Mick Hartley

Exactly what it looks like

NZ Herald cartoonist Rod Emmerson - the one who previously had Kellie-Jay Keen as "the Trojan Horse of the far right" - produced this effort after the violence in Auckland:

What was clearly meant to be a right-on celebration of Kiwi defiance in the face of nasty far-right transphobic propaganda (Georgina Beyer was the NZ's first transgender member of parliament) turned out, tellingly, to be all too accurate in its symbolism: a huge male fist thrust in the face of a tiny women telling her in no uncertain terms to shut the fuck up.

Victoria Smith at The Critic:

So, it’s still a male person intimidating a female person, but with apparent justification. It’s fine to tell women to be small and pitiful and silent as long as it’s in the name of smashing the gender binary...

It all feels so very familiar, yet we’re meant to believe the rage — a very male rage — is of a different order to that of the past. 

We’re meant to think that this time, it comes from a good place, because these particular women, TERFs, are bad. Even if the same group (male people) are expressing fury that the same other group (female people) are doing the same things (organising politically, talking without their permission, saying “no”), this time the fury is progressive. We’re meant to think it’s progressive because the male people don’t call themselves male people. Or because the female people are all right-wing, even though some of them aren’t. Or because the male people claim to be demolishing gender norms in ways the female people wouldn’t understand. This is despite the fact that I have never seen anything more gender normative in my life than these global, public tantrums about women doing literally anything that doesn’t centre men....

One of the most disturbing things about mob violence against women is that, as in witch trials, once it becomes a spectacle, it becomes self-justifying. No one on your side would do this, would they, unless they had good reason? The worse it looks — the more obvious it becomes that these are just men, shouting at women, threatening them, abusing them, same as always — the more necessary it becomes to dig in your heels, to insist that the targets are real witches, this time.

Witches don’t exist, though. What is happening right now is exactly what it looks like. It’s a male hand, pointing down, trying to silence. It’s a male fist meeting a female face. It’s the same anger, the same misplaced sense of virtue. There’s nothing more to it than that.

What’s going on

Kellie-Jay Keen at Spiked:

For starters, the media in Australia and New Zealand are lost. They will tell straight-up lies. I became this monster. Before I even got to Australia, the media reported on me as if I were some hugely influential figure. And actually, thanks to how the media behaved, by the time I left I really was having an influence. Hopefully I’ve changed some of the landscape for women in both New Zealand and Australia.

During a livestream, I was fiddling with the zip on my clothing and the New Zealand news channel, Newshub, blurred my hand out. It said I was actually giving a white-power signal.

The prime minister of New Zealand even got involved. There was a High Court hearing to try to stop me going into New Zealand. When I arrived at the airport, I was taken into a room and interrogated for two hours. Someone looked through all my suitcases. I got a note through my hotel door from someone saying that they knew what I was wearing, that they hated me and they could see me. All of that was before I even got to the event.

The Green senator for Tasmania, Nick McKim, said that TERFs should be known as ‘trans-exclusionary right-wing dropkicks’ or ‘TERDs’. Well, ‘dropkick’ is short for ‘dropkick and punt’, which is Australian rhyming slang for the C-word. So that’s what he called me in parliament.

The people who say these vile things about me are treated as heroes. And what was interesting was that very few media outlets even discussed what my issue was. They just said I was ‘anti-trans’. There was nothing about the fact I campaign to protect women-only spaces. I was just monstered.

On the other hand, I’ve had so many letters from women that say they had never heard of me until everyone started saying that I was this terrible person. And they went to my website, and now they love what I do. I expect there will be a lot more of that in the coming weeks.

So what has happened in New Zealand is actually a spectacular win. Part of this activism has always been that I want John the scaffolder down the road to know that his daughter has likely been taught gender-ideology nonsense at school. I want normal, working people to understand what’s going on. Because at the moment, this has been a top-down, manipulative, coercive movement. What we’ve done with that New Zealand flashpoint is we’ve basically said: ‘Hey, everybody, look at this – this is what’s really happening.’...

Those trans activists always do my work better than I ever could. They raise the issue and put a spotlight on exactly what’s going on.

 

Sunday in the park with Graham

Glinner describes his Sunday, when he attended the "Let Women Speak" event at Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner and a loud violent threatening bunch of trans activists surrounded the women. The police were in attendance but did nothing to help, and were very relaxed about the use of megaphones (supposedly banned) and all the other intimidatory tactics.

I didn’t realise quite how bad it was until I was in it. The women were under siege, surrounded on all sides, except for the back, which was fenced off. Six or seven policemen dotted around the semicircle’s circumference, barely keeping the TRAs back. It was frightening and intimidating, and those brave women who were there still had the images of misogynistic violence in New Zealand still fresh in their minds....

I think this was all deliberate. I think the police would prefer if the women weren't there at all, so that they didn't have to interrupt their Sunday of picking their holes and sending each other rape jokes on WhatsApp. They deliberately provide as few officers as possible, and they allow TRAs to use loudhailers and break other park regulations in order to frighten and silence women who are just trying to be heard....

Sunday was a disgrace. Women were being frightened and threatened and drowned out by men in masks and the police did nothing except enable it.

Julie Burchill had a piece in the Spectator last week which is fits iin nicely here - wondering why the Met is racist, sexist, homophobic, but never transphobic. It's a "wokescreen":

In my book Welcome To The Woke Trials, I put forward the theory that wokeism is a reactionary, not a revolutionary, creed. The fact that the police seem to prefer taking the side of the males who score high in the victimhood olympics, be they mostly Muslim men torturing mostly white female children or men pretending to be women and boasting that they kill Terfs, shows how misogyny has shape-shifted, happily assisted by the ‘justice’ system.

The police can at at last show how progressive and minority-friendly they are by adopting trans ideology - which is at heart a misogynist movement. A perfect fit. And all those Stonewall training courses will no doubt have helped....

Also, right on cue:

The Metropolitan Police Service is holding a #transdayofvisibility this Friday pic.twitter.com/cSd2QMEvv5

— The Lies They Tell (@sarahstuartxx) March 28, 2023

Trans reporting

We don't have the details yet, but it's surely worth noting that when a trans woman commits a serious crime the media reports are scrupulous about using female pronouns. It's usually somehwere near the bottom of the report - or when you see a photo - that you realise they're talking about a man. Yet with this Nashville shooter there's no problem referring to her as a woman thoughout, even though she's trans and uses male pronouns.

Also: testosterone shots as part of the transitioning? That would make a difference...

Female spree shooters are rare.
Including today's shooter,
the last 3 were self identifying as men at the time 🚩#ThisNeverHappens pic.twitter.com/VYELbZUW30

— Biology Rules Ok (@OkBiology) March 27, 2023

Bad decisions

From the Mail:

A transgender woman who was convicted of rape in 1998 when she was a man was today jailed for nine years for stabbing another trans woman in the home they shared. 

When she was a man??

The court heard that the defendant was currently in the process of transitioning and was referred to with 'she/her' pronouns.

Prosecutor Lydia Pearce said today that the defendant had been out drinking before she made demands for money in her shared flat.

She then attacked her victim - who was able to stem the bleeding from her 'superficial' wounds with a cloth - while demanding to know her PIN number....

Deputy circuit judge Timothy Clayson was told that back in 1988, Jade had been locked up for five years for rape and other sexual offences.

He was also informed that in 2013, she had been jailed again for another sexual matter.

Barrister Richard Canning, representing Jade, said her main focus was now to complete her transition while adding she knew what she had done was wrong.

He also said Jade had struggled with alcohol and had made 'bad decisions' while in drink.

Well yes. The hair, for a start...

Jade will now have to serve two-thirds of a nine-year jail sentence before being considered for release by the Parole Board....

The Ministry of Justice refused to reveal whether Jade would be sent to a men or women's prison.

Unintelligible social justice rhetoric

Oxfam has embraced "inclusive language". Tomiwa Owolade in the Times:

In its obsession with a particular kind of unintelligible social justice rhetoric, Oxfam has undermined the clarity with which it has previously distinguished itself. In its fascination with purely symbolic gestures against inequality and injustice, it has lost sight of what actually challenges those forces: the material, the pragmatic, the real.

Oxfam is pursuing a disastrous culture war and pretending it is not. Describing sex as “assigned” by society rather than biology is not an objective scientific fact but a contentious ideological claim. Reducing women to their biology is divisive. Invoking the jargon of American social justice is not inclusive but the very opposite; alienating to anyone unfamiliar with the latest trends on social media and academia, it furnishes those who use it with a condescending outlook....

Apart from anything else, these issues should be debated because the advocates for these changes are so confused in their thinking. The inclusive language guidelines claim, for instance, that “whilst the majority of the time we use the spelling ‘women’, in some contexts it may be appropriate to use ‘womxn’, which can be seen as a mark of inclusion and solidarity”. If you think that is the end of it, you would be wrong: “some trans people”, it continues, “object to the phrase on the basis that trans women are women and the use of ‘womxn’ might suggest otherwise”.

So we should use “women” most of the time, but other times we might use “womxn”’ to be inclusive, but using “womxn” might in fact be discriminatory, in which case we should use “women”. They say we should avoid terms like “BAME” (black, Asian and minority ethnic) and “BME” (black and minority ethnic), and instead use BIPOC (black, indigenous and people of colour) and POC (people of colour). Those former terms are “outdated”. The guidelines are dense enough to give the most robust mind a migraine; opaque enough to frustrate the most discerning eye.

The inclusive language guide claims to be “a resource to support people in our sector who have to communicate in English to think about how the way they write can subvert or inadvertently reinforce intersecting forms of inequality that we work to end”. But how can it achieve such aims when it uses such garbled language?

The guide is counterproductive. But it is also wrong. It says, “we further recognise that this guide has its origin in English, the language of a colonising nation. We acknowledge the Anglo-supremacy of the sector as part of its coloniality”, as though English can only be reduced to an instrument of colonial oppression, rather than also being the language of Chinua Achebe and Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth.

Deprived people around the world are not helped by this turn towards obscurantism. Neither are trans people or ethnic minorities or any other group Oxfam claims to speak in defence of. The case for social justice needs to be grounded in truth and clear language or it will wither like spoilt fruit. Oxfam was founded to fight poverty, not to relitigate the meaning of a woman.

If charities and organisations continue to wage a culture war against reality, all of us have a duty to respond by affirming the importance of truth in genuinely guaranteeing the dignity of every man and woman; this will ensure the legacy of the original Oxfam does not go to waste.

It's probably too late. Oxfam has already disgraced itself with all the stories of sexual exploitation. This is the sound of a once important organisation disappearing up its own backside.

Using the terms male and female

No sex please, we're academics. 

Transgender athlete research has been shut down after a professor called trans women "males".

Dr John Armstrong, a scholar at King's College London (KCL), applied to carry out a survey of elite athletes and volunteers on whether trans women, who are born male, should compete in women's track and field categories and whether they felt they could express their views.

However, the university's ethics panel rejected his application last week citing equality and diversity concerns, in what has been labelled an attack on academic freedom.

In a rejection letter, the university said: "The language is not sensitive and the misgendering of athletes is not appropriate... there is obvious bias in the language and there is very little scientific reasoning underpinning the hypothesis."

KCL took issue with how Dr Armstrong had referred to trans women as "males" in his research proposal.

Dr Armstrong's application had said: "The principle aim of the project is to find the views of athletes and volunteers on the question of when males should be allowed to compete in the female category in athletics."

Oh dear. How very transphobic of him.

KCL's panel also said "there is a risk that some participants might be unhappy or distressed by the questions that are being posed to them" and asked Dr Armstrong to "please contact the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion team to seek input on the wording used".

Much better if he'd said that he wanted to study the question of when women should be allowed to compete in the female category in athletics. A little pointless, perhaps, but at least the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion team would be happy, and no one would be at risk of being distressed by the questions.

Dr Armstrong told The Telegraph: "They appear to be trying to prevent me from using the concept of sex at all. I am not misgendering any individuals, I am just accurately using the terms male and female.

"I’m being blocked from conducting research and it’s impacting upon my academic freedom.

"No serious work has been done by the various federations to try to find out the opinions of people in athletics, both at the grassroots and elite athletes.

"By refusing to allow people to conduct research that doesn’t meet certain activist viewpoints, that undermines the credibility of research in general."

Former GB athlete Mara Yamauchi, the third-fastest British woman ever to have ran the marathon, told The Telegraph: "Female voices in sport have repeatedly been silenced, ignored and intimidated.

"Research like Dr Armstrong’s is therefore valuable, necessary and important. It is disappointing to hear that it has been blocked. This is yet another example of academic freedom being diminished."

Fiona McAnena, sports director at campaign group Fair Play For Women, said: "Sport is organised by birth sex - male and female. If we can't refer to that, we can't have women's sport. Do these people think we shouldn't have sport for women, just mixed sport? All sport would be dominated by men and boys."

The Mysterious Affair of the Sensitivity Readers

Last month we heard about Roald Dahl and the sensitivity readers. Now it's Agatha Christie's turn:

Agatha Christie novels have been rewritten for modern sensitivities, The Telegraph can reveal.

Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries have had original passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins.

The character of a British tourist venting her frustration at a group of children has been purged from a recent reissue, while a number of references to people smiling and comments on their teeth and physiques, have also been erased....

The new editions of Christie’s works are set to be released or have been released since 2020 by HarperCollins, which is said by insiders to use the services of sensitivity readers. It has created new editions of the entire run of Miss Marple mysteries and selected Poirot novels.

Digital versions of new editions seen by The Telegraph include scores of changes to texts written from 1920 to 1976, stripping them of numerous passages containing descriptions, insults or references to ethnicity, particularly for characters Christie’s protagonists encounter outside the UK.

The author’s own narration, often through the inner monologue of Miss Jane Marple or Hercule Poirot, has been altered in many instances. Sections of dialogue uttered by often unsympathetic characters within the mysteries have also been cut.

In the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children”.

This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children”.

Vocabulary has also been altered, with the term “Oriental” removed. Other descriptions have been altered in some instances, with a black servant, originally described as grinning as he understands the need to stay silent about an incident, described as neither black nor smiling but simply as “nodding”.

In a new edition of the 1964 Miss Marple novel A Caribbean Mystery, the amateur detective’s musing that a West Indian hotel worker smiling at her has “such lovely white teeth” has been removed, with similar references to “beautiful teeth” also taken out.

The same book described a prominent female character as having “a torso of black marble such as a sculptor would have enjoyed”, a description absent from the edited version.

References to the Nubian people – an ethnic group that has lived in Egypt for millennia – have been removed from Death on the Nile in many instances, resulting in “the Nubian boatman” becoming simply “the boatman”....

A toxic culture of fear

As we heard back in December, the Arts Council withdrew funding from a film to be made by the LGB Alliance after staff claimed the Alliance was "a glorified hate group":

The charity had been awarded a £9,000 Arts Council grant to make a film for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee but the grant was withdrawn after an outcry over claims of transphobia.

Separately, Arts Council England staff also posted comments about LGB Alliance, claiming it was “a cultural parasite and glorified hate group” that had “neo-Nazi” supporters.

At a meeting of 400 Arts Council staff, Simon Mellor, deputy chief executive, said: “LGB Alliance is a divisive organisation with a history of anti-trans exclusionary activity” and that it was “a mistake” to have made the funding award.

In fact the LGB Alliance was set up in 2019 when it became clear that groups like Stonewall had been taken over by the T in LGBT, and that the trans movement, far from being the next step in the gay liberation process, was in fact deeply homophobic and misogynist - a regressive throwback to old gender stereotypes dressed up in progressive trans-friendly clothing. So, not really much of a neo-Nazi group, but - as we're seeing down under - that does seem to be the slur-du-jour now for anyone the slightest bit gender critical.

Now a fed-up Arts Council employee is taking them to an employment tribunal:

Arts Council England (ACE) created a “toxic” culture of fear for staff who dared to question transgender views, a senior grant officer said as she accused the charity of harassment and victimisation.

Denise Fahmy claims Britain’s biggest arts quango risked “closing down free speech” after a grant was withdrawn from a charity that campaigns exclusively for lesbian, gay and bisexual rights.

Ms Fahmy, 54, who worked for 15 years as an (ACE) grant officer, believes she was targeted after she questioned why £9,000 of funding was withdrawn from LGB Alliance.

She has now resigned but is taking the quango to an employment tribunal, claiming she was harassed and victimised because of her gender-critical beliefs....

“I have seen too many people’s careers and their mental health ruined by spurious allegations of transphobia, especially in the wider arts community.

“If it was toxic for me in the office, I could only imagine what it’s like now for gender-critical people and ‘the wrong kind of gays’ working in galleries and theatres across the country. Actually, I know what it's like because artists, performers and venue directors have been in touch to tell me that there is real fear in the arts.”...

Kate Barker, LGB Alliance’s chief executive, said: “LGB Alliance is the canary in the coal mine. The withdrawal of our tiny grant has exposed how the capture of ACE by a minority of bullying ideologues is destroying free expression and creativity.”

The new witch trials

Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, has been taking her Let Women Speak tour across the Anglosphere. In the UK and the US she's been met with loud groups of threatening trans activists trying to silence and shout down the women speakers - which in a way is part of her point: that women aren't allowed to speak out about the importance of women-only spaces, while the trans activists reveal themselves to be part of a retrogressive movement of bullying men. It's turned into a kind of street theatre, with the loud violent blokes proving her point perfectly.

In Australia and New Zealand it's reached new levels. For a start the press has been fanning the flames, calling Parker a far-right anti-trans activist. In Melbourne a group of National Socialists, extraordinarily, managed to get through the police cordon - were let through by the police, it seems - and gave the Nazi salute. Cue smug commentary about how this just proved the far-right extremist connection. All very convenient. There's a story there waiting to be uncovered.

And here's the NZ Herald - "the Trojan Horse of the far right":

In Auckland yesterday ihe violence reached new levels.

Show me the GC protesters violently attacking trans people for trying to speak.@ThePosieParker stages free #LetWomenSpeak events, to allow women to speak about their lived experiences, and to explain why men need to stay tf out of women's spaces.

Last week @billybragg,… pic.twitter.com/cEJ2gzoyuI

— FletchFletchington (@DrFletchington) March 25, 2023

Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator:

This is what it must have been like when women were marched to the stake. Yesterday in Auckland the British women’s rights campaigner Posie Parker found herself surrounded by a deranged, heaving mob. She had tomato soup and placards thrown in her face. She was doused with water. Huge men screamed insults and expletives in her face. The shoving of the crowd became so intense that Parker feared for her life. ‘I genuinely thought that if I fell to the floor I would never get up again’, she said. ‘My children would lose their mother and my husband would lose his wife.’

It was a truly chilling spectacle. The mobs’ faces were twisted into masks of feral hatred. They ranted in frenzy as the diminutive Parker, her bottle-blonde hair stained orange from the soup that had been dumped on her, desperately tried to make her way to the safety of a police car. It was a ritualistic shaming of a witch, a violent purging of a heretic.

Next time you’re reading a history book and find yourself wondering how Salem came to be consumed by such swirling hysteria, watch the clips of Posie’s persecution in New Zealand. This is how it happens. This is how the fear of witches can overrule reason and unleash the darkest, most punitive passions of the mob.

And what is Parker’s crime? What did this witch do? She said, ‘A woman is an adult human female’. That’s it. Parker, whose real name is Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, is well known for her criticism of the ideology of transgenderism. She thinks a man never becomes a woman, no matter how many hormones he takes or surgeries he undergoes. She thinks if you were born male, you will die male, and in the time in between you have no right whatsoever to enter any women-only space.

This is heresy. Dissenting from the gospel of gender ideology is to the 21st century what dissenting from the actual gospels was to the 15th. And so Parker must be punished. It was a modern-day stoning, so mercifully they only threw soup and water and planks of cardboard at the blasphemer....

Auckland was the worst. At Albert park in the centre of the city yesterday, the mob could not hide its vengeful loathing of the uppity women who disagree with its ideologies. Parker is a new kind of witch, one who willingly submits herself to a witch-trial, so that the rest of us might see just how dogmatic and unforgiving the new witch-hunters are. I am full of admiration for her. Her courage is shining a light on the visceral intolerance that advances under the banner of identity politics.

The events in Auckland should be a wake-up call for liberals everywhere. We glimpsed the iron fist of authoritarianism that lurks in the velvet glove of ‘Be Kind’. The misogynistic streak in trans extremism is undeniable now. Watch enraged men kicking down metal barriers so that they might get closer to the witch Posie and tell me this isn’t sexism masquerading as radicalism. Witness the crowing of men who are delighted that the mob made the ‘coward TERF’ run away and tell me this isn’t chauvinism on steroids. Behold the use of megaphones and expletive-laden chants and physical menace to silence a woman and tell me this isn’t a sexist, censorious crusade against women’s freedom of speech.

Every word of this. 🧵 https://t.co/3ltetOZ0yK

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) March 25, 2023