Mick Hartley

Chrysler Girls' Club

Arthur Siegel, May 13, 1942. "Detroit, Michigan. Style show presented by Chrysler Girls' Club at Saks Fifth Avenue store and scenes at plant. Chrysler Corporation office workers (one powdering her chin) typing various forms."

[Photo: Shorpy/Arthur Siegel for the Office of War Information]

A dystopian nightmare

In that earliuer post this morning, with JK Rowling and Rhona Hotchkiis, I missed out on the third contribution, from Susan Dalgety. It's worth reading, as a clear example of the horrors unleashed on families with vulnerable children by the gender cult.

Esther is a broken-hearted parent. The mother of three girls, her family’s life has been dominated by gender identity for nearly five years. Her eldest, Lily, now 17, believes she is a man trapped in a woman’s body, having gone through a period of being non-binary. Her younger sister, Rachel, is 15. She has tried binding her breasts and taking testosterone supplements bought online, believing she can change her sex. Both have been affirmed by teachers at their secondary school, against their parents’ wishes, but in accordance with the Scottish government’s guidance issued to schools in 2021.

Esther, frustrated by years of trying to support her children as they struggle with their mental health, has a simple message for Nicola Sturgeon and her ministers who promoted gender identity in schools. “What were you thinking? Why would you impose an adult agenda on children? Don’t you realise what you have done?”

Esther and her husband, Chris, are exhausted by their family’s ordeal. In her cosy sitting room she recalls how pleased she and Chris had been when Lily first made friends. “She is on the autism spectrum and finds making friends difficult. She didn’t have any when she started secondary school. She spotted the rainbow flag at an open day at school — it was the flag that attracted her, she didn’t know what it meant. It was the Pride club and she was quickly signed up. She had found a ‘tribe’.”

Esther describes how Lily became obsessed by gender identity. “It was a non-stop discussion about gender and sexuality. At one point she talked about 96 different genders. She was looking for a reaction. We talked about it endlessly, at every family meal. And her younger sister became interested too. We tried to be as supportive as you can be as parents. They wanted flags, badges, all the paraphernalia, and we supported them. After all, what’s a badge? It is just a badge.”

Then came Covid and, like almost every teenager, Lily and her sister Rachel disappeared online. “At the start of lockdown, we did lots of things together as a family, like going for walks together. But it wasn’t a normal society and the girls started spending most of their time on their computers. We didn’t know that gender identity ideology was all over TikTok and YouTube, and of course the algorithms sucked them in deeper and deeper.”

Esther and Chris agreed to the school’s advice that the girls be known by their new names at school, having previously changed their pronouns at school without their parents’ knowledge. Esther explains: “The transgender guidance promotes the affirmation model, so we reluctantly went along with it.” Desperate, they sought help from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), only to find themselves reported to social workers for “unintentional emotional abuse” because they refused to affirm their daughter’s change of identity by using her chosen pronouns at home.

After a seven-month wait, social workers decided Esther and Chris had no case to answer, and suggested that the family be referred to CAMHS for support. “I laughed,” says Esther.

Five years after their oldest daughter started exploring her gender identity, Esther says she and her husband are now taking a “watchful waiting” approach. “We have spent time trying to reconnect with them to get our family unit back together … It is important to stay close. But they are thoroughly entrenched in the ideology they see online, which only presents a positive picture and none of the reality or risk.

“They are an idealistic generation; they don’t want to have a male–female divide. Anyone can be anything. As JK Rowling said in her tweet, ‘dress however you please …’ But this is different. By telling kids it is possible to change sex, it has confused everyone, and it is damaging. I see the whole world affirming my children — school, doctors, opticians, everywhere they go, all in the guise of ‘be kind’. It’s a dystopian nightmare. And if we speak out, as parents, we get lambasted or sent to social services. But everyone is affirming a delusion.”

Esther says her only hope now is time. “If we can keep them as far away as possible from testosterone and surgery as their brain matures, we hope by the time they reach the ‘magical’ age of 25, they will be comfortable in their bodies.”

The rubbish war

A BBC report:

North Korea has dropped at least 260 balloons carrying rubbish in the South, prompting authorities to warn its residents to stay indoors.

South Korea's military also cautioned the public against touching the white balloons and the plastic bags attached to them because they contain "filthy waste and trash".

The balloons have been found in eight of nine provinces in South Korea and are now being analysed.

North and South Korea have both used balloons in their propaganda campaigns since the Korean War in the 1950s.

South Korea's military had earlier said it was investigating whether there were any North Korean propaganda leaflets in the balloons.

The recent incident comes days after North Korea said it would retaliate against the "frequent scattering of leaflets and other rubbish" in border areas by activists in the South.

"Mounds of wastepaper and filth will soon be scattered over the border areas and the interior of the ROK and it will directly experience how much effort is required to remove them," North Korea's vice-minister of defence Kim Kang Il said in a statement to state media on Sunday....

South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that "some of the fallen balloons carried what appears to be faeces judging from its dark colour and odour".

There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

South Korea's military condemned the act as a "clear violation of international law".

"It seriously threatens the safety of our people. North Korea is entirely liable for what happens due to the balloons and we sternly warn North Korea to immediately stop this inhumane and crass action," the military said.

In addition to anti-Pyongyang propaganda, activists in South Korea have launched balloons carrying among other things, cash, banned media content, and even Choco Pies - a South Korean snack banned in the North.

Earlier this month, a South Korea-based activist group claimed it had sent 20 balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang leaflets and USB sticks containing Korean pop music and music videos across the border.

In the past North Korea has claimed that Covid arrived from the South by balloon, as well as many other impure alien things.

The gender shaman

Here's Robert Garofalo, of Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago:

“I’ll turn to the child and be like, so yeah what gender identity do you have?”

Dr. Robert Garofalo of @LurieChildrens hospital proudly admits the horrible truth behind the process of transitioning children. pic.twitter.com/40s97I5TyI

— Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) May 27, 2024

A thread by Dennis Noel Kavanagh:

1/ You can be a Doctor or you can be a gender shaman and Rober here chooses the latter. Shorn of his duty to establish Gillick competence or assess according to evidence his is a holy mission, to divine and channel sacred gender souls purely on the word of the chosen. https://t.co/DhJdAMNLBA

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) May 29, 2024

Full thread:

2/ A gender shaman such as this never pauses to ask why so many autistic or gay youth are chosen because that is a matter of science and data and his mission is spiritual a revelatory in nature. His practice is not medicine, but the delivery of sacraments.

3/ Here the evil Robert delivers youth from is predominantly growing up gay because we know 80-90% of youth crossing the doors of these clinics are simply proto young gay men and lesbians. In gender growing up gay is the ultimate hardship to be cured.

4/ And so the west slides into an Iranian approach to gender non conformity. This is why Dr Bell at the Tavistock warned of homophobic parents seeking out transition for children and why Sonia Appleby and many others repeated the concern.

5/ This is the great lie of the rainbow. Despite the new corrupted rainbow everywhere and endless holidays and approaching month long gender Ramadan this is in fact a weak and pre liberation community where the young are medically corrected out of their sexuality.

6/ It’s simple really isn’t it. Take your worryingly mincing lad and the gender shamans will heterosexualise him so he passes as a straight girl. Passing in this area is not just about sex. Here it is about sexuality and those 80-90% figures.

7/ To do all this religious work one must ignore statistics, disregard the detransitioners and resisters, cancel the opposing gays and often simply refuse to collect data. This is necessary in a world where spiritual revelation replaces Gillick competence or medical curiosity

8/ But then this isn’t the practice of medicine. This is the spiritual work of the gender shaman. A man so possessed of virtue he broadcasts his special connection to the souls of the chosen and his sacred work achieving gender utopia.

9/ The “trans kid” is about the most dangerous concept gender has produced and no more dangerous is it than to gay people. Welcome to regress. It is now more dangerous to be born gay now than 20 years ago. Thanks to our gender shaman.

The Cass golden bridge

Helen Joyce in The Critic:

Of the aphorisms attributed to the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, none is more famous than that you should build a golden bridge over which your enemies can retreat. If they are backed into a corner, the idea goes, their only way out will be through you. But if running away is easy and tempting, winning may not require wading through rivers of blood.

For some who profess the trans neo-religion, the Cass Report, published in April, looks like a golden bridge. Distinguished paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass said nothing in it that critics of gender clinics’ reckless experimentation haven’t been saying for years. But she said it in a government-commissioned report and demonstrated the near-total lack of an evidence base.

Just two of 103 academic papers that fit the criteria for inclusion in the literature review were judged to be high quality, and the rest were either worthless or inconclusive. An awful lot of people who spent years insisting not just that gender-confused kids should be chemically castrated with puberty blockers and speedily prescribed cross-sex hormones, but also that women can have penises and all the other trans articles of faith, are now looking for a face-saving way to recant.

Amongst them is Keir Starmer. In 2021 the Labour leader said backbencher Rosie Duffield was wrong to say that only women have a cervix; post-Cass he admits that “biologically, she of course is right”. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, who used to say “trans women are women, get over it”, now says the next Labour government will “work to implement the expert recommendations of the Cass review”.

Why did two clever men ever believe that men could become women? Or that little children could discern their innate gender identities before they could tie their shoelaces?

Streeting, like so many gay men, was presumably misled by some gay campaign groups’ adoption of trans ideology despite its incompatibility with gay people’s rights. As for Sir Keir, he’s a lawyer, and lawyers are prone to believing that laws can overwrite reality.

His insistence pre-Cass that “99.9 per cent” of women don’t have penises makes sense if you think a government-issued piece of paper determines your sex (the 0.1 per cent are men with gender recognition certificates stating their “acquired gender” as female).

Funny how many people fell for this when they have no trouble understanding the concept of a “legal fiction” when the government declares Rwanda safe.

Streeting surely understands that the more that is done to end the scandal of sterilising gender-confused children before he picks up the health portfolio, the better for him. Sir Keir no doubt wants to avoid questions about women’s penises at every press conference he gives as prime minister. As John Maynard Keynes nearly said, when the incentives change, I change my mind.

The hope now is that many of the cowards who remained professionally deaf and blind to the downsides of pretending sex can change, join the rush for the exit. The self-proclaimed sceptics who used to be so scathing about homoeopathy but swallowed the ludicrous claim that it was possible to be “born in the wrong body”. The New Atheists who genuflected to a godless neo-religion. The civil servants supposed to uphold impartiality in public life, who put their pronouns in their email signatures....

The courage of girls

In the Times today, an extract from JK Rowling's essay in The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, due out tomorrow:

Looking back now, and notwithstanding how unpleasant it’s been at times, I see that outing myself as gender-critical brought far more positives than negatives. The most important benefit of speaking out was that I was free to act.

One of my favourite writers, Colette, wrote in her book My Apprenticeships, “among all the forms of absurd courage, the courage of girls is outstanding.” For too long, I’d watched in silence as girls and women with everything to lose had stood up in the face of a modern-day witch hunt, braving threats and intimidation, not only from activists in black balaclavas holding placards promising to beat and murder them, but from institutions and employers telling them they must accept and espouse an ideology in which they don’t believe, and surrender their rights. In a sense, of course, all courage is absurd. Humans are hardwired to survive, to seek safety and comfort. Isn’t it more sensible to keep your head down, to hope somebody else sorts it out, to serve our self-interest, to court approval? Possibly.

But I believe that what is being done to troubled young people in the name of gender identity ideology is, indeed, a terrible medical scandal. I believe we’re witnessing the greatest assault of my lifetime on the rights our foremothers thought they’d guaranteed for all women. Ultimately, I spoke up because I’d have felt ashamed for the rest of my days if I hadn’t. If I feel any regret at all, it’s that I didn’t speak far sooner.

And this, from former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss, on why trans-identified males have no place in all-women prisons:

In 2014, I fulfilled what had been an ambition since joining the prison service five years previously and moved to HMP Cornton Vale — Scotland’s only all-women prison — as governor in charge.

In my two years there, I encountered several trans-identified male prisoners and became implacably convinced that they should not be in a women’s jail. I listened to all the arguments: they are women; they live as women; they are particularly vulnerable. But not one of those claims stood up to close examination. Trans-identified males pose the same challenges to women as all men — everyone knows what those are and that’s why men as a group are not permitted unfettered access to women’s spaces, services and sports. Trans-identified males are not excluded from these spaces because they are trans but because they are male, and that should hold as true for prisons.

I wish people would remember that women in jails have no choice: they cannot get away. They cannot avoid sharing intimate spaces. They cannot “reframe their trauma”, as one prominent Scottish activist outrageously suggested to rape survivors uncomfortable with males in single-sex spaces.

Women prisoners must live in close, sometimes very close, proximity to whoever the prison service decides. They must say nothing while a man with an erection, visible through his tight leggings, enjoys their obvious discomfort. They must say nothing while an aggressive man punches walls, triggering adrenaline rushes of fear as women relive the male violence and abuse that they have suffered in the past. They must say nothing while a man, masquerading as a woman, describes in detail what he plans to do to his girlfriend with his penis when he gets out. And they must remain silent when a “trans woman” tells them he has no intention of living as a woman in the community.

These all too common incidents, all ones I have witnessed or had reported to me, are compounded by the fact that in the UK, but not only the UK, a disproportionately high number of trans-identified males in prison are convicted sex offenders....

Update: amended, as The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht is not just a Rowling book - it's a collection of essays, with JKR being one of the contributors.

Gender ideology in Scottish secondary schools

It's Scotland. Again:

More than 95 per cent of Scottish secondary schools are telling children they can self-identify their gender, an investigation has found.

In a report, For Women Scotland, the campaign group, claimed that an “unscientific contested belief system” had become “deeply embedded” within classrooms as a result of controversial SNP government guidance and the influence of radical activist groups.

In findings based on freedom of information requests from hundreds of schools, the group discovered nine in 10 Scottish secondaries taught pupils that humans have a gender identity that may be different to their biological sex.

At least 95.4 per cent are operating gender self-ID policies, meaning schools consider the gender of the child to be whatever they declare it to be.

The situation means that biological males are being allowed to participate in female sport classes and share toilets and changing rooms with girls in a majority of high schools, the report warns.

The SNP government has kept controversial guidance, which calls on teachers to “be affirming” to children who say they are trans and endorses “social transition”, in place despite the recent findings of the Cass review.

The Celtic fringe, eh.

8-year-old Mykhailo

A reminder of another war...

8-year-old Mykhailo waits in vain for his father come home from bombed supplies store in Kharkiv

Now he has to undergo DNA testing himself, as his father is likely among the victims.

Authorities fear they’ll have to sift through ashes to find remains and identify the deceased. pic.twitter.com/X0PVmpeJnm

— Tymofiy Mylovanov (@Mylovanov) May 26, 2024

The occupation of the campuses

Natan Sharansky in Tablet, on the crucial role universities have played, and are still playing, in the demonisation of Israel and the sudden explosion into the open since Oct 7th of naked antisemitism:

Twenty years ago, just after the second intifada, I went on a tour of American and Canadian campuses. Shaken by what I saw and heard, I told (then) Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that the major battle for the future of American Jewry will be fought on campuses. So disturbed was I by this visit, that I titled the article I wrote about it in the Hebrew press “a journey into occupied territory.”

The “occupiers” in my metaphor were the centers for Middle East studies that had sprouted like mushrooms in American universities to spread anti-Zionist propaganda. Their influence was palpable, not only in events they organized, but also in their effect on the Jewish students I met. While many expressed deep solidarity with Israel and support for its struggle against terror, a few young men and women told me that for them, as liberal Jews, it would be better if Israel didn’t exist. “Then,” they told me, “I won’t be perceived as responsible for such awful crimes.”

Such statements, which foreshadowed attempts by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace to dissociate themselves from Israel, didn’t concern me as much as yet another, and far more alarming, set of statements. People who wish to fully sever their association with Israel neither reflect nor sway the sentiments and opinions of the overwhelming majority of American Jews. No, the statements that concerned me and led me to speak of occupation and battlefields were the many variations I heard on one young woman’s quietly spoken and regretful admission that she would very much like to speak against divestment and other anti-Israel measures, but she couldn’t. Her professors won’t like it, she told me. It would harm her future career.

Dear Lord, I thought, when I first heard these words. We are not in the Moscow of my youth, where one’s career depended on pretending to buy the Soviet credo hook, line and sinker! Yet the more students I met, the more I heard of similar, stifling concerns. Having grown up in the Soviet Union, I knew very well how catching and pervasive self-censorship can become. No one will need to “occupy” the campuses physically if the Jewish students will carry out their own occupation themselves by growing too afraid to speak their own truths....

Of course America is a free country and not a totalitarian regime. However, it was impossible to miss the resemblance between the culture I encountered in the American academy 20 years ago and the Soviet worldview of my youth. Like the Communist party (following Marx), more and more people started dividing the world into oppressors (read: always bad, always in the wrong) and oppressed (read: always in the right), and claiming that whoever belonged to the first camp wasn’t worthy of the same rights, freedoms, and protections as the latter. Since Israel and successful “white” Jews elsewhere were a priori classified as oppressors, hating and indeed abusing them became less and less taboo.

In the past 20 years, the ideologues of this new antisemitism continued to pour their fervor into demonizing Israel, and to use every tool at their disposal to press the majority of American Jews who don’t believe their lies into becoming doublethinkers. They made it more and more difficult to get a public position in a student body for students who supported Israel or even visited it on a Birthright trip. They gaslighted Jewish students who spoke about their personal experiences of antisemitism by telling them that what they experienced was really “only” and “legitimate” anti-Zionism, putting them on the defensive for their so called “alarmism” and “rejection of legitimate criticism.” More and more Jewish students found that standing up for their beliefs marked them for discrimination and harassment. Jewish students found themselves unwilling doublethinkers in the very places that are supposed to be the bedrock and bastion of free society.

After Oct. 7, the campaign to vilify Israel and scare its potential supporters on campuses has exploded into the open. Explicit antisemitism became legitimate and accepted on many American campuses, as so-called “anti-Zionism” revealed itself to be a flimsy cover for unadorned antisemitism....

The occupation of the campuses, which 20 years ago was but a metaphor, has become a real movement with funding, leadership, and physical presence. Young Jews no longer face ostensible threats against their professional futures; they face daily threats against their physical safety and the core of their identities as Jews and as human beings.

Sharansky was inspired by the letter published at the beginning of the month from Jewish students at Columbia - Proud to be Jews, and proud to be Zionists - which he sees as a possible "turning point in the struggle for American Jewry’s future".

When I was a dissident in the USSR, my friends and I knew well that a revolution can only start when a critical mass of doublethinkers stops being afraid and crosses the line into open dissent. Only when the masses lose their fear and drop the mask of pretense, can they lead their society into a different future. It was true in the USSR, and it is true today: The ideological regime of antisemitism that has entrenched itself in America’s universities for decades will only collapse when enough Jews stop being afraid. It will only collapse if they stop unwillingly aiding it by hiding and self-censoring, and instead speak their truths openly and loudly.

Continuous calls for intifada revolution

Following on from the US students in Tablet on their campus experiences since Oct 7th, here are some testimonies from the UK collected by Eliana Silver in the JC:

Anonymous, University of Leeds:

“It began very shortly after October 7. The most notable incident was the ‘Free Palestine’ graffiti that appeared on the Hillel campus building. A friend of mine had a swastika projected on his car.

“The Jewish chaplain returning from IDF service was forced into hiding due to death threats made toward him and his family. I was told countless times that October 7 was justified.

“When a group of us set up a stall outside the uni with Israeli flags promoting Jewish identity, a pair of girls approached the stall and yanked the flag, scattering our equipment across the floor.

“More recently the words ‘Israel harvests Palestinian organs’ were written in chalk across the ground on campus, an obvious lie and libel against the world's only Jewish state. There are continuous calls for intifada revolution on campus.”

​​​​​​Anonymous, Goldsmiths, University of London:

“There are no safe spaces on campus. Even the cafés are occupied. One of the galleries was donated by a Jewish donor and they covered his name up.

“My supervisors have posted antisemitic tweets and when I mentioned that I felt unsafe, my supervisor brushed it off and told me to read the work of a US academic known for their strong anti-Israel views.

“There is no breathing room or escape. Only one narrative is acceptable.”

Anonymous, University of Exeter:

"It’s been very difficult. A member of staff said during a webinar that Israeli women weren’t raped on October 7 because they were inherently the oppressor so could not be a victim. I was also denied the right to write in our campus paper about October 7, despite pro-Palestinian pieces being on the front page every week.

“Me and other students were surrounded and harassed by hundreds of people at our stall on campus. They claimed we were responsible for their families dying and that we weren’t real Jews. The university took no action.” 

Harry, University of Oxford:

“My great-uncles were tied to train tracks in Egypt before being expelled. Israel was their only sanctuary. My great-grandmother was born in Jerusalem. Yet there’s no room for narratives like these in Oxford. Rather, the myopic focus is on Israel as a uniquely European project.

“Even soon after October 7, I heard people say, ‘We only let them [Jews/Israelis] get away with it because of what happened during the war, meaning the Holocaust.’

“The mentality of the encampment is to sideline opposing views as mere political disagreements. For them, the allegation of genocide is enough for it to be real. For me, my lived experience of antisemitism is erased.”

The number of students unwilling to give their names tells its own story.