Mick Hartley

Indoctrination at an organisational level

Believing that sex is real can now prove to be a barrier to NHS promotion:

The NHS Trust that runs a controversial gender identity clinic for the young is facing accusations of discrimination after a potential candidate who believes there are only two sexes was told not to apply for senior leadership roles.

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust runs GIDS, the UK’s main clinic for young people who identify as transgender, referring children as young as ten for experimental hormone treatment.

It promised to bring in outside expertise to improve the service after it was rated “inadequate” last year by inspectors, who raised significant concerns over clinical practice, safeguarding and governance.

The trust recently advertised for a chairman and two non-executive directors. However, when Kate Grimes, a retired hospital CEO, expressed interest in applying, and asked an external recruiter whether the trust would consider hiring people who, like her, “believe that there are only two sexes and that sex is immutable”, she was told not to “waste time” because the trust did not wish to hire anyone with gender-critical views.

Dr Melanie West, from Gatenby Sanderson, the recruitment firm, replied in an email: “I have to say that your view on sex being immutable is not a view point that the trust would wish any of their non-executives to hold and as such I would not recommend that you waste time making an application for this — it will be one of the questions I will be asking candidates at first stage interview.”

You can see her point, I suppose. The Tavistock Clinic is in the business of enabling supposedly gender-dysphoric children to fast-track along the road to a brand new sex via puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and surgical intervention. An experienced doctor who actually understands the basics of biology and knows that sex is immutable would be a considerable embarrassment. It might save a few thousand unhappy children from ruining their lives, but think of the damage to all those careers....

Grimes said that she was “absolutely astonished” by the response, which puts the trust at risk of breaching employment law.

Grimes, who ran Kingston Hospital in southwest London, said that senior leaders’ beliefs should have no place in evidence-based medicine. She said: “It is perfectly possible to support and care for children with gender dysphoria without believing it is literally possible to change biological sex. Indeed, it is a fundamental principle of good healthcare that one’s personal beliefs do not interfere with the care provided.”

She has written to Sajid Javid, the health secretary, warning of “indoctrination at an organisational level”.

Update: JL at the Glinner now has a comprehensive post on this.

A latter-day Islamic Che Guevara

You might think there'd be little appeal in Latin America for the Iranian Shi'ite thug Qassem Soleimani, a man who bears responsibility for the murder of tens of thousands of Syrians, as well as orchestrating Iranian militias across the Middle East. If he's carefully de-Islamised though, and presented as some kjnd of heroic fighter against the evils of US imperialism, then yes, it can work. Emanuele Ottolenghi writes in Tablet on the recently founded Qassem Soleimani Chair for Sociocultural and Geopolitical Studies in Latin America and the Middle East in Caracas, and the work of spreading Iran's revolution to the gullible but ever-present anti-American climate among those let down by Marx but always on the lookout for some new heroes.

For decades, Iran has patiently sought to export its Islamic Revolution to Latin America. Alongside Iranian embassies, one academic institution stands out as a bastion of Iran’s influence operations in the region: Al Mustafa International University, which has branches in over 50 countries, and which the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned in 2020 for its role in Iran’s propaganda efforts, including the provision of material support for the training and indoctrination of Shiite militias. With an $80 million annual budget, Al Mustafa is one of Iran’s leading propaganda outlets. Its robust budget enables it to spread Iran’s revolutionary message far beyond the walls of its campus.

The university’s latest achievement is the establishment of the Cátedra Libre Qassem Soleimani, or the Qassem Soleimani Chair for Sociocultural and Geopolitical Studies in Latin America and the Middle East, a center that was inaugurated in November 2020 at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas. The late Qassem Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force, the elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Corps in charge of overseas operations....

What began in the early 1980s as a subtle effort to propagate revolutionary Iran’s worldview through mosques and cultural centers is increasingly loud and visible, thanks to Iran’s transnational alliances with hard-left movements and regimes in Latin America, which help facilitate Al Mustafa’s proselytizing and propaganda work. Thanks to the zeal of its acolytes and Iran’s funding, a vast regional network is now in place. Revolutionary fellow travelers from communist Cuba to the Castro-Chavista regimes in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have given Iran greater access, freedom of action, and resources to consolidate its outreach and leverage local anti-American sentiment to serve its own interests.

It’s no surprise that Iran’s foray into Latin American universities has scored its biggest success in Venezuela. Caracas has been Tehran’s closest ally in the region since the late Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian brand of anti-Americanism seized power there in 1999. Relations flourished under Chavez’s tenure, and especially when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013....

Al Mustafa-sponsored institutions are an echo chamber for Iran’s narrative of resistance to so-called imperialists and oppressors, usually embodied by the United States and Israel, which resonates more in parts of Latin America than a specifically Islamic message would, winning support from old-fashioned communists and nativist, indigenous separatists. Among these groups, anti-Americanism is an easy sell.

Since Soleimani’s death in 2020, Iran has lionized him as an iconic hero of the “Resistance,” depicting him for Latin American audiences as a latter-day Islamic Che Guevara. This theme reverberates in Spanish-language, pro-Iran propaganda: In a January 2022 blog post republished by TeleSur, Chilean author Pablo Jofre Leal, a collaborator of Al Mustafa University’s Hispanic languages department, Islam Oriente, and other Iranian proxies in Latin America, evoked Che’s words to describe Soleimani: “The highest level which the human race can aspire to is to be revolutionary.” Soleimani, he added, was “an authentic revolutionary.” The mandate of the Soleimani Chair at the Cátedra is to explore themes that are part of Soleimani’s “legacy” as “a hero and martyr in the anti-imperialist struggle.” As co-director Ramon Medero explained in a video launching the Cátedra, Soleimani is “a martyred hero who immediately became a symbol of justice and a paradigm to be followed by all oppressed people of the world.”

The White House seems uninterested in all this, preferring to concentrate instead on the highly dubious benefits of reviving the JCPOA. Ottolenghi thinks they're making a mistake.

Child abuse

We know how this will play out in the gender-friendly world of US culture: more right-wing (sorry, extreme right wing) hatred of trans kids, who are really just looking for some lovely gender-affirming care.

Medical procedures on transgender youths should be considered “child abuse”, the governor of Texas has said, as he advised medical professionals and members of the public to report cases to the authorities.

Greg Abbott said that providing treatment such as puberty and hormone-suppressing drugs to teenagers should be a crime.

In a letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Abbott told the agency to carry out “prompt and thorough” investigations into reports of “these abusive procedures”.

Parents of children who undergo the treatments should be investigated, Abbott said.

He said “all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children who may be subject to such abuse, including doctors, nurses, and teachers” should alert authorities to cases.gender-affirming care.

Failure to do so, Abbott said, could result in “criminal penalties”. Members of the public also have an obligation to report cases, according to the governor.

Abbott’s comments followed an opinion by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who said the procedures violate state law.

An opinion itself does not set new legislation, rather it provides an interpretation of existing laws.

Abbott’s letter provoked a swift backlash, including from the White House which said the comments were an attack on parents and posed a danger to transgender children.

“Families should have the right to seek healthcare that will enable young people to live healthy and fulfilled lives,” a statement said. “Conservative officials in Texas and other states across the country should stop inserting themselves into healthcare decisions that create needless tension between paediatricians and their patients.

“And no parent should face the agony of a politician standing in the way of accessing life-saving care for their child.”

Life-saving care?? Puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, surgery - all in the name of an irrational cult-like belief that children by the hundreds of thousands are somehow born into the wrong body. And of course the White House is right on board.

The man's right: it's straight-up child abuse. 

Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health for the Department of Health and Human Services, who is also transgender, said “gender-affirming care” is “essential and can be lifesaving”.

She added: “Our nation’s leading paediatricians support evidence-based, gender-affirming care for transgender young people.”

Texas has been accused of being hostile to transgender people.

In October Abbott, a Republican who is facing challenges from the conservative wing of his party for re-election, signed a bill banning transgender girls from competing in female sports at taxpayer-funded schools.

I know! Can you believe it? Banning men from competing in women's sports! Is there no limit to the depths these right-wingers will go?

Winter in Iowa

John Vachon - January 1942. "Burlington, Des Moines County, Iowa."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration]

Challenging Mridul Wadhwa

It's about time this was challenged:

Britain’s leading equalities watchdog has been urged to scrutinise the appointment of a trans woman as head of a Scottish rape crisis centre after a legal ruling over the definition of “what it is to be a woman”.

Feminist campaign groups want the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to examine the appointment of Mridul Wadhwa as chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, a position that was advertised as open to women only.

It's astonishing that this should ever have been allowed. Mridul Wadhwa is a trans rights activist with no gender recognition certificate, yet he was appointed head of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre with no questions asked. He's since suggested that women who are unhappy being counselled by biological men after the trauma of rape should expect to have their prejudices challenged. See? Rape can be a good learning experience into the dangers of the much more serious crime of transphobia.

Dr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play for Women, has written to the EHRC urging it to investigate the procedure of the Wadhwa appointment. She argues that Wadhwa, a trans woman without a gender recognition certificate, should not have qualified for the position.

For Women Scotland (FWS), a feminist campaign group, claims the party has broken the Equality Act by having a “male candidate” on an all-women shortlist. FWS has published a letter which was sent to the SNP on their behalf by Sindi Mules, a partner with the Balfour and Manson legal firm.

Ms Mules wrote that all-women shortlists to address the under-representation of women in parliament were legislated for by the Equality Act, which was “quite clear: these shortlists are single sex, and are restricted to candidates who share the protected characteristic of the sex that is under-represented”. She added: “The Equality and Human Rights Commission confirms that the provisions in the Equality Act apply differently to a trans person with a gender recognition certificate (GRC) than to those without a GRC.

“They also state that, ‘A trans woman who does not hold a GRC and is therefore legally male would be treated as male’. It is confirmed . . . that the candidate Mridul Wadhwa does not have a GRC, so is therefore legally male.”

Excellent. The EHRC under its new head Baroness Falkner is starting to get to grips with the real issues in the gender debate.

The Ukrainian killing fields

Putin apologists have been making much of the historic links between Russia and Ukraine, carefully skirting round the matter of the Holomodor, when some four million Ukrainians starved to death as a direct result of Stalin's collectivisation program. There was an earlier horror, though, which in many ways presaged the massacres to come in the bloodlands of central Europe - as recounted by Jeffery Veidlinger in Tablet:

As Russian troops threaten Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin denies the very existence of the Ukrainian people, it is worth remembering the tragedy that took place between November 1918 and March 1921, when Russian and Bolshevik armies invaded the independent Ukrainian state that had been established in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. All civilians, whether they identified as Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, or none of the above, became victims of that conflict, commonly referred to as a “civil war.” But the 3 million Jews who lived in the region—about 12% of the overall population—suffered a distinct fate.

Between 1918 and 1921, over 1,000 anti-Jewish riots and military actions—both of which were commonly referred to as pogroms—were documented in about 500 different locales throughout what is now Ukraine. This was not the first wave of pogroms in the area, but its scope eclipsed previous bouts of violence in terms of the range of participants, the number of victims, and the depths of barbarity. Ukrainian peasants, Polish townsfolk, and Russian soldiers robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, stealing property they believed rightfully belonged to them. Armed militants, with the acquiescence and support of large segments of the population, tore out Jewish men’s beards, ripped apart Torah scrolls, raped Jewish girls and women, and, in many cases, tortured Jewish townsfolk before gathering them in market squares, marching them to the outskirts of town, and shooting them. On at least one occasion, insurgent fighters barricaded Jews in a synagogue and burned down the building.

The largest of the anti-Jewish massacres left over a thousand people dead, but the vast majority were much smaller affairs: More than half the incidents resulted only in property damage, injury, and at most a few fatalities. The numbers are contested, but a conservative estimate is that 40,000 Jews were killed and another 70,000 subsequently perished from their wounds, or from disease, starvation, and exposure as a direct result of the attacks. Some observers counted closer to 300,000 victims. Most historians today would agree that the total number of pogrom-related deaths within the Jewish community between 1918 and 1921 was well over 100,000. The lives of many more were shattered. Approximately 600,000 Jewish refugees were forced to flee across international borders, and millions more were displaced internally. About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed. The pogroms traumatized the affected communities for at least a generation.

It's a story now largely forgotten, overshadowed by the Holocaust. Not without relevance, though:

Today, there are about 40,000 individuals who identify as Jewish in Ukraine, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Anti-Jewish rhetoric has not played a significant role in the current conflict. But Putin, who perfidiously portrays Ukraine as a state defined by “hate and anger,” will surely use all the tools at his disposal to whip up popular resentment against Ukraine’s leadership and to discredit democratic Ukraine in the international arena. In any case, a Russian invasion will be a disaster for all inhabitants of Ukraine and, like the Russian interventions in 1918-1921, will lead to unintended consequences.

Gary Brooker 1945 - 2022

It's always A Whiter Shade of Pale that's remembered, but Procol Harum were much more than a one-hit wonder band. There was the classical stuff with orchestras, like Grand Hotel, which I think they pulled off better than any other rock band.

And then there was this: Simple Sister, from the 1971 album Broken Barricades - a killer riff that that was heavy metal before heavy metal, plus dark dark lyrics. 

And what a great vocalist he was.

Portraying medical transition as cool and edgy

We heard the other day about the cult-like world of Tumblr, where young girls are encouraged to join in the trans fun and, putting behind them their horrible white cis-het privilege, take the leap into a brave new world of medical intervention and gender woo. Well, seems like TikTok's not much different:

Months after partnering with Stonewall and weeks after being accused of “brainwashing” children into trans surgery, a prominent video-sharing service has banned from its platform the “deadnaming” and “misgendering” of individuals who identify as transgender or non-binary.

On Tuesday, February 8, TikTok updated its Community Guidelines to instruct users not to “post, upload, stream, or share: Content that targets transgender or non-binary individuals through misgendering or deadnaming.” To misgender is to use pronouns based on an individual’s sex, rather than declared gender identity. To deadname is to use the name the individual was known as prior to declaring a gender identity.

The change in policy came as part of what TikTok calls an effort to combat “hateful” ideologies.

Another recent change on the platform was the addition of a feature allowing users to add preferred pronouns to their profiles.

In 2020, TikTok signed a partnership with Stonewall, the UK’s embattled queer and transgender charity. Stonewall has influenced hate crime law in England and Wales, and its Diversity Champions scheme has vetted the policies of over 850 organizations in the UK, including the Ministry of Justice, city councils, police departments and institutions of higher learning. The organizations pay thousands each for Stonewall’s guidance, and costs taxpayers at least £600,000 annually.

In late December, the Daily Mail announced that TikTok has been drawing heated criticism from campaigners who say the video-sharing platform allows transgender-identifying influencers to ”brainwash” children by promoting hormonal and surgical modification of sex-based features as “cool.” Critics point to the example of 18-year-old transgender-identifying fashion model Alex Consani, who suggests in a video that has gotten over 2.3 million views that followers are “one estrogen pill away from a glow up.”

Stephanie Arai-Davies of Transgender Trend said at the time that TikTok is “hugely influential and it’s full of videos that portray medical transition as cool and edgy. Gender is seen as the new rebellion.”

Kate Harris of the LGB Alliance said: “It’s no coincidence that the growth of TikTok coincides exactly with the exponential growth of children presenting with gender dysphoria.”

Now TikTok’s new prohibition against “misgendering” and “deadnaming” have made expression on the platform of views opposing the gender identity industry more difficult.

From that Daily Mail piece:

More than a quarter of British TikTok users are aged between 15 and 25, and children aged between four and 15 who sign up spend an average of 69 minutes on the app each day, according to TikTok’s own data.

Analysis by The Mail on Sunday shows that videos with the hashtag #Trans have been seen more than 26 billion times. 

TikTok signed a partnership earlier this year with Stonewall, the controversial lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights charity, to promote this material.

One popular transgender TikTok influencer, Bella Fitzpatrick, raised £20,000 from followers in less than three months to fund private gender-reassignment surgery. 

The 19-year-old has 700,000 followers and explains the process of transitioning, including her experience of bypassing NHS waiting lists.

Another is Alex Consani, 18, who has more than 680,000 followers. She went viral five years ago when, aged 12, Cosmopolitan magazine featured her life as a trans model.....

A channel featuring influencer Jaison Jowett shows the process of transitioning and carrying out reassignment surgery.

One video includes the caption ‘Heal with me after top surgery!’ – a reference to a reconstructive chest operation.

Another video begins with the words ‘I used to be a good Christian kid’ before showing the transformation to a ‘trans, gay atheist who loves tattoos and chaos’.

Last night, Kate Harris, of the LGB Alliance, which opposes Stonewall’s policies on transgender issues, said: ‘Our major concern is that millions of impressionable children are watching these online influencers....

Ms Harris described some of the videos as ‘deeply frightening’, adding: ‘The message is so often, “Don’t involve your parents.”

‘What these videos would lead a generation of children to believe is that it is easy to change sex and that it is the answer to all of your problems.’

The demonisation of a woman who stands up for women

Talking of Suzanne Moore (yesterday), who discovered that left-wing papers like the Guardian have no interest in tolerating gender-critical views, here she is in her new home at the Telegraph, writing about that disgraceful New York Times ad targeting JK Rowling:

This is aimed at attracting a younger, diverse readership, and it presumes that such people have no qualms about “cancelling” Rowling. This presumption, derived mainly from Twitter, is abhorrent. For a start, Twitter is not the universe, but a tiny part of it. The endless rows over trans rights that occur there do not reflect the real world in which Rowling’s books sell more than ever. Readers are not boycotting her.

All the vile efforts to denounce Rowling for “transphobia” – i.e., thinking biology is real, and that being a woman is not simply a feeling in some man’s head – become ever more desperate. Her power, her wealth, her grace under pressure have made her even more of a hate figure for liberals who deny that cancel culture exists. This uncancellable woman sure does get to them.

Which is why this New York Times ad is more than idiotic – it is dangerous. Imagine a world in which JK Rowling did not write the books we know she did. What happens to the author in this scenario, her intellectual property? Will her creation be removed in some Maoist obliteration? Imagine she does not exist. What does that actually mean? Let me spell it out.

Every death threat I have ever had, every woman I have spoken to about being stalked or abused, has heard these words. They have “no place”, they have “no right to exist”. It is a threat, and I felt sick when I saw that fox-killing egomaniac lawyer, Jolyon Maugham, tweet about the Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who is already anxious about her own security, saying: “There should be no place for her in progressive politics.”

Such dog-whistling is everywhere, often from these men who believe themselves to be on the right side of history. JK Rowling writes successful books. Duffield got elected. Kathleen Stock was made a professor. These women will not be imagined away for the sake of a tiny percentage of the population. To think that this advances trans people’s rights is a delusion.

But delusion is now part of a liberal mindset. I was interviewed recently by an American writer who was trying to understand the differences between what is happening here over trans issues compared with in the States. We are told – wrongly – that the only people not on board with gender ideology are nutzoid Christian evangelicals, yet here most gender-critical feminists are from the Left.

It is more complicated than that, and already it’s breaking down. Sport is opening up the eyes of those who have not paid much attention to this debate. Watching swimmer Lia Thomas, recently transitioned, wiping the floor with the women in the Ivy League is sowing doubt. No one in the stands looks happy. Off the record, many female students and parents think that the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the governing body, has done wrong; that biological facts mean however hard their daughters train, they cannot win – but they don’t want their kids labelled “transphobes”. A friend of mine, campaigning for the Democrats, told me that on the doorstep they were hearing that Biden was responsible for ending women’s sports.

Not everyone is happy to see the demonisation of a woman who stands up for women, which is all JK Rowling has ever done. That someone should whip up more hatred against her to sell newspapers shows a complete loss of moral fibre and a condescending attitude to readers. If you want publications edited by Twitter, then all you will get are publications without analysis, reportage and argument.

That this, again, involves tying a woman to the pyre and asking for a match – and thinking this is attractive – is a new low.

Triggering the rise in transgenderism among children

Why that Isle of Wight case, about the 6-year-old deemed "transphobic" because he was confused when a pupil he knew as a boy turned up to class wearing a dress, is so important. Andrea Williams at The Critic on how school policies are triggering a rise in transgenderism among children:

Ten years ago, if you had asked the general population, what the difference was between gender-fluid, gender non-conforming, transgender and transsexual, few could have told you. Today, our primary school children can not only answer that question but may find themselves, with or without their and their parents’ knowledge, in class with a “trans kid”. Such is the all pervasive influence of the campaigners who have shaped the teaching on this in our schools.

Have you heard of the Cornwall Guidelines? Chances are that you haven’t. They are referenced in the Department for Education’s guidelines on how to deal with the issue in schools. Now the Cornwall Guidelines have found their way into thousands of primary schools, without proper critique but with profound effect.

The Rowes started their legal action in 2017 when they were told that unless they believed that six- and eight-year-old “trans kids” really were the sex they were identifying with, that they were “transphobes”.

The Rowes, concerned for the well-being not just of those children but their own, and the wider school community, produced hundreds of pages of scientific evidence from around the world in support of their position and asked the Secretary of State for Education to intervene.

He declined, saying there was “no evidence” to suggest that the school had “promoted partisan political views to its pupils or brought political issues to the attention of its pupils”. He said the matter had nothing to do with education, it was all about meeting the needs of all children without compromising the rights of the “transgender” child.

At a hearing in the High Court last week, Lord Justice Lane disagreed. He found it was arguable that education had a wider definition than the Secretary of State was describing; that it was more than “textbooks and curriculum”; that the culture and sex education policies set by the school could be described as education. He also said that it was arguable that the Secretary of State had failed to pay due regard to the scientific evidence the Rowes had put forward.

The case goes to the heart of the policies and practices implemented in schools around safeguarding of children as young as four. It is striking that since the Cornwall Guidelines were published in 2015, child referrals to the Gender Identity Development Service have more than tripled. How we educate our children in schools through our sex education and trans policies has a real-life impact.

Tragically, research evidence collated in the past five years, also proves that children who identify as transgender suffer disproportionately from severe mental illness. It shows that if comorbidities are treated early, nearly 90 per cent of children dealing with gender dysphoria will be reconciled to their biological sex by adulthood. If our schools’ policies promote, normalise and encourage children to believe they are “trans” without addressing their comorbidities, many more children will undergo drastic and life altering social transition, drugs and surgery.

The evidence couldn't be clearer. Children need understanding and advice with their problems. What they certainly don't need is to be inculcated into this absurd gender cult at such an early age, and led down the path of irreversible medical intervention. It's hard to think of anything quite so brazenly irresponsible. 

The current law set out in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 makes clear that only over-18s who have lived out in the opposite gender for two years can have their adopted gender recognized in law. Trans campaigners stretch out other legislation, such as the Equality Act 2010, to make it appear to apply to under-18s, but it is this soft law, or people’s misconceptions about it, that has led to documents like the Cornwall Guidelines being followed without question.

Enshrining gender ideology, in a well-meaning but flawed attempt to make children’s life easier, may be shown to breach Public Sector Equality Duty, which requires public bodies to “foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not”. Treating people like the Rowes and their young children as if they are bullies for not believing in gender ideology hardly fosters good relations.

The Rowe case demonstrates that our children follow, in their behaviour, life choices and belief, what education policies and systems set out. The Secretary of State for Education should take this very seriously.

The Rowes did not mean to start a case. They simply questioned the school’s policies on transgenderism. Five years later, the case is of national significance pertaining to how we educate not just those children who are vulnerable, but all our children. Its importance cannot be understated.