Last month Professor Jacob George was recused last month from participation in the puberty blocker trial after the shock revelation that he’d expressed a belief on social media in the reality of biological sex. Which rather suggested that ideological compliance was considered more important than scientific expertise by the trial promoters. Now, though, Doctors urge Wes…

A new low. From the JC – Labour council promotes exhibition showing ‘Jews’ eating babies: Drawings at an art gallery in Thanet in Kent have been accused of  featuring imagery that is antisemitic and Israel’s representative to the UK has called for the authorities to intervene. JC writer and Telegraph columnist Zoe Strimpel posted on social media following…

Sonia Sodha in the Times makes an effort to find some middle ground on Islam in the UK – Left and right are misreading Muslim Britain. The right is increasingly turning British Muslims into a lightning rod by conflating Islam with the political ideology of Islamism, which seeks the state imposition of sharia. And the…

It’s a condition that affects only women, so of course they’ve made a trans woman their representative. From the Times: Amanda Craig, who has published nine novels and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021, spoke out after Steph Richards was named as the parliamentary engagement officer for Endometriosis South Coast. Endometriosis…

The article, a review of Mark Mazower’s book On Antisemitism, does not start well: In April 2024, six months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza…. That quote in full, in the final paragraph: The irony of contemporary antisemitism is that its increasingly contradictory, “smokescreen” quality exposes, perhaps more clearly than ever before, that antisemitism has…

Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times, on the Iranian women footballers: “My Choice, My Homeland” was emblazoned across a giant billboard in Valiasr square in central Tehran. Iran’s female football team stood on stage flanked by officials and cheered by flag-waving crowds for a heroes’ welcome shown live on national television. The Lionesses, as they…

The responses to this are well worth a read. Yes to Jenni Murray; no to Harman.

David Collier compares and contrasts BBC coverage of two hospital explosions: the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza back in October 2023, and an apparent Pakistani airstrike which devastated a drug rehabilitation hospital in Kabul. The sustained dishonesty of the Al-Ahli hospital coverage still astonishes: Within minutes, claims of an Israeli airstrike killing hundreds spread around the…

From the University of Chicago Press – Theses on the Future History of Trans People: On Trans Messianism. In this article, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in particular the set of theses Benjamin discarded as he edited, I argue that trans embodiment constitutes a form of living in a messianic…