The Leaflet Saga

This image of our leaflet was posted on Peyton Rose’s (now deleted) tweet on the 15th of March 2019:

The archive of the tweet shows that, further down the thread, Peyton claimed we were flyering in Waverley Mall.

Which is interesting, as it looks very much like the same photograph popped up again on the 20th of March in an ‘article’ in Pink Saltire, who claimed the photograph was of a leaflet found in a staff area of Edinburgh Council headquarters:

We’ve checked, and the Waverley Shopping Centre does not have white tables and those nice white tub chairs – perhaps someone can let us know if they exist at Edinburgh Council HQ?

To further add to the mystery we found this image on an old post on Reddit from four months ago:

Those white tables again, that blue in the background, that thumb…!

We would like to point out that these leaflets were printed for distribution at the Edinburgh Festival, last August. We only have a few left and, to the best of our knowledge, none of our members were leafleting at Waverley Mall recently. It may well be the case that some members of staff left leaflets at work in Edinburgh Council HQ, in which case the leaflets have been there, quietly not offending anyone, for at least four months!

Unison and Edinburgh Council, and in particular, Cllr Adam McVey leader of Edinburgh City Council, would do well to question the veracity of the story in the Pink Saltire and speak to women about their concerns, rather than respond publicly with this knee jerk reaction:

Recycled photographs and threats of violently throatpunching women, which have resulted in criminal charges, should not be leading to a point where comments such as “take robust steps to deal with incidents like this“, “commitment from the Council on tackling this type of behaviour” and “completely unacceptable” are made about a factual women’s rights leaflet – and not about the defamatory article or misogynistic threats of violence.

Rather than shut down legitimate political discourse with unjustified claims of transphobia we would much rather Mr McVey, and Unison, meet with us to discuss concerns regarding the interaction of the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act. We hope in the meantime he will distance himself from the unevidenced and inflammatory article which he appears to endorse.