September 13, 2024

The trans population figures

Also of note today - finally, the 2021 census figures which massively over-estimated the number of trans people has been downgraded.

Census figures claiming that there are 262,000 transgender people in England and Wales have been formally downgraded, after fears the question may have been misunderstood.

On Thursday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) requested a reclassification of its 2021 gender identity estimates from “official statistics” to “official statistics in development”.

It admitted there was the “potential for bias” in answers to the question: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?” In the 2021 census, people whose first language was not English were four times more likely to say they were transgender than those with English as their main language.

The ONS acknowledged potential bias in how the question had been answered by those “who responded that they did not speak English well”. Dr Michael Biggs, an Oxford professor who first raised concerns about the question, said the ONS had made a “long-overdue admission” that the question was “fundamentally flawed”.

He said yesterday: “It’s disgraceful that the Office for National Statistics took 18 months to admit this. Of the total of over 100 questions in the 2011 and 2021 censuses, this is the first to have been downgraded by the ONS.”...

Biggs said he believed that ONS’s close relationship with LGBT lobby group Stonewall contributed to this question being developed without proper scrutiny and said it was “essential” that other public bodies were stopped from using it.

Here's the abstract from the April 2023 paper from Michael Biggs:

The 2021 Census of England and Wales was the first in the world to elicit information on gender identity from an entire population. This paper argues that its results are implausible on the dimensions of geography, education, ethnicity, and religion. The results contradict external sources of data such as referrals to gender clinics and signatures on a pro-transgender petition. The results are also internally inconsistent when the various categories of gender identity are correlated across geography,and when compared to the results for sexual orientation.The spurious results were produced by a badly flawed question on gender identity, which was originally formulated by a transgender campaigning organization. The question evidently confused a substantial number of respondents who erroneously declared their gender identity to differ from their natal sex. Confusion is manifested by the overrepresentation of people lacking English proficiency or educational qualifications in the most suspect gender categories. These findings demonstrate how a faulty survey question can systematically distort our apprehension of the social world.

In particular the London boroughs of Newham and Brent, which have a significant percentage of residents who speak English as a second language, recorded the highest proportion of transgender people in the UK. Which should perhaps have caused alarm bells to ring.

The Deputy Director at the ONS is transwoman Alison Pritchard, as it happens.

Postscript:

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A change of leadership

So farewell then Mridul Wadhwa:

"The chair and board should have stepped down too. ScotGov should have withdrawn funding from ERCC until there was an entirely new board and SLT. But yes, apart from all that, the "time is right" for Wadhwa to go. 2/3

"During his inglorious tenure he did provide one important service to women - he illustrated why men who demand entry to women-only spaces are precisely the men who should never be allowed in. They are, by definition, boundary violators. So goodbye Wadhwa - and good riddance 3/3"

BBC report:

The chief executive of a sexual assault support service has stood down after a review found it failed to protect women-only spaces. Mridul Wadhwa – a trans woman – resigned after a Rape Crisis Scotland report found she failed to behave professionally while head of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC).

The investigation, carried out by an independent consultant, also found Ms Wadhwa “did not understand the limits of her authority” and the needs of survivors were not prioritised.

In a statement, the ERCC board said it was implementing recommendations from the review, but felt the “time was right for a change of leadership”....

However, For Women Scotland - which has campaigned against changes to transgender rights - accused the board of "ignoring its own culpability".

In a statement posted on X, they said, external: "This is the very least that they can do. It seems the board are intent on ignoring their own culpability.

"It's not good enough.

"They, and Rape Crisis Scotland, are making a sacrifice. But they created the problem."

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September 12, 2024

For the purpose of propagating a continuous war against the Jewish state

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Reporting the ERCC

A new report on the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre is damning on the role of Mridul Wadhwa:

A controversial rape crisis centre “damaged” victims of sexual violence by hindering their access to biologically female counsellors, a damning report has found.

Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), run by trans woman Mridul Wadhwa, was blasted for “many serious failings” including not putting the needs of survivors first.

The independent investigation condemned the centre for insisting traumatised rape victims, who can be as young as 12, must specify if they don’t want support from someone born a man....

The review was ordered by umbrella organisation Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS) in May 2024, after a scathing employment tribunal judgment ruled that ERCC worker Roz Adams was subjected to a “heresy hunt” for suggesting a rape victim should know the sex of her counsellor.

Although rape crisis centres are autonomous, they sign up to the RCS’s national standards, many of which the review found ERCC had failed to meet.

RCS said the review had found a “significant breach of its standards” and was “pausing” the referral of any new clients to ERCC until it implements the recommendations of the review.

Women only spaces are a required national standard yet they were not available from October 2022 until at least February 2024, when ERCC knew it was facing a tribunal and would be under scrutiny.

The review was heavily critical of Wadhwa, who self identifies as a woman but does not have a gender recognition certificate and is legally a man.

It found her be a domineering as chief executive who “who did not understand the limits on her role’s authority” and it said Wadhwa “failed to set professional standards of behaviour” within the organisation.

She was portrayed as incompetent, overseeing an organisation with systemic failures and a chaotic approach in key areas such as financial transparency, training and safeguarding for staff and clients.

Yes, that does indeed sound damning. And he got the job, advertised for women only, despite being a man without a gender recognition certificate. This was at the time of peak SNP-driven gender identity ideology, before the wheels came off that particular wagon.

The reviewer, charity sector consultant, Vicky Ling, said she was also told victims were not using the service because they deemed it unsafe, given there was no guarantee of being seen by a counsellor born female.

And she recommended ERCC refer any concerned survivors to guaranteed women only services such as Beira's Place, the rape help centre funded by JK Rowling and condemned by Wadhwa as transphobic.

Wadhwa labelled rape victims bigots and transphobes if they doubted whether a man identifying as a woman should run a centre helping women recover from male violence.

She said any staff who did not think all trans women were women should be fired.

According to the employment tribunal, Madhwa was on a mission to 'cleanse the organisation of those who did not follow her beliefs’.

Let's not forget Cameron Downing, the former SNP equalities officer who identified as non-binary and claimed to have received extensive support from the ERCC. He made no secret of his hatred of women - he wanted to “beat the f**k” out of feminists - and was imprisoned for six years after being found guilty of multiple sexual offences. That's who the ERCC was there for - not the women victims.

Joan Smith had a good piece on the ERCC at Quillette a month back.

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As if using a woman’s womb were a human right

The case this week of a surrogate mother who had to fight for the right to have any contact with her son - after the gay couple who paid to rent her womb said it was 'homophobic' for her to be involved in their 'motherless family' - has highlighted the contentious nature of surrogacy. Jo Bartosch at Spiked - Surrogacy is exploiting women in the name of ‘inclusivity’:

The positioning of surrogacy as about gay rights is a particularly sinister manoeuvre. Just as with the misogynistic campaign to remove ‘women’ from law for the sake of ‘trans rights’, the push to erase motherhood has come cloaked in a rainbow flag and decorated with inclusive sparkles.

The truth is that gay men are (rightly) at liberty to adopt just as heterosexual couples are. Yet surrogacy is being promoted by mainstream LGBT lobby groups as if using a woman’s womb were a human right. Looking at the steady stream of positive surrogacy stories, it seems a public-relations campaign to normalise the practice is well underway. Already, the surrogacy industry is lucrative, global, powerful and growing. Estimates suggest that within 10 years, it will be valued at around $129 billion....

‘Kindness’ and ‘inclusion’ are being weaponised to normalise the rental of wombs, the sale of babies and the cutting off of contact between children and their mothers. This is brutal, exploitative and fundamentally anti-human.

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Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee

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"We must consider the fight against this malignant tumour as a matter of life and death”

The world is catching up on North Korea's clampdown on "anti-socialist" - ie South Korean - culture. Richard Lloyd Parry in the Times:

Video has emerged from North Korea showing handcuffed teenagers being publicly denounced for the crime of enjoying foreign films and music, in a further sign of the regime’s fear of the “malignant tumour” of imported culture.

Clips broadcast on South Korean television show teenage girls with heads bowed in some kind of tribunal. One of them, whose name and school are identified on screen, stands weeping in front of a microphone as she makes her confession, before being roughly led away by uniformed soldiers.

The film, which appears to be an official production distributed as a warning, describes her as one of “several students who watched and distributed impure publications and propaganda materials, including puppet television dramas” — a term used to refer to South Korean television.

In a second clip, a young soldier confesses to similar crimes. “Using my mobile phone, I watched 15 American movies, 17 South Korean puppet movies and 127 videos and listened to about 160 puppet songs,” he says.

The scene switches to a classroom of young soldiers as they listen to the testimony of his mother. “He was arrested [for] watching impure recordings,” she says tearfully. “I gave birth to a traitor, not a son!”

A voiceover comments: “There is a phenomenon by which impure recordings are purchased, viewed, stored and distributed using mobile phones. In the process, even text messages are exchanged in the contaminated puppet dialect. We must consider the fight against this malignant tumour as a matter of life and death.”

There are already YouTube clips of young people being sentenced to hard labour for watching South Korean dramas.

The punishment may be worse than years in a hard labour camp: it could be execution.

 

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Transferred to a Minnesota’s women-only prison

Exciting times in Minnesota, as reported by Genevieve Gluck at Reduxx:

A total of five male convicts were transferred to a Minnesota’s women-only prison following the adoption of a gender identity policy by the Department of Corrections in January of 2023. Two of the men who are now being held at MCF-Shakopee, a female correctional center, are sexual predators serving sentences related to the abuse of children.

Among them are Elijah Thomas Berryman, 26, who was first arrested in April 2022 and accused of sexually abusing a minor multiple times. He pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct in March of this year, and according to the Minnesota DOC website, is currently serving his 25-year sentence at the women’s prison.

Another, Sean Windingland, 35, sexually assaulted two 6-year-old relatives and posted videos of the abuse and grooming on pornography and pro-pedophile websites.

Windingland admitted to engaging in sexual contact with the young girls when questioned by investigators, but claimed that the children had consented. He pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct in 2019. Windingland is now serving his 36-year prison sentence among women at MCF-Shakopee.

The third, Bradley Richard Sirvio, is a convicted murderer who is serving a life sentence. Sirvio, 52, beat a man to death with a hammer before setting his house on fire in November of 1995. A repeat offender, Sirvio has several other convictions that include multiple charges of assault, burglary, and theft. He was quietly transferred to MCF-Shakopee in November 2023, a full five months ahead of the date that a newly-drafted gender identity policy was set to take effect.

The two remaining men confirmed by Reduxx to have been transferred into the women’s prison are Nathan Charles Johnson, serving two years for aiding and abetting a burglary, and a trans-identified male who uses the name Christina Suzanne Lusk, but was born Craig Lusk.

In June 2022, Lusk launched a discrimination lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Corrections which ultimately resulted in the implementation of measures permitting male convicts to be housed in the female estate. Lusk, who was serving a five-year sentence for the possession of methamphetamine at the Moose Lake correctional facility for men, was backed by the trans activist non-profit organization Gender Justice – which was recently revealed to have received nearly $500,000 in taxpayer funds from the administration of Governor Tim Walz.

The Democratic vice presidential nominee’s office handed out $448,904 to Gender Justice just one year after the organization filed the sex discrimination complaint against Minnesota’s DOC on behalf of Lusk, according to a review of public records published by the taxpayer watchdog group OpenTheBooks.com.

Of course I understand the general jubilation across liberal America after the Harris-Trump debate, where Trump came across as a narcissistic buffoon - which of course he is. And also, deranged. The prospect of a second Trump presidency is chilling. But - and it's a big but - the Democrats are right behind this gender ideology, from Harris and Tim Walz on down. They shouldn't be given a free pass on this just because they're not Trump.

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September 11, 2024

LRB responses to 9/11

A timely reminder, 23 years on from 9/11:

Full text:

Letters
Vol. 23 No. 20 · 18 October 2001

With a few exceptions, your 11 September roundtable (LRB, 4 October) is agreed on one central point: what happened in New York and Washington can be directly blamed on US policies and actions from the 1960s to the present, with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as the last straw. Fredric Jameson reminds us that the recent ‘events’, as he calls the horrific attacks that killed thousands, provide us with ‘a textbook example of dialectical reversal’. Others – Tariq Ali, for instance – warn us not to incense Arab nations even further, as if a mea culpa on our part could now end the threat of further attacks, this time quite possibly ones of biological warfare.

But what I wish principally to address here is part of Mary Beard’s contribution. ‘When the shock had faded,’ she writes, ‘more hard-headed reaction set in. This wasn’t just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.’

On 11 September, according to the latest figures as I write, 6333 Americans and 2593 foreign citizens died in New York. That’s approximately 9000 people. (I am not counting those who died at the Pentagon.) Most of us know someone or know of someone who has died in the WTC debacle. And most of the people who died had relatives, including thousands of now orphaned children. If you multiply 9000 by, say, four you have 36,000 innocent people whose lives have been destroyed in one way or another. The victims, incidentally, included a high proportion of Latinos and blacks as well as a good number of Muslims. And, contrary to the cliché about the WTC and the Pentagon being emblems of US imperial power, the victims held a great variety of jobs: they worked for travel agencies, restaurants, public relations firms, TV networks, insurance companies, law firms, art supply manufacturers. In short, they were a cross-section of America.

But Mary Beard, writing from Cambridge, surely one of the most idyllic safe havens in the world, tells us that ‘the United States had it coming’ and that this is ‘of course’ what many people ‘openly or privately think’. In the circles in which Beard travels, perhaps many people do think this. Certainly most of the LRB’s contributors seem to. Perhaps this is why academics are now so poorly regarded by the rest of the population and why there are so few academic jobs for recent Humanities PhDs, either in the US or the UK. Outside the ivory gates, 95 per cent of the US population evidently disagree with Beard’s assessment. But of course we know how spurious this ‘fact’ is. As Jameson tells us, the people ‘are united by the fear of saying anything that contradicts this completely spurious media consensus’.

Fear, one wonders, of what? Has Jameson ever been silenced for his views? Beard, in any case, goes on to complain about our ‘glib definitions of “terrorism”’ and our ‘refusal to listen to what the “terrorists” have to say’. ‘There are,’ she continues, ‘very few people on the planet who devise carnage for the sheer hell of it.’

Well, I suppose it depends on what one means by ‘the sheer hell of it’. By analogy to terrorism, perhaps we should not have bothered with definitions of Nazism or Fascism, but should have listened to what Hitler and his friends had to say. I seem to recall that Neville Chamberlain tried just that; he even had ‘a piece of paper from Herr Hitler’. But as Churchill knew, ‘an appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile thinking it will eat him last.’ As it turned out, after all that ‘listening’ at Berchtesgaden, there were quite a few people on the planet who were quite happy to devise carnage ‘for the sheer hell of it’, taking that phrase quite literally. Hell is, in any case, what transpired.

It is true that the US has committed some atrocities in the Middle East and that, say, Clinton’s bombing of the wrong target – a beautiful new hospital – in the Sudan was a major crime. Does it therefore follow that ‘the US had it coming’? And which of us in the US are included?

I have been a subscriber to LRB since the journal’s inception some twenty-five years ago. But I hereby cancel my subscription and shall urge my Stanford students and colleagues to boycott the journal. Let me end, however, on an upbeat note that speaks to Beard’s ‘of course’. The man who takes care of our garden in Pacific Palisades, Ruben Vargas, was here the other day. A Latino who came to California from Mexico not all that long ago, Vargas has a daughter who is a freshman at UCLA. Some of us like to think that such upward mobility is what makes the US unique. I asked Ruben what he thought of the attack. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least now we’re all in it together.’ I responded: ‘But Ruben, many of my friends think it’s all America’s fault.’ He smiled and said: ‘Excuse me, Marjorie’ – yes, in California, one has only a first name – ‘but isn’t that a minuscule part of the population?’ Of course!

Marjorie Perloff
Los Angeles

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South Africa "unable to prove its allegations of genocide"

From the linked article:

South Africa is attempting to extend the deadline for presenting evidence against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague because it is unable to prove its allegations of genocide, Kan News reported on Tuesday.

The move comes some nine months after the country submitted a suit against the Jewish state over the Israel Defense Forces’ conduct in the war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza, claiming that the IDF is committing genocide.

South Africa is required to submit its evidence on Oct. 28, but is trying to extend the deadline by several months in the hope that evidence proving their genocide accusations will come from other places.

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