Worth remembering that when organisations folded to trans demands for mixed sex facilities and sports no impact assessments were carried out on the likely effect on women and girls. Most marginalised minority?
— LGB Alliance Cymru (@LGBAllies_Cymru) November 1, 2025
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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Plastic surgery was born in the hospitals of the First World War, when doctors like Harold Gillies pioneered facial construction surgery on the appalling injuries that confronted them as the poor wounded soldiers were carted back from the horror of the trenches. Later, in peace time, it survived on nose jobs, blemish removals, and maybe dealing with those unfortunate bags under the eyes. Minor adjustments, basically. Now, though…well, it’s all about revealing the real you, exposing your inner beauty, These surgeons can reconstruct your face. Feminise it. Masculinise it. Above all – beautify it. Glamourise it. Take the years away.
So what about the lived-in face? About reading the inner life from the features? – as self-portraits by artists like Rembrandt manage so mysteriously and so powerfully. And as we all do to some extent, in every human interaction.
Kathleen Stock has some thoughts:
[T]reating other people as ensouled is constitutive of human interaction, built into the basic terms of engagement. There is not, first, the act of seeing some movements, and only then an intellectual inference to hidden pains or joys. The pain or joys are seen directly in the other person’s face and body. I smile meaningfully at you, and you smile meaningfully back. I literally see your mind in your smile, as you do in mine. Or as Wittgenstein also put it: “the human body is the best picture of the human soul”.…
But whereas physiognomy involves making predictions about general character traits, to say you can literally see someone’s mind or soul in their body and face is to make a different point – one about human uniqueness. It’s a gestalt: the alchemic interplay of features, gestures, facial movements, vocal tones, speech patterns, and other habits of mind that add up to an irreplaceable, particular person in the beholding of them. That this is the norm for meaningful human interaction is what makes even skilful impersonation of people you know so weird and hilarious: almost there, but not quite.
Perhaps this all sounds a bit too mystical to take seriously. Perhaps human faces are just bits of flesh performing functional tasks, as Descartes implied. But if you think otherwise – as I do – then it starts to look psychopathic that we culturally approve of faces being sliced up and rearranged into stiffly impersonal, generic masks, for no other reason than the owner’s vanity. At the very least, when the surgeon discards all those bits of muscle and skin, he is also cutting off others’ capacity to know you properly. At worst, he is doing some violence to your deepest self. When you look in the mirror, the eyes, nose, and mouth may all be in roughly the right places; but even you may not be able to tell who is looking back.
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Kunwar Khuldune Shahid at Spiked on the horrors of Sudan’s civil war:
The violence visited upon the people of Sudan, particularly its non-Arab population, is without parallel in the 21st century. Darfur has been the epicentre of this misery. In the three decades in which Sudan was ruled by al-Bashir, the Sudanese army repeatedly attempted the ethnic cleansing of the state’s non-Arab population. This was done with the help of Arab militias such as the Janjaweed, many of whose fighters now belong to the RSF. The Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups bore the brunt of al-Burhan and Hemedti’s war crimes.
With the fall of El Fasher, the tally of those displaced in Sudan is now approaching 13million. It has been described as the world’s ‘largest humanitarian crisis’ by UNICEF with 25million people – half of Sudan’s population – experiencing malnutrition or famine. As many as 400,000 people have been killed since the start of the civil war.
Massacres of the region’s non-Arab population are sadly nothing new. This violence is rooted in the Arab colonisation of east Africa, beginning with the seventh-century conquests that converted northern Africa to Islam.
The enslavement of the region’s non-Arabs also has a long history. After Arab armies were thwarted in their bid to expand southwards from Egypt by the Christian Nubian kingdom of Makuria, the Baqt treaty of AD 652 allowed Arabs to trade grains and spices in exchange for slaves. The land acquired the Arabic name Bilad as-Sudan, or ‘Land of the Black People’. By the end of the 19th century, Sudan was a critical source of slaves for Egypt and the rest of the Ottoman Empire.
Sudanese independence in 1956 did nothing to change the subjugation of Sudan’s non-Arabic population. A succession of coups ended in 1989 with the ascent of Omar al-Bashir, who continued the Islamisation of Sudan with a vengeance.
Just recently the escalating violence has edged into the news, but basically no one in the West has much interest. The media, and the left – who you might perhaps expect to be concerned about the genocide of black Africans – are obsessed with Gaza. The wrong people here, the Arabs, are doing the slaughtering. By the rules of the racism game, Arabs are victims. Does Not Compute. Avoid. Keep focusing on the evil Jews.
As I’ve said before (can’t find it now) whoever’s doing the public relations for the Arabs is doing a cracking job. Here they are committing a clear-cut genocide against black Africans, and no one cares. The violent imperial spread of Arabs across North Africa under the banner of Islam is never confronted, nor the long-lasting and brutal slave trade – there long before the West got involved in African slavery, and still continuing. And now they’re the biggest victims the world’s ever seen at the hands of the Jews in Palestine, and the world erupts in support of their noble cause.
Nice work if you can get it.
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The government is procrastinating over the Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance on single-sex spaces.
Rules that would ban transgender people from using facilities that do not match their biological sex could be delayed for more than a year, it has emerged, as ministers were accused of “undermining the law” by demanding extra checks.
Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, received statutory guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) eight weeks ago, setting out how gyms, clubs and hospitals must judge single-sex spaces based on biology.
The document has not yet been laid in parliament and many organisations, including some NHS trusts and the civil service, said they were waiting for the guidance before implementing changes after the Supreme Court ruling in April that the use of “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act refer to sex at birth.
Any excuse to delay. The law is clear, but – oh dear – it’s all so complicated now. Of course it was easy to allow men into women’s spaces when Stonewall was all-powerful, but now, well, it’s different. Then it was about pandering to men, and now it’s about being on the side of women. It’s much harder.
Claire Coutinho, the shadow women and equalities minister, told The Times: “Any delay in approving this code puts the safety and dignity of women and girls at risk. The Supreme Court ruling was clear and every organisation has a duty to comply with the law.
“Doing so is not a regulatory burden that needs assessment by government bureaucrats. Bridget Phillipson must get a grip and stop hiding behind process to avoid upsetting her backbenchers.”…
One Whitehall source said: “The reality is these things can be done very quickly if they want to, but when there’s a thorny issue it can also be used to kick the can down the road.”
Added: see Naomi Cunningham:
The proposed regulatory impact assessment looks remarkably like an act of simple cowardice. The government knows that a code of practice doesn’t make or change the law, but only explains it. It knows that this is not what regulatory impact assessment is for. It knows that many employers and institutions are currently delaying complying with the law until the new code is issued. It knows that many thousands of individuals are suffering ongoing legal wrongs because of the ongoing delay. It knows that a proportion of those will continue to bring claims, and the courts and tribunals will clog up with cases, and public authorities and private employers will continue to pour legal fees into defending them.
But it also knows that the new code of practice will be unpopular with many of its supporters. It is seizing on the idea of a regulatory impact assessment to delay the inevitable; and to redirect the fury of its activists to the courts and tribunals, and to the brave individuals who will have to go to court at great personal cost, often one by one, sometimes in groups like the Darlington nurses, to enforce their rights. It’s a craven exercise in blame-shifting.
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Since the trans idea of women is all about feminine performance – ie glamour – it makes a kind of sense for Glamour UK Magazine to feature nine transified men on the latest cover as their women of the year.
Victoria Smith at UnHerd:
Glossy magazines have always had a complex relationship with their female readership. How do you convince a woman that you’re rooting for her — that you’re all about her empowerment — while ensuring that she never feels good about herself? How do you maintain that feeling of inadequacy — she is too fat, too old, too unfashionable — on which your advertisers depend? It’s not as though you can tell her directly. You have to make her believe the self-hatred comes from within.
It’s true, I suppose, of all glossy magazines that depend on advertising: they need to shame you into thinking that you’re never quite good enough – that you need that extra something to really live your life to the full. For women that extra bit – the femininity, the glamour – seems to tally rather well with what transified men think of as the totality of being a woman. So here we are, at the logical conclusion of their position: it’s glamour and performance all the way down, and biology counts for nothing.
There’s nothing surprising or edgy about Glamour’s latest cover, featuring nine glossily-styled trans women wearing “protect the dolls” t-shirts alongside the headline “Women of the Year”. In the article accompanying the image, Shon Faye writes that “the T-shirt and its slogan blew up after the UK Supreme Court handed down a judgment on the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 that excluded trans women from the definition.”
That’s right. After the UK Supreme Court confirmed in April that women should be defined by femaleness (humanity) rather than femininity (artificiality), a counter-movement arose which centred on the idea of women as dolls. No one on the Glamour cover is female. This is the magazine ideal of “woman” boiled down to its purest essence: plastic breasts, pouty lips, long hair, low body fat. The issue here is not that a female person cannot also possess such features. It is that when it comes to deciding what is a necessary attribute of womanhood, glossy magazines — like porn, like gender identity ideology — dispense with femaleness before anything else.
Perhaps people can now see the absurdity of where this nonsense all leads.
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Story here:
Transport for London have confirmed they are investigating a case where a Jewish man was trapped on a London bus by the driver, who allegedly made antisemitic comments and refused to give him back his bank card.
In a video shared widely on social media, the Jewish man, identified as David Abraham, pleads with the bus driver to return his card, which had dropped behind the driver’s partition when he had used to pay.
“My own card, I’m begging the driver to give me my bank card – he don’t want to give me. I don’t know what is going on”, David says in the video.
“The guy says he hates Jewish people – I didn’t do anything to him. I just touched my bank card, my bank card dropped there, he says he doesn’t want to give me my card, he doesn’t like Jewish people. What kind of driver is this?
“I begged him for 40 minutes, this driver is not going to give me my card.”
Elsewhere in the video, David, who is originally from Africa, says “it’s very sad. I’m very surprised to see a black man is hating another black man because I’m Jewish.”
It turns out that the bus route was the 67, which goes through the heart of the Stamford Hill Jewish community. Lovely.
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I posted yesterday on last week’s disruption of an Israel Society Jewish history event at UCL, expressing the hope that some action might be taken against these antisemitic hooligans. Well, it’s not looking good…
Full text:
If you read UCL’s initial statement, you might think it sounds strong. But the devil is in the detail, because there isn’t any. There is no mention of what disciplinary action will be taken, or when. The Provost says “I condemn what happened,” but noticeably not “we,” the university.
Meanwhile, whilst the heads of the Israel Society were warned by the police they might need an armed escort to leave campus safely, they say they have not heard a single word from the Provost – not an email, not a call to ask if they are okay.
And the local MP for the area, Keir Starmer, who also happens to be the Prime Minister, has said nothing about this – despite finally admitting that “from the river to the sea” and “intifada” chants are antisemitic, and despite pledging to do “whatever it takes” to support the Jewish community.
This is not an isolated incident. The culture of radicalisation on campus is now so deep that a student who publicly expressed support for Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation, was never even investigated.
It is not enough to say antisemitism is condemned. We need real consequences and real leadership before something serious happens to Jews on a UK campus.
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Jenny Holland at Spiked on prospective NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani and his poor auntie:
Progressives took a break this week from their collective nervous breakdown over President Trump’s White House renovations in order to respectfully mourn with Zohran Mamdani, whose hijab-wearing ‘aunt’ – actually his father’s cousin – felt weird one time after thousands of New Yorkers were evaporated in the 9/11 Islamist terrorist attacks.
Mamdani’s words alone – ‘I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after 11 September because she did not feel safe in her hijab’ – would have been ill-judged enough. But the way he delivered them was even worse. As he stood outside the Islamic Cultural Centre in the Bronx, his voice faltered, he bowed his head and he choked back tears… just because his ‘aunt’ did not want to ride the Subway?
It was quite a performance. In a city that lost 1,169 residents in that cataclysmic act of Islamic terrorism, he stood in front of a row of people in religious Islamic dress, and had the audacity to pretend that Muslims were the ‘real’ victims of 9/11.
A good time, perhaps, to recall Norm MacDonald’s joke:
“I can’t say my friend’s name, but he said his biggest fear is that ISIS or some terrorist group like that will get a hold of a dirty bomb that exploded over a major city within the United States and kill tens of millions of people — because then the blowback against… innocent Muslims would be absolutely terrible.”
He, Zohran Mamdani, is also on record as saying “The struggle for Palestinian liberation is at the core of my politics and continues to be”, and “We have to make it clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF”. So Israel controls the New York police?
He’s currently favourite to win the mayoral election, in a city that has the second largest Jewish population in the world, just behind Tel Aviv. Good luck, New York.
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Read all about it here, from trans activist Shon Faye: The Dolls: ‘What we really crave is to work, love and exist with dignity’.
As trans rights face increasing threat in the UK, Glamour honours nine of the community’s most ground-breaking voices at this year’s Women of the Year Awards. From fashion and music to charity and activism work, these trailblazers work tirelessly to empower, uplift and celebrate trans voices.
Added, from JK Rowling:
I grew up in an era when mainstream women’s magazines told girls they needed to be thinner and prettier. Now mainstream women’s magazines tell girls that men are better women than they are.
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Jolyon Maugham continues to beclown himself with his Good Law Project:
There is, of course, no “blanket exclusion” of trans people from sport. As the comments point out, they just have to compete in their correct sex category. The days when men could just claim to be women and use their genetic advantage to dominate are, thankfully, coming to an end.
Mick Hartley 