Chapman's outburst was dangerous, Donald Trump-ish nonsense - Euan McColm

‘I have no doubt that Chapman believes herself to be on the side of the angels but the reality is that she’s an enabler of angry men’

I’m 12 years old, walking through the snow in Star Wars slippers, pyjama trousers and a man’s sports jacket that I can wrap around myself twice. It’s around 3am and I don’t know which emotion is stronger – fear or shame.

I’m terrified my father, who’s clattered off the wagon again, will get in the Sierra and come after us and I’m ashamed the happy family life I want my friends to believe I enjoy is a fabrication. What if someone I know happens to wake, look out of the window, and see us shivering in the street?

As is usual, things have built to a head fairly swiftly.

After weeks of sobriety, he comes home late from work one night, glassy-eyed and reeking of rum and mints.

Over the following days, he digs himself deeper back into the hole, drinking more, loathing himself more, getting angrier.

On the night he explodes, my mother shakes me awake and we leave in a hurry. She grabs one of his jackets from the hook in the kitchen as we spill out through the back door.

We head to the phone box outside the neighbourhood shops then walk towards the main road, where a friend of mum’s will pick us up.

Later, in the attic room of a strange house, I lay the jacket I’ve been wearing on the floor, hawk up as much as I can and spit on it. I do this over and over. It’ll have dried by the time he gets it back but it’s something.

We were lucky. Things could have been a great deal worse.

There was always someone who’d come to get us. There was always a safe place to go.

Countless families don’t have an accessible escape route.

Over the decades since I was wandering through the snow in my jim-jams, I’ve met a lot of people with similar and, often, far worse stories to tell.

And I’ve met a lot of extraordinary people – predominantly women – who work in the field of tackling domestic violence.

I’ve also encountered more than my fair share of “do-gooders” for whom work in this area is guided by personal belief systems that don’t always marry up with their missions. These people have always existed but the social media age has more fully exposed the ideologues who perform compassion, even though the consequences of their actions can be devastatingly harmful.

Last year, the chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, Sandy Brindley, shrugged off the damage she had caused by endorsing and supporting the appointment of trans-identifying Mridul Wadhwa as chief executive of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis centre.

When Wadhwa stepped down from that role after a tribunal found they’d led a witch-hunt against a counsellor who believed female victims should be able to attend support services from which men were excluded, Brindley painted herself the victim of terrible unfairness. Didn’t people understand that, since she was good and caring, all of her actions were beyond reproach?

Green MSP Maggie Chapman has much in common with Brindley. Both are privileged, middle-class women with power. And both are in thrall to ideologues whose professed kindness cannot begin to conceal the danger they pose.

Chapman is an Alpha crank. Not only does she hold bizarre views about sex and gender – once, when challenged on her view that sex is not immutable, she replied that “very few of us know what our chromosomal make-up is” – she has the power to wreak real damage. As deputy convenor of the Scottish Parliament’s equalities committee, she was complicit in a recklessly one-sided “consultation” on gender reform which saw the magical thinking of government-funded lobby groups preferred over the real-life experience of feminist campaigners.

After the recent Supreme Court Court ruling that a gender recognition certificate does not change someone’s biological sex, Chapman’s reaction was grimly predictable.

Last weekend, she joined a protest in Aberdeen where unhinged activists ranted about their intention to ignore the law. They would continue to use whichever facilities they chose, regardless of the fear their presence in single-sex women’s spaces causes.

Chapman’s contribution to the event was a moon-howling speech during which she lashed out at the “bigotry, prejudice and hatred… coming from the Supreme Court and from so many other institutions in our society”.

This reckless intervention led the Faculty of Advocates to issue a deeply critical statement. Chapman’s words were, they said, “not compatible” with her role on the equalities committee.

There will now be a vote among committee members over whether she should be allowed to retain such a sensitive role.

I think it’s perfectly clear she should not. Her outburst was dangerous, Donald Trump-ish nonsense. My commitment to the principles of free speech stops at permitting someone to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre where no such fire exists. That’s what Chapman did last weekend. Her accusation was both false and dangerous.

During a series of interviews last week, the MSP refused to apologise or back down.

I have no doubt that Chapman believes herself to be on the side of the angels but the reality is that she’s an enabler of angry men behind verbal and physical attacks on women who reject the idea someone may change their sex.

To Maggie Chapman and other privileged politicians and campaigners, the problems of others are to be viewed in the abstract and solutions are to be found in the strict ideologies to which they subscribe.

These powerful people simply cannot, I believe, conceive of dangerous circumstances from which they could not extricate themselves. Their support for the dismantling of women’s rights and their contempt for the principles of safeguarding are fomented in a bubble of back-slapping do-goodery, where to question their beliefs if to be a hateful bigot.

To a colossal ego, add the failure of both imagination and compassion and you’ve got yourself a Maggie Chapman.

And you may keep her.