Hannah Barnes in the New Statesman: The proposed NHS-backed “Pathways” puberty blocker trial “could not have received more oversight and scrutiny”, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, told parliamentary colleagues in January. It had gone through “rigorous rounds of scientific, clinical, ethical and regulatory review”. How, then, to make sense of the U-turn from the Medicines and Healthcare…

A useful essay from Adam Louis-Klein, in Sapir, on “the latest pseudoscience to overtake academia”: In his 1946 book Hitler’s Professors, linguist Max Weinreich documented how the German university — then the pride of Western scholarship — fell with terrifying speed into the service of Nazi ideology. Within months of Hitler’s rise to power, professors across disciplines had issued declarations…

A BBC report: A row has broken out over an event’s single-sex attendance policy. Rosie Hayes told the BBC multiple venues in Brighton had cancelled or stopped hosting trauma-healing classes organised by her group Sisters Heal for the victims of sexual assault, rape and domestic abuse, which were limited to “biological women only”. She has…

Photos from the Times news in pictures feature today: Tetiana Khimion, 47, now a sniper in the Ukrainian army, poses in a park in Kyiv with a photograph of herself as a dance teacher before the war. [Sergei Grits/AP] People bring flowers to pay tribute at a memorial in Bucha for the victims of Russian…

From an interesting little essay by Peter Himmelman on Facebook: Over the past several years, and especially since October 7, 2023, I have watched something unfold that is difficult to explain, especially if you assume it emerged entirely on its own. On that day, Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah.…

Wesley Yang spells it out: Transgenderism is an ongoing project of attempting to normalize a bizarre subculture built around esoteric pseudo-medical practices from the outermost fringe of human extremity and make it compulsory for every American to join that subculture and to make that subculture the mainstream culture of the Western world. One requires only…

Trade unions threated to cut funding for the newspaper after it published a cartoon of Stella’s which showed a crocodile claiming to be “transitioning as a newt” as it entered a pond full of newts who objected to the crocodile coming in. Deemed to be a transphobe, the trade union council held a meeting to…

The ideologues of Soviet antizionism — the “Zionologists” — operated in a Marxist-Leninist ideological context and spoke in left-wing idiom, but their personal views were informed by Russian far-right conservative thought, which had always disdained Jews. They imbibed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi theories, both of which were prohibited literature in…

And that’s before you get onto the business of what they teach in UNRWA schools.

Round Walthamstow Wetlands this morning: