister Jack, Times columnist Alex Massie and his father Allan.
Ramsay could have been the model, in both looks and actions, for Malcom Wright-Pratt from the Viz comic strip The Modern Parents.
But his biggest claim to fame is being arrested and convicted in 2011 for being part of a 130-strong mob protesting against capitalism (we know) at Fortnum & Masons (we know), for which he was given a conditional discharge despite causing over £100,000 of damage and “terrorising” staff and customers.
Readers may wish to pause for a moment to consider the likely penalties which would have been handed down to some ghastly plebs from council estates who’d committed the same crime, or to contrast it with some of the actual sentences issued to working-class oiks in the same year for shop-based public disorder offences.
Since 2019 Ramsay has been the editor of Open Democracy, an activist “news” site funded – to the tune of millions of pounds a year – chiefly by large grants from American and other corporate and industrial charities like the Ford Foundation, created by the notorious racist and anti-Semitic car magnate Henry Ford.
(Readers may not be entirely astonished to discover that Ramsay appears to have taught his three-year-old child to chant “Free Palestine!”)
(That quote isn’t from IRA terrorist Bobby Sands. It’s from a gay Greek poet born in 1931 that Sands would have happily shot.)
These grants are provided, naturally, mostly in the name of “social justice”, “diversity” and “inclusion”. Many of the donors, like the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund which provided OD with $800,000 in grants in recent years, are deeply opaque, with their website declining to identify even which country the fund is based in and having been described by some investigative websites as “a near-bottomless pit of “dark money” […] fed by a handful of mysterious hedge fund billionaires”.
With crushingly predictable irony, OpenDemocracy is absolutely obsessed with other people’s funding by “dark money”.
OD is utterly captured by the trans movement, and nobody more so than Ramsay himself, who regularly and vitriolically lambasts the likes of For Women Scotland and gay-rights charity the LGB Alliance as “hate groups”.
He continues to do so despite the latter having survived numerous attempts by transactivists to strip it of its charitable status and having been confirmed as a wholly legitimate and respectable organisation by the Charity Commission after a thorough investigation in 2021.
He frequently dismisses the valid concerns of gender-critical feminists and others about women’s rights, LGB rights, child safeguarding and freedom of speech (that validity having been established by a growing string of tribunals and court cases) as an “anti-trans moral panic”.
He even attacks his former colleagues in the Scottish Greens.
(We presumed that we didn’t need to tell you he was a Scottish Green. Like, duh. The demented Green MSP and former COO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, Maggie Chapman, is his daughter’s godmother.)
He does, however, simply adore Mridul Wadhwa.
In 2022 OpenDemocracy published a piece by Ramsay asserting that “anti-trans activists” had “forced Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre into lockdown”, startling readers who might have imagined that a refuge for rape victims would have kept its front door locked as a general rule.
Ramsay had “researched” the piece by sending out a list of comically biased and leading “Have you stopped beating your wife?”-type questions to gender-critical groups like feminist policy collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie and FWS.
FWS’s sarcastic response is a joyous read, but after the article was published they also sent a serious letter to Peter Geoghegan – OpenDemocracy’s editor-in-chief and one of the founders of super-partisan Scottish-based political “fact-checking” site The Ferret, listing the many, many inaccuracies, misrepresentations and flat-out falsehoods in Ramsay’s piece.
OpenDemocracy made some alterations/corrections to the article in response, but the most disturbing of the falsehoods which still remain are found in the passage below.
Remarkably, Ramsay didn’t see fit to include a SINGLE example of the “55 pages” of abusive and hateful emails he claimed to have been shown by ERCC. (Nor, in fact, did he mention how he’d managed to establish their veracity, since he said all of them had had the senders’ details redacted.)
His piece is full of weasel phrases like “seems to call for a genocide” (does it? Show us so we can judge) and extracts shorn of any context to the point of being worthless – the only actual quote from the supposed emails in the article is of people supposedly warning that unspecified “transphobes” might “take matters into their own hands”, which could mean anything from a full-on arson attack to simply reporting ERCC to the relevant authorities for malpractice.
But it also explicitly states that the ERCC had received “numerous threats of vigilante violence”, which we know for sure is a straight-up lie.
How do we know that? Because ERCC told the Adams tribunal, under oath, directly and without equivocation or qualification, that they didn’t.
We are unable to think of a way in which there could have been any misunderstanding over such a serious issue. It does not seem plausible that senior members of ERCC management could have simply forgotten such threats – which, remember, we were told had “forced” them into “lockdown”.
The only reasonable explanation, given the witness’s sworn testimony and the lack of any evidence in the article, is that Adam Ramsay invented them. (We will of course be happy to withdraw this conclusion if he can provide us with the proof that is so strikingly absent from the published piece.)
Most of Ramsay’s article is simply hyperbolic polemic and can be disregarded as such. It offers no sources or citations for the bulk of its text, which are mostly just attacks on anyone who doesn’t share Ramsay’s extremist views as “bigots”.
(“Extremist” is not our assessment, but that of Judge McFatridge. We can discern no ways, major or trivial, in which the views of Ramsay on gender ideology differ from those of Mridul Wadhwa/ERCC.)
With a quite breathtaking lack of self-awareness he goes on to accuse other people of making “unfounded and unevidenced accusations”, even as he lazily fails to spell their names correctly. (It’s Kellie-Jay.)
He takes at face value claims from people like abusive rapist Beth Douglas, quotes some unsourced statistics about incidences of transphobic violence, and indulges in baseless speculation about people like former SNP MSP Joan McAlpine.
(He loves Douglas almost as much as he does Wadhwa.)
He states that “a recent survey of young Scottish trans people showed 49% had been targets of hate crime”, but the link he supplies – to the website of the controversial and widely-discredited LGBT Youth Scotland – reveals that it’s a self-reported figure from trans people, with no relation to any sort of real recorded crimes.
He sympathetically invites Mridul Wadhwa to smear as “misinformation” the empirically true claim from FWS, confirmed during the tribunal, that rape victims going to ERCC could find themselves being counselled by males (such as, indeed, Wadhwa himself).
And he asserts as an unquestioned, unsupported fact Wadhwa’s claim that TV writer and gender-critical voice Graham Linehan once “published part of [Wadhwa’s] home address”, allegedly causing Wadhwa to fear for his life for no particular reason.
As far as we can establish, the “part” that Linehan published was… “Scotland”.
But in so far as it makes any factual statements which could be interrogated, those statements are false. It falsely claims, for example, that the Alba Party has “made opposition to trans rights a central feature of its campaign”. Alba has no policy, and never has had a policy, of removing ANY rights from trans people, far less making such a policy “central” to its campaign, which is primarily focused on Scottish independence.
It is provably the case that Adam Ramsay’s article about the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre contains falsehoods, including things he must have known were false when he wrote them (such as the above claims about Alba). Indeed, there is almost nothing in it that is verifiably true.
Adam Ramsay is a liar. As far as we and large numbers of other people (visible in the hundreds of responses to his recent, and many previous, tweets) are concerned his “reputation” is that of an abusive, partisan, hypocritical, misogynist polemicist and a purveyor of damaging and defamatory untruths and smears funded by dark money.
He demonstrably has no interest in the truth (having challenged none of the outlandish claims made by those quoted in his article), certainly not on the subject of gender, and we very much doubt he’d have the journalistic ability to uncover it even if he did. After all, he doesn’t even know a man from a woman.
Our solicitors are Halliday Campbell WS of Tweeddale Court, Edinburgh. We know that you’ve got plenty of money. Come and get us, Adam.
