Mick Hartley

That great moral project for our time

Allan Stratton at Quillette, with the third and last part of his series on the new gender activists  - The Progressive Case for Renouncing Gender Extremism. It's a longish piece, but here's his conclusion:

If you follow the pronouncements of the most militant gender supremacists on social media, it is hard to escape the lack of caring they exhibit for anyone—women, prisoners, athletes, rape victims—who expresses even the mildest protest at their sweeping claims about the need to utterly eliminate biological sex as a recognized category in any area of policymaking. This aggressive approach has intimidated many lawmakers, and has won allies among those academics who’ve sensed (correctly) the arrival of new grievances to be studied and nourished, new orthodoxies to be promulgated, and new navels to be gazed at. But it also has squandered decades of hard-won grass-roots public support for traditional forms of trans rights that did not presuppose the destruction of sex as an organizing concept—i.e., the right of trans people not to be fired, evicted, brutalized, or otherwise discriminated against because they happen to be trans.

While branding their activism as part of the epic struggle against patriarchy, heteronormativity, and even capitalism, gender supremacists have actually produced an effectively colonialist doctrine that demands universal obeisance to the pronouncements of privileged professors at elite universities and leaders of well-connected western NGOs. Indigenous prisoners, beaten women, marginalized female athletes, immigrants, Jews, Muslims—all are treated as transphobic saboteurs who stand in the way of that great moral project for our time: recognizing that biological males can be literal women.

The project won’t succeed. People aren’t stupid. We know how babies are born. History moves in cycles of reaction and counter-reaction, and this field is overdue for the latter. The problem is that when the backlash arrives, it won’t just be the Twitter activists and media darlings who get the brunt of it. It will be everyone on the progressive side—the LGBT rank-and-file in particular. Before that happens, everyone who believes in equality and justice must stand up and call out this extremism for what it is.

I posted on the first part of Stratton's trilogy back in June. My thoughts at the time: 

We used to snigger at the absurdities of post-modernism, and all the obscure sub-divisions that proliferated from the teachings of (mostly) French post-war philosophers that came to be known as Theory, and successfully came to dominate, in particular, English departments in American universities. Remember the Sokal hoax, where the full glorious fatuity of it all was made clear for everyone to see and laugh at? Or the bad writing contest, where the wilfully obscure pretensions of writers like Judith Butler were exposed? I wonder if this is the first real case of the effects of this nonsense - in this case Queer Theory and its ramifications - finally escaping the confines of the academy and making itself felt in the real world?

Well, we're not laughing now.

The issue of the criminal Zionist regime

Iran's Supreme Leader speaks to Iranian athletes returned from the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, on a very important matter:

"An important point with regards to international sports is the issue of the criminal Zionist regime. This is a very important matter. That brutal, genocidal, and illegitimate regime is trying – by participating in the international sporting events – to obtain legitimacy. For this, it is using sports forums, and the global arrogant [Americans] and those who depend on them help and assist them in this. In this respect, I am saying to you – both the respected sports officials and the athletes themselves: Don't be passive under any circumstances. Obviously, they will take countermeasures, and it is the job of the Sports Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and the legal systems to provide the athletes with legal and diplomatic support, and to prevent them from being oppressed. We cannot, just because of a medal... I mean, a free-born and proud athlete cannot, just because of a medal, shake hands with the representative of a criminal regime, thus recognizing it. There are precedents to this. Today, they are causing a fuss over the Zionist regime, but it was the same with the apartheid regime in South Africa. Many of the athletes in the world refused to compete with [South Africa]. That regime was destroyed and disappeared, and the same will happen [to Israel]. It will also be destroyed. Therefore, this is a very important matter. The various systems should defend the rights of the Iranian athletes – and even non-Iranian athletes who encounter sanctions, because they refuse to compete with a representative of the Zionist regime, like in the case of the Algerian athlete."

And, as has been made clear often enough, Iran intends to play a leading role in the annihilation of said criminal Zionist regime.

Biden, meanwhile, is all set to resume talks.

The more women are louder and visible, the more vitriol we get

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph expands on her Sunday Substack piece - To be a woman in the public eye today means pricing in the vitriol:

My sympathy for Rosie Duffield, Labour MP for Canterbury who cannot attend her own party conference because of fears for her safety, is not simply to do with the fact that I agree with her on some issues – there are some I probably don’t – but because I know a little of what it’s like to be monstered.

As a survivor of domestic abuse, as she is, I imagine hypervigilance kicks in, as it does when you have been traumatised. Yet recently chatting to her I was amazed at how upbeat she sounded: “I have been asking for a meeting with Starmer since June as I was struggling.” His response? A text. That’s it. “It’s misogyny isn’t it? The more women are louder and visible, the more vitriol we get.”

In the flesh Rosie, 50, is tiny but was told by trans-rights activists not to attend Canterbury Pride as she would make them feel “unsafe”. She is way tougher than she looks. “I am robust. I am a single parent. I have hidden behind doors from bailiffs. I am a survivor of domestic violence. I have lived on tax credits, so these people don’t scare me.

“The leadership is advised by 20-year-old guys who see everything through a male lens. The abuse is vile and sexualised. I thought things would change when Corbyn went, but no, men still seek to cancel us. The thing is though, I don’t need to ask men about women’s rights. I don’t need to be validated by them.”

Different issues - gender identity replaces antisemitism - but the same mentality in the ranks of the Labour faithful.

Much of the Labour party appear to be keeping their heads down, while the Corbyn faction want Duffield out anyway. Guardian columnist Owen Jones has, as ever, made the issue about himself on his bonkers Twitter timeline. Obviously he is the real victim here. He was beaten up for being gay and left-wing which was a terrible thing. Yet, as Jess Phillips points out when I talk to her: “At least he could report that as a hate crime when, all the times I have been [physically] assaulted, I as a woman cannot do that.”

When it comes to this issue, Jess is her irrepressible self. She doesn’t have to agree with someone to support them: “But if anyone asks me ‘Is Rosie a transphobe?’ I say of course she isn’t.” Unlike her colleagues, she doesn’t keep her head down. “I am so used to people shouting at me I just have to focus on the outcome not the journey.” But even she admits that often the threats “just fell you”. “To be a woman in the public eye means pricing in the vitriol.”

Both of us worry that younger women will not put themselves forward as they cannot handle the abuse. “What we will see in five years’ time is that we don’t have these political women coming down the pipeline.” She has texted and spoken to Rosie to see if she is OK and says: “I know some think it’s not politically expedient to talk about this. But Rosie stands defiant.”

That was my impression, too, and right now we need women to be able to speak freely and to be safe. If not in the Labour Party then where?

Moral cowardice

The other day we had Janice Turner pointing out the absurdity of Keir Starmer's position. The wretched man is desperate to win back the so-called "red wall" of disaffected Labour supporters, yet has shown himself unwilling to confront the most obvious issue that currently defines the gap between the "progressive" metropolitan few and the overwhelming red wall majority: the question of gender identity and supposed "trans rights". At the moment the debate centres round gender-critical Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who's declared herself unwilling to risk the abuse she'll inevitably receive from trans activists at the forthcoming Labour Party Conference. Starmer, given the chance to offer support to Duffield, and make his own position clear, is keeping quiet.

Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator - Starmer’s shameful silence on the Rosie Duffield trans row:

There is unquestionably a misogynistic streak to the rage against women who question the idea that it’s possible to change sex. These women — Duffield, Rowling, Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, Posie Parker, Venice Allan, Lucy Masoud, and many others — have made clear, sensible criticisms of the trans lobby and have brilliantly articulated the case for protecting women’s sex-based rights. And for doing so they are constantly, sometimes disgustingly maligned. They’re branded hags and phobes; they’re written off as TERFs (which, strictly speaking, means ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, but is now basically used as a stand-in for ‘witch’); they’re threatened, No Platformed. All that the woke set needs now is a ducking stool and they can really get to work.

And now we end up in a situation where a Labour MP feels she cannot attend her party conference because she once said only women have cervixes. It’s madness. And it’s a very serious problem for Starmer. So far he has said nothing about the persecution of Rosie Duffield. What moral cowardice. A party leader who fails to stand up for one of his own MPs against the barbs and threats of intolerant mobs really should ask himself why he’s in the job.

The loudest thing in British politics right now is the deafening silence of Keir Starmer in relation to the Rosie Duffield controversy. If Starmer and his team are serious about repairing Labour, and about winning back the support of decent working-class voters, then they should start by unconditionally backing Duffield and denouncing her sexist, censorious haters. That would send a clear message to the cranks that they aren’t welcome in Labour, and it would let the fair, reasoned working class know that, finally, Labour might be recovering its sanity.

I wouldn't bet on it.

China's new cultural revolution

As I've noted before, the expectation when Kim Jong-un became the North Korean leader ten years ago was that the country would liberalise, along the lines of next-door giant China. Instead, rather than North Korea becoming more like China, what we've been seeing over the past decade is China becoming more like North Korea. The pressure on Chinese culture now from President Xi has strong echoes of North Korea's current "anti-socialist" drive against the influence of foreign, supposedly decadent, culture.

Aaron Sarin in Quillette:

Last week, members of China’s television, radio, and online entertainment sectors were made to attend a symposium in Beijing with the theme Love the Party, Love the Country, Advocate Morality and Art. They were instructed to abandon vulgarity, hedonism, the worship of money, and “extreme individualism.” These vague injunctions arrive amid China’s heaviest cultural crackdown in years. Film stars like Zhao Wei have been mysteriously memory-holed, their movies completely removed from streaming platforms, their credits erased from film information sites. “Once you touch the red line of law and morality,” warned state mouthpiece the People’s Daily, “you will reach the finish line of the road of performing arts.” If the exact nature of this “red line” remained unclear, another editorial put a finer point on the matter: Chinese films must be more socialist from now on.

American Idol-style TV shows have been banned; next on the list are karaoke songs that fail to “promote socialist core values.” These moves are part of an attempt to end the “worship [of] Western culture.” True socialism has no time for smut, and so the sale of sex toys has been banned during livestreams hosted on e-commerce websites. One week before the symposium, the Party zeroed in on the specific problem of effeminate male TV celebrities: “Resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics,” broadcasters were told. Days later, building on recent video game restrictions for Chinese children, gaming companies Tencent and NetEase were ordered to cut content that encourages effeminacy.

North Korea, as I keep saying, has no culture outside of Kim worship. Is China heading the same way?

The Party’s stern alternative to all that sex and pop and sissy chaos is “Chinese traditional culture, revolutionary culture, and advanced socialist culture.” Numbers two and three on the list indicate that Beijing understands culture about as well as it understands morality. George Orwell saw the problem clearly back in the pre-war years. As he observed in The Road to Wigan Pier, “Nearly everything describable as socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad. … Every writer of consequence and every book worth reading is on the other side. … Socialism has produced no literature worth having.”

This truth is borne out by the miserable state of China’s literary scene. When Anna Sun (assistant professor of sociology and Asian studies at Kenyon College) analysed the work of modern Chinese writers, she found that almost all of them had been infected by socialist language dating back to the Mao era—a clumsy jumble of communist jargon and Mao-ti (Maoist literary form). In fact, it’s not just the artists and intellectuals who speak this language—everyone does, from the diner in a restaurant who casually asks his friend to “Xiaomie [annihilate] the leftovers,” to the young mother who tells her little boy, as he struggles not to wet himself on the bus, “Jianchi! [Be resolute!]”

Originally fashioned to represent the authentic voice of the proletariat, Mao-ti is a language “repetitive, predictable, coarse, and mostly devoid of aesthetic value.” Sun argues that the most celebrated of today’s Chinese novelists actually owe everything to their translators. The language in which they were trained acts as a trap constricting thought, and as a result they can neither think nor write with the precision and truthfulness required of genuinely great novelists. Some have found that the only sure way to spring the trap is to abandon Chinese altogether, and write in English.

There was a kind of cultural golden age in China, from around 1912 to 1949, the years of the Republic of China after the end of the 5000 years of imperial rule in China up to the victory of the Communist Party under Chairman Mao.

Then came the communist revolution, and the life was abruptly sucked out of China. Shanghai’s cafés and dance halls closed down; the Race Course at Nanking Road was transformed into a military barracks. Lipstick and makeup disappeared. Soon all of the men had crewcuts and all of the women wore their hair in short bobs. Everyone dressed in the same faded blue or grey cotton. And then in the 1960s, of course, Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution saw the widespread demolition of statues and temples, the smashing of antiques, and the burning of books. Today’s ominous developments do not mean that China is about to experience a second Cultural Revolution, but the promise of an “advanced socialist culture” bodes ill.

At last week’s Beijing symposium, one film director delivered a sycophantic address in which he said, “It is our creators’ duty to do every work simply and unadornedly, and to pass positive energy silently to the audience.” This sentiment chimes with Stalin’s pithy proverb about writers being the engineers of the soul (a line echoed in recent years by Xi). And yet, the truth is that creators have a duty to their art and nothing else—not to their audience, not to “positive energy,” and least of all to some high-minded state-determined notion of the improvement of the people. Certainly art elevates, but not for reasons that we will ever be able to fathom.

As for the karaoke singalongs and American Idol copycat shows that sit at the other end of the spectrum, we might imagine that Chinese culture will suffer no great loss. But millions of people are about to have perfectly innocent pleasures removed from their lives, and this matters. In the small ways as well as the large, Xi Jinping continues to impose on a vibrant nation his narrow, pinched, joyless vision.

A woman who thinks biology is real

Suzanne Moore is angry - Endanger Duffield . Endanger us all:

If no one will defend women, I think we may have to defend ourselves.  That’s not a threat by the way, I get actual threats all the time from  people pointing  guns . It’s only social media. It’s only silly intimidation. It’s not real violence. This is because I am Terfscum/ Gender Critical/ a feminist/ a whore/ a fascist / a woman with a voice.

A woman who thinks biology is real.

That’s all it takes these days to be told you need to be beheaded and raped to death. So forgive me, if when I read that Rosie Duffield cannot go to the Labour Party conference because her safety cannot be guaranteed, I am more than a little miffed. Luciana Berger had to have police escorts at conference as she was Jewish.  What a welcoming era the Corbynites created!

Duffield has actually done two crimes now that are virtually interchangeable in the Labour ranks. In 2018 she attend a rally . Enough is Enough , a rally against anti-Jewish racism. All Labour MPs should have been there, only a few were.

The second is that she thinks that “only women have a cervix”. Crazy lady !!!  She also thinks  male-bodied people should not enter female only spaces simply  because they identify as women.

For this she is deemed “transphobic”. Any woman who believes sex is real – a fair few  -is now “transphobic”. The word has become meaningless. As a female MP was murdered, I am astonished at Keir Starmer’s silence and appalled that many female MPs who I respect, dare not speak out. Why? Because they will come for you if you defend Duffield? Listen, they will come for you anyway.

“Transphobia” is now a conduit for the hatred of women to dress itself up as principled activism. For most of these fools, activism is insulting women on Twitter. Many of them are hardly big thinkers but happy to embrace an identity politics that is supremely individualistic and hyper-capitalist, the actual opposite of the socialism that they aspire to....

Left wing men use violence against women but hey its all for a good cause? Any of them read the new stats on the horrendous increase in violence against women and girls?

At the last conference I went to , I was privy to the endless denials of anti-Semitism and watched so- called activists banging on the windows of a Women’s Place meeting. This is not a party I ever want anything to do with.

If you cannot and will not guarantee the safety of female MPs, how do you guarantee the safety of ordinary women?

Chant your mantra of trans women are women  as much as you like. Very few trans women are murdered in this country and each of those murders is an abomination  (the rate is about one a year) . Yet let’s not forget us privileged natal women are murdered at the rate of 2 a week. That is acceptable? That’s just how it is?

Who kills women? Who kills trans women? Not feminists . Not even Terfs . Another meaningless word.

Men kill women. Men. Clear enough?

Just get real. Also live in a world beyond inane demonstrations of your goodness on social media. Your “inclusivity” now means many women cannot stand to go into public life because it is horrendous.

Why would any woman want to go through what Rosie Duffield is having to go through?

Happy Palestinian heroes

From the Times of Israel, after the recapture of escaped terrorist prisoners:

Iham Kamamji and Munadil Nafiyat, both members of the Islamic Jihad terror group, were apprehended in the West Bank city of Jenin, the Israel Defense Forces said early Sunday. Kamamji and Nafiyat were among six Palestinian security prisoners who escaped from Gilboa Prison in northern Israel earlier this month. The arrests of the two fugitives — a week after the four other escaped prisoners were recaptured in northern Israel — brings to a close a massive 13-day manhunt following one of the worst jailbreaks in Israel’s history.

After the Shin Bet released images of the two men following their capture on Sunday, the photos were doctored to show the nabbed fugitives smiling broadly...

Iham Kamamji in an image from the Shin Bet (left) and one doctored for social media (right). (Shin Bet/Screenshot)

Munadil Nafiyat in an image from the Shin Bet (left) and one doctored for social media (right). (Shin Bet/Screenshot)

Among many Palestinians, the fugitives have been widely regarded as “heroes” who succeeded in freeing themselves from multiple life sentences. The jailbreak was followed by heightened tensions in the West Bank, a stabbing attack in Jerusalem, several attempted attacks, and sporadic rocket fire from the Gaza Strip at southern Israel.

Similar images circulated last weekend of the first four escapees to be recaptured by Israeli security forces: Zakaria Zubeidi, Yaqoub Qadiri, Mohammad al-Arida and Mahmoud al-Arida. The doctored photos disseminated of the fugitives after their capture turned their true-life grim and tired expressions into defiant grins to the cameras.

Zakaria Zubeidi seen after being recaptured in northern Israel on September 11, 2021 (left) and in a doctored photo in which he is made to appear smiling.

Mind you, who's to say which is doctored. Perhaps it's the other way round, and those cunning Zionists turned the defiant expressions of our brave Palestinian heroes into images of defeat and despair....

From above

Winning images from the 2021 Drone Photography Awards:

“Pink-Footed Geese Meeting the Winter” by Terje Kolaas

“Duoyishu Terraces” by Ran Tian

“Sheep in Congress” by Yoel Robert Assiag

“Poisoned River” by Gheorghe Popa

“Bank Of Buriganga” by Md Tanveer Hassan Rohan

“Melting Ice Cap” by Florian Ledoux

“Hippopotamus Group From Above” by Talib Almarri

Looks like, feels like and smells like misogyny

The new Labour Party. Under Corbyn it was the antisemites. Now, under Starmer , it's the trans lobby:

The Speaker of the House of Commons has made an unprecedented intervention over the security of politicians after a female MP was forced to pull out of the Labour Party conference later this week after receiving online threats from militant transgender activists.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle said elected representatives should be able to appear publicly “without fear of harm” after Rosie Duffield revealed she would miss the conference, which begins in Brighton on Saturday.

The MP, who won Canterbury for Labour in 2017, ending its century-long run as a Tory seat, has decided to stay away after receiving advice that her safety and security could be at risk if she chose to attend. Duffield, 50, claims she has been branded transphobic for “knowing that only women have a cervix”. She has also pointed out that it might not be appropriate for people with male bodies who identify as women to enter female-only spaces such as lavatories and changing rooms....

Hoyle said: “Parliamentarians, who have been elected to speak up for their constituents, should be able to attend their own party conference without fear of harm.

“Too many people have been targeted for their opinion or the office they hold. In order to protect democracy, we need to ensure those participating can do so without threats of intimidation.”

Duffield believes those who attack her for her views are “mostly straight white men”. She said: “There are some women who get involved and want to be seen to be very woke ... but mostly it is men, and the same men that have trolled me ever since I got elected.

“So it looks like, feels like and smells like misogyny, and this is just the latest cause they have latched on to ... The fact that I am blonde — they call me a bimbo. The fact that I don’t like antisemitism. There is always something, but it is always the same people who attack me.”

Not always straight white men. There are also a few gay white men:

After Duffield’s second electoral victory in 2019, the Labour-supporting pundit Owen Jones shared a snap of himself proudly standing alongside her at a constituency rally he had organised. Less than a year later Jones dug out the picture once more, this time to “apologise publicly” for his actions and to say that he was “genuinely mortified” about having ever shared a platform with Duffield.

In the English Gardens

Frieze Sculpture 2021, just arrived in Regent's Park:

Shou Sugi Ban Oak - Ibrahim El-Salahi

Stack 9, Ultramarine Blue, 2021 - Annie Morris

Induk Monster - Yunizar

Muamba Grove #1, #3, and #4, 2019 - Vanessa Da Silva

Play Sculpture - Isamu Noguchi

Quantum Shift (Parabolic Monolith Sirius Titanium) 2021 - Gisela Colon

Untitled, 2021 - Jose Pedro Croft

Starmer's choice

Keir Starmer is trying to win back the so-called "red wall" - voters who abandoned the Labour Party because of what they perceived as its pandering to the concerns of the leftie metropolitans who backed Corbyn. There could hardly be a more obvious issue that alienates that red wall - especially the women - than gender identity. It's a cause dear to the hearts of a small "progressive" minority who make a lot of noise, but a clear turn-off for the overwhelming majority of voters. Yet Starmer can't quite bring himself to make the choice and back women against the trans activists. It's the obvious way to go - but the man just hasn't got the bottle.

Janice Turner in the Times - Sir Keir Starmer must respect women or lose them:

Labour, like all progressive parties, is being torn apart by the quasi-religious schism of gender. Two warring tribes have emerged: “gender critical” feminists who believe single-sex spaces, in prisons or refuges, are needed to protect women; and LGBT Labour which argues if a biological male identifies as a woman they must, immediately and in every circumstance, be treated as female.

But Labour, as with Brexit, has opted for fudge. In June Sir Keir Starmer vowed to introduce gender self-ID, after previously saying single-sex spaces should stay. There’s a clear conflict of rights. Yet to LGBT Labour, even acknowledging that two sides exist is “transphobic”.

Now Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP who's endured extreme physical threats for the crime of tweeting that only women have cervixes, won’t be attending next week’s Labour conference because of concerns over her safety.

Starmer has texted Duffield, a victim of domestic abuse, to say he’s sorry she felt unsafe, but offered no help with security. Nor has he publicly defended her after a year of angry demands she lose the whip. “Keir is terrified of conflict,” says one MP. “He just hopes it will all go away.”

No chance of that. In all left-of- centre political parties the gender wars are escalating. Asked on Radio 4’s Today if he believed “there should be spaces where biological males can’t go”, the LibDem leader Sir Ed Davey replied: “No.” The very morning a government report revealed an epidemic of violence against women and girls, Davey promised to scrap all existing female safeguards.

In the SNP, civil war has broken out over its pledge, in alliance with the Greens, to push through self-ID for over-16s. A movement, Women Won’t Wheesht (shut up), was formed to oppose SNP proposals such as erasing data about biological sex from the Scottish census and denying raped women the right to choose a female medical examiner. When the Tory MSP Murdo Fraser referenced a large WWW protest outside the Scottish parliament, Nicola Sturgeon heckled: “Shame on you!” Women’s concerns, she said, are “not valid”.

Even the Women’s Equality Party (WEP) is riven. This summer it held a “members assembly” to formulate a position on self-ID to put before the membership. But when the results came back solidly against, the WEP leadership abandoned the exercise. Women are leaving in fury.

Meanwhile in the Green Party, so ideologically outré it calls women “self-identifying non-males”, gender is the key battleground of its leadership election. The trans activist Sian Berry resigned because Shahrar Ali was appointed to the front bench. Now Ali is standing for leader himself, laying out his unapologetic gender critical position. “A woman is commonly defined as an adult human female and, genetically, typified by two XX chromosomes,” he wrote. “These facts are not in dispute nor should they be in any political party.”

Yet, unbelievably, they are. Next election the question to trip up every politician won’t be on social care or immigration, but: “What is a woman?” A Green candidate at a hustings stated a woman “was an attitude”. Davey’s predecessor Jo Swinson, when asked if humans are born either male or female, replied: “Not from what I’ve read.” Get your answer sorted, because women are watching.

And, boy, are they angry. Politicians who think this is a niche issue, not worthy of expending political capital, are deluded. Almost every day, women come up to me to convey their rage. Why can’t they say “breast feeding”? Why are they called “menstruators”? Why are women prisoners expected to be cellmates with sex offenders because male gender identity always trumps female safety? They’re no longer intimidated by their privileged, pronoun-obsessed student daughters. They are livid at being hectored by woke men — both gay and straight — that they are bigoted just for wanting to keep their meagre, flimsy hard-won rights. And more are prepared to say so....

On this issue only the Tories are reading the room. When people wonder why Liz Truss comes top in party members’ polls they forget about women, who are grateful she is fearlessly defending their rights. Kemi Badenoch is vilified by activists for her science-based, humane attempt to balance trans and women’s needs as equalities minister, but stands firm.

Starmer too needs to grasp the gender nettle. These extreme LGBT activists are a small, unrepresentative hard-left group who hate him anyway: women are half the electorate. Starmer must choose a shadow equalities minister ready to defend women. Then he must defend her. Because there’s a new political slogan in town: “If you don’t respect my sex, you can’t expect to get my X.”

It's not likely. The trans activists have convinced too many on the left that theirs is the progressive way forward. And Starmer, by my reading, just isn't the man to challenge them.

Keira Bell over-turned

They can't vote, or go into a pub, or drive - but teenagers under 16 can now go to a doctor to get puberty blockers without telling their parents. Yes, the Keira Bell ruling has been over-turned on appeal, and 13 and 14-year-olds, full of the familiar trials and pains of puberty, and egged on by irresponsible social media telling them that all their troubles would be over if they'd just "change sex", can just go right ahead and potentially ruin their lives:

Under-16s can take puberty blockers without parental consent, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

The appeal was brought by the Tavistock Trust, which runs the UK's only youth gender identity clinic.

The decision reverses a 2020 ruling that under-16s lacked capacity to give informed consent to the treatment, which delays the onset of puberty.

The original case was brought by Keira Bell, who says the clinic should have challenged her more over transitioning.

Court of Appeal judges said they recognised "the difficulties and complexities" of the issue, but that "it is for the clinicians to exercise their judgement knowing how important it is that consent is properly obtained according to the particular individual circumstances".

Puberty blockers are drugs used to "pause" puberty by suppressing the release of hormones.

They are prescribed to some children who are experiencing gender dysphoria, which the NHS describes as "a sense of unease that a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity".

The Tavistock clinic said it welcomed the decision.

"The judgement upholds established legal principles which respect the ability of our clinicians to engage actively and thoughtfully with our patients in decisions about their care and futures," a spokesperson said.

"It affirms that it is for doctors, not judges, to decide on the capacity of under-16s to consent to medical treatment."

The Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) said that hormone treatment "allows a young person time to consider their options and to continue to explore their developing gender identity before making decisions about irreversible forms of treatment".

Well no, the evidence is that puberty blockers lead almost inevitably to hormone replacement therapy, and no, it's not simply a matter of postponing pubertal changes while the troubled adolescents make their minds up. This is serious stuff, meddling with the normal maturation process. Also, the assumption that doctors are impartial and guided solely by science and the well-being of the children is far from the truth, as we know from the ideologically driven thinking behind the Tavistock, and the complaints from the many whistle-blowers who've left.

It's a big step backwards.

Not all over yet, though. The Supreme Court very likely awaits.

Facing execution

In yesterday's post about the two North Korean students recently put on trial for watching, copying, and distributing South Korean videos, I suggested that the unfortunate youths would likely end up in labour camps.

It could be worse than that. From today's Daily NK:

North Koreans caught importing or distributing foreign media content inside their country face being executed or sent to political prison camps with their families, Daily NK has learned. The country’s authorities are generating an atmosphere of fear by sticking to an outmoded system of “guilt by association.”

In a telephone conversation with Daily NK on Thursday, a source in North Korea said people who have imported recordings, videos, propaganda, printed materials, radios or books from South Korea “that could become illegal means of reactionary agitation” face execution. “Or, they get dragged off with three generations of their family to a political prison camp run by the Ministry of State Security,” he said.

Materials providing a summary of the anti-reactionary thought law, which were obtained by Daily NK earlier this year, say that bringing in or distributing movies, recordings, videos or books from South Korea is punishable by up to life in a forced labor camp or death, depending on the severity of the crime.

Though the law specifies life in a forced labor camp, violators are apparently being sent to political prison camps.

Severe and persistent anti-Jewish harassment

Back to that old story of antisemitism being excluded from "progressive" definitions of racism, since Jews, supposedly, are white and privileged.

At Quillette - How Social-Justice Extremists Spawned a Generation of ‘Progressive’ Antisemites:

In 2019, the Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS) division of Stanford University’s Student Affairs department launched a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training program with a mandate to instruct students about institutional racism. Instead, the program provided a case study of how radicalized forms of social-justice indoctrination can fuel antisemitism.

Earlier this year, Dr Ron Albucher, a Stanford psychiatrist and a former CAPS director, along with his colleague Sheila Levin, an eating-disorder specialist in the same department, filed complaints with federal and state civil-rights agencies regarding what they alleged to be “severe and persistent anti-Jewish harassment.” “Unfortunately, what we found was that the very program meant to help build an inclusive environment for all members of the Stanford community was, in fact, perpetrating the invidious discrimination it sought to eliminate,” wrote the complainants in an open letter published by the Stanford Daily last month.

The dialog-based seminars organized by CAPS were primarily aimed at addressing racial injustice suffered by individuals classified under broad categories, including black, indigenous, and people of color. The organizers used these categories to break participants up into racially segregated “affinity groups.” Albucher and Levin were assigned to the group designated under the label “whiteness accountability.” In the sessions, the pair alleges, seminar committee members “maligned and marginalized Jews by castigating them as powerful and privileged perpetrators who contribute to systemic racism.” Meanwhile, seminar moderators “intentionally overlooked antisemitic incidents” happening on campus.

On one occasion, the DEI group came together for a special session to discuss the “Zoom Bombing” of a Stanford University-wide virtual town hall meeting, which was marred by participants posting racist and antisemitic messages, invoking the N-word and images of swastikas. According to Albucher and Levin:

In the discussion of this event … DEI committee leaders decided to omit the swastikas, stating that they did not want antisemitism to dominate the discussion since Jews are wealthy business owners. When more swastikas were discovered in [Stanford] Memorial Church, DEI facilitators said we would discuss this incident only if time permitted. Yet, there was no further mention of this blatant expression of antisemitism. Failing to even acknowledge the very images used to promote Jewish genocide, especially during a DEI training, is deeply concerning.

These episodes have gained widespread attention because Stanford is an elite school, the alleged behaviour is particularly egregious, and witnesses to them have launched official complaints to government agencies. But this is not an isolated phenomenon. Indeed, what’s happened at Stanford is emblematic of progressive ideological doctrines that now treat the Jewish community as collateral damage in the push to attack and stigmatize “whiteness.”

And, as ever, the left's obsession with Israel gets drawn in to the picture:

Since CSJ [Critical Social Justice ideology] encourages the idea that Israel’s relationship with Palestinians can be cast in the same one-size-fits-all white-oppressor-versus-non-white-victim model, it is not surprising that hostility to Israel became embedded in the Black Lives Matter movement and endorsed by the academics who support it. During Israel’s most recent conflict with Hamas, progressive Democrats vilified the Jewish state for acts of self-defense. One congressman, Jamaal Bowman, claimed Israel was murdering “Black and brown bodies,” as if Hamas might be seen as one giant collective George Floyd. At Princeton University, a collectively authored “statement of solidarity” from academics denounced “Jewish supremacy,” an inartful attempt to present Israeli Jews as a Middle Eastern Ku Klux Klan. Black Lives Matter tweeted support for “Free Palestine,” while referring to Israel as “settler colonialists” and trying to draw a linkage between defunding American police and ending support for Israel. Antisemitic incidents around the world are surging, and are often conducted on the pretext of striking back at Israel. CSJ ideology serves as an enabling ideology for much of this hatred, insofar as it blurs the line between antisemitic hate and legitimate social-justice protest.

Worth reading in full.

A triumph for the UK and for common humanity

Worth reminding ourselves. From Nechirvan Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, in the Times - Kurdistan proves liberal intervention can end in triumph:

The West’s hasty departure from Afghanistan has reignited the debate on liberal interventionism. This conversation often overlooks the fact that not all interventions are bad. Action in Iraqi Kurdistan by Britain, the US, France and others in 1991 saved hundreds of thousands of my countrymen from being killed by Saddam Hussein.

Operation Provide Comfort, the brainchild of John Major, and the no-fly zone that followed, protected Kurdistan for 12 years. This provided the space and relative security to hold elections, create a parliament and government institutions and launch a legitimate military force, the Peshmerga. And when Iraq was liberated in 2003, we rebuilt thousands of villages razed by the Baathists and created an oil industry and emerging market economy. In short, intervention 30 years ago allowed us to do our own nation-building.

Today, the people of Kurdistan and Britain are firm friends, business partners and allies against terror. My visit to the UK this week celebrates that deep partnership, reflected in Britain’s investment in Kurdistan, the eagerness of our young men and women to study in British universities, and the thriving Kurdish diaspora across the UK.

But our joint fight against terrorism is far from over and we need strategic patience. Islamic State remains active in Iraq, Syria and beyond. Just as we saw the Taliban wait until their adversaries left, Isis is in no hurry to surrender or flee. The Peshmerga, alongside Iraqi and western forces, continue to confront this threat because our future, and the security of allies who have experienced appalling acts of terror at home, depend on it.

Kurdistan sits on the front line of the conflict between freedom and authoritarianism, hope and darkness. Radical and terrorist groups threaten us and our way of life. But we remain a safe haven and beacon of tolerance. We host almost a million Syrian refugees and displaced Iraqis who fled Isis and would have been killed or joined the exodus of refugees to Europe had we not opened our doors. We welcome and accommodate all faiths: Christians, Yazidis, Muslims and more.

The debate over Afghanistan will rage but intervention in Kurdistan was a triumph for the UK and for common humanity. While it is vital to learn from one’s mistakes, it is also important to celebrate one’s successes.