A woman is someone who doesn't need to put in any work to become a woman, because she's already a woman. pic.twitter.com/Br6CO6lw5F
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 8, 2025
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Helen Joyce at The Critic on the BBC’s fixation with trans heroes, drag queens, and gender bollocks:
In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston must be tortured to make him say that two and two make five; the BBC lies about reality voluntarily.
A mustachioed German neo-Nazi taking advantage of the country’s gender self-ID law to serve his sentence in a women’s jail; a mentally ill American teenager who shot up a Catholic church, killing children; a man who livestreamed himself skinning and dismembering a cat before chucking it in a blender, and who strangled a stranger and threw the body in a river?
Literally no man is deranged enough that the BBC balks at his demand to be called a woman and she/her.
If you complain about one of these stories, you’ll be told the BBC’s style guide requires journalists to refer to people as they wish, and in particular that it does so if that is the language used in court. In other words, it has written rules for itself that require it to repeat other people’s lies, especially when those lies are self-interested or originate from state-run sources. Pravda couldn’t have said it better.…
It’s not just news that is distorted by the BBC’s determination to pretend men can be women. In recent months University Challenge, Antiques Roadshow, Escape to the Country, The Repair Shop and Match of the Dayhave all featured trans-identifying men as guests, every time presented as women without any mention that they are trans, let alone that they aren’t actually women at all. For less than 0.1 per cent of the population, that’s a hell of a lot of “representation”.
But not as much as the BBC gives to drag queens, its favourite demographic. On a recent day nearly half the first page of results for a search on its website for “drag queen” (a preloaded tag) were about The Vivienne, a queen with they/them pronouns (scrupulously observed) who was addicted to ketamine and died in January of drug abuse.
Every update on the cause of death and every Z-list celebrity who mourned his passing merited an update. Compare that to the single article apiece on the conviction and sentencing of Stephen Ireland, a high-profile LGBT campaigner and founder of Pride in Surrey, for raping a 12-year-old. When it comes to the rainbow, only boosterism is allowed.
Presumably the drag queen obsession followed the pricey purchase of Ru Paul’s Drag Race in 2019. Six years later the BBC must surely have asked every drag queen in Britain his opinion about absolutely everything. It’s reminiscent of a Soviet factory pumping out unwanted, outdated tractors because the politburo hasn’t told it to stop.
Yes the BBC – with its unique position and power in the UK – must bear a considerable part of the blame for the spread of gender woo. It’s been captured by trans ideology from the start, and there are no discernible signs of the changes that are starting to take place elsewhere.
Then there’s the matter of Israel…
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The “moronic inferno” yesterday:
Jewish students wearing kippah skullcaps have said they were harassed by activists shouting “free Palestine” as more than 1,000 anti-Israel protesters attended events on the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks.
An undergraduate at Bristol University said that they had been shouted at and told “antisemitism no longer needs disguising”. Other students said that they had found the events “beyond intimidating”….
Up to 100 students attended a protest in Sheffield where the organiser, from the Revolutionary Communist Society, said that he “could not give a damn” if the prime minister called the events “un-British”.
Video of an event organised by the Glasgow University Justice for Palestine Society showed members displaying a six-foot banner that read “glory to our martyrs”. The Times understands that a post on the society’s Instagram page has been reported to the police for celebrating “the glorious Al-Aqsa Flood”, Hamas’s name for the October 7 attacks.
Dozens also gathered in Edinburgh with signs from the Socialist Worker that said “Starmer has blood on his hands” and “Freedom for Palestine”.
This is the hard left – the Revolutionary Communist Society, the Socialist Worker. Is there a feeling perhaps – and I’m trying to be optimistic here – that this is now coalescing into a small clique of hard-leftists?…the hard-leftists that always thrive at universities, before people stop the posing and grow up. It doesn’t help their cause that these people are basically nutters, aligning with the most reactionary forces on the planet. After Manchester, are some of the less committed now seeing this for what it is, and perhaps feeling a smidgeon of shame for helping to add their voices to the antisemitic clamour?
Times comments along the lines of “I’m disgusted with this generation” are understandable enough, but these people – these hard-leftists – are still a tiny minority.
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Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:
Hate crime is rising, and anti-Semitism on the Left is bare-faced. This was all happening before Oct 7. I see swastikas spray-painted on walls in my area of north London. I have seen Jewish women abused on the bus. I hear friends say they are frightened of going to central London when the marches are on. I have other Jewish friends who are in utter despair at what is being done in Gaza.
There is no monolithic view here, nor does there have to be.
Whatever you think of the actions of the Israeli government, British Jews here are not responsible for them. They live in Britain, and the state that they contribute to should protect them.
The pro-Palestinian protesters who, just after the murders in Manchester could not wait to put on a keffiyeh and get down to Liverpool Street to shout at commuters, are asinine. What cause they serve beyond their own imaginary self-aggrandisement is hard to fathom.
The rest of us, though, could open our eyes and listen to what Jewish people are telling us. Some are thinking of leaving the UK. Their children hide their Stars of David, and they no longer put mezuzahs on the doors. To be visibly Jewish is to be targeted.
The same is true over the Channel. You only have to wander around the big European cities to see that synagogues are now like fortresses, with barbed wire, barriers, scanners and armed guards. These are places of worship. Churches and mosques don’t need this. Jewish supermarkets are also vulnerable from Islamist attacks. The Chief Rabbi in Britain has spoken about “an unrelenting wave of hate”.
This hate has not come from nowhere. It was always there, hence the preparation. But it has been legitimated by parts of the Left, and by blaming British Jews for the actions of Israel. For the past decade, Labour has embroiled in endless arguments over the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Jeremy Corbyn could not address the anti-Semitism in his party, even when Jewish MPs like Luciana Berger had to have bodyguards to walk around.
This has led us to a moronic inferno where Left-wing idiots feel free to chant “globalise the intifada” on our streets, where calls for death and violence are the new radical and chic accessories of choice.
All of this has been cloaked in an anti-colonialist, anti-racist discourse to justify “the oldest hatred”. When British Jews have objected to this, they are at best ignored, and at worst seen as actual killers of Palestinian babies.
Are we really going to see these planned “honour our martyrs” events at UK universities today? – celebrating “two years of resistance”? A moronic inferno indeed.
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Julie Burchill, in the Spectator, lets rip on the “Islamist cry bullies”:
In the wake of the Manchester synagogue attack, we might ask ourselves why the Jews in particular have attracted the ire of Islamic extremists. Pretending that it’s about Gaza is the easy way out; I think it’s far more likely that the root of the trouble lies with the fact that Judaism was the first monotheistic (Abrahamic, if you like, which I do, as it further annoys Islamists) religion, around some 2,000 years before Islam. We know they’ve got a bee in their bonnets about being first; see the ridiculous idea that one does not ‘convert’ to Islam but rather ‘reverts’ to it, as we’re all born that way.
Let’s start with A for Archaeology. There’s always some humourless saddo who thinks that they’re pointing out for the first time that – ho ho ho – there are stamps saying ‘Palestine: Land of the Bible’ in the early part of the century. But – ha ha ha – that was merely what the British occupiers called Zion, when the fag-ends of the Ottoman Empire were being tied up. If we’re talking about history, earlier this year a silver coin dating from the 6th to 5th centuriesBC was found in what was then the Kingdom of Judah; on the other hand, the ‘Palestinian’ flag was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, becoming the official flag of ‘Palestine’ in 1988. That means that Polaroid cameras (first one on sale in 1948) go back further than the official ‘State of Palestine flag’. Some history!
Being well aware what cry bullies the Islamists on their doorstep are, Israel has bent over backwards many times in order to prevent a boo-hoo that could turn into a suicide bombing. You only have to think of the Temple Mount, the holiest site for Jews, originating in the first century; on top of that, the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem built the Dome of the Rock in the seventh century. A child could work out who should have ownership. Yet neither Jews nor Christians are allowed to pray in this place which is so precious to both of them.
You’ll often hear state-approved ‘comedians’ mocking Christianity on their tragic little panel shows, but the Koran is strictly off limits. Quiz them on this and you might hear some bluster about ‘punching up’ not ‘punching down’. (In a similar vein, those who refused to back the Charlie Hedbo journalists, like Laurie Penny, accused the magazine of ‘racist trolling’.) But this focus on Christianity once again seems a prime example of cry bullyism. Christianity is now the most persecuted religion in the world; Islam is the fastest growing, and the richest. Tell a migrant worker-slave in Qatar or a gay man in Dubai or a spirited woman in Iran that Islam is powerless. How come none of the fearless Radio 4 drolls dares to get a rise out of the bit in the Hadiths which tell us that:
‘The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews’
All those talking trees and flying horses; I suppose a Disney film’s out of the question?
The Jew animosity goes right back to the early days of Islamic conquest, when the Jews refused to bow down to the forces of Mohammed – see the Battle of Khaybar.
Why should we care, as Gentiles? Because we’re human. Because the Jews have added so much to our country. And if altruism doesn’t appeal to you, remember that ‘After Saturday comes Sunday’ – a phrase used by fundamentalists to intimidate Christians in the Middle East. Already across Africa the kidnappings, rapes and mass murders of Christians by Islamist extremists are common.
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With far right antisemitism, the left is quick to condemn. With Islamic antisemitism, it’s not quite the same. Dave Rich notes the difference:
The bald fact is that the anti-racist left abandoned Britain’s Jews a generation ago. Whereas they had stood roughly shoulder to shoulder with Jewish and other communities against the National Front and the British National Party, this solidarity evaporated when wave of antisemitism that hit European Jewry during the Second Intifada came primarily not from the far right but from radicalised Islamist extremists. It was al-Qaeda who murdered Jews in Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco in the early 2000s; and it was French Muslims who killed French Jews with increasing regularity in the years following. This reality was at first denied, then justified or excused. When neo-Nazis killed Jews, this was rightly recognised as a racist murder; but when jihadists did it, it was seen as an illegitimate expression of a legitimate anger about Israel.
The Jews are clearly victims when attacked by the far right. Brown-skinned Muslims, however, by the simplistic logic of racial hierarchies, rank below supposedly successful “white” Jews, so their antisemitism is an unfortunate but justified response to their oppression. It’s an easier position to maintain when you believe, as the Free Palestine crowd seem to do, that all Jews are somehow European (“go back to Poland”), and you deny that Israel is the Jews’ ancestral home – and deny the reality that a good half of Israelis, the Mizrahi, have no historic connection to Europe but were driven out of Arab lands where they’d lived for millennia.
Anti-Jewish diatribes that would evoke left wing outrage if they came from far right racists go completely ignored when they come from mosque pulpits. We are repeatedly told that “resistance” doesn’t mean slaughtering Jews in their homes, when on October 7, that is exactly what it meant. The pro-Palestinian movement in this country may like to think of itself as anti-racist, but there are an awful lot of anti-Jewish racists who seem to feel quite at home there.
The problem is that now, on the hard left, it’s not so much that they don’t condemn antisemitism – they embrace it.
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After trans activist and writer Gretchen Felker-Martin celebrated the killing of Charlie Kirk – “Thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch,” and “Hope the bullet’s okay after touching Kirk,” – he received a call from the comics publisher DC, cancelling the series he’d been working on and terminating their relationship. A blow against free speech, no doubt, but in America the tables have turned. The left denied there was ever such a thing as cancel culture while happily cancelling anyone who didn’t agree with their particular line – in particular gender woo and “trans rights”. Now, though, with Trump and the rise of MAGA culture, some of these woke warriors are getting a taste of their own medicine.
Sarah Ditum at UnHerd:
“It’s an absolute shame that DC fired Gretchen Felker-Martin for exercising free speech,” wrote the feminist author Roxane Gay on Bluesky. “Every writer here should be decrying this because we have to stand up for each other! This is ridiculous.”
She had nothing to say earlier, though, about the persecution and cancellation of anyone who transgressed the in-fashion trans ideology. Reputations were trashed; careers ruined. But they were bigots and Terfs, so that was fine.
Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2022 book Manhunt openly celebrates the brutal murder of Terfs and other lowlife who dare to question trans dogma – notably JK Rowling and Jesse Singal.
The fact that Felker-Martin is obnoxious, misogynistic and crass doesn’t mean he deserved to lose his job over a bad tweet. But, realistically, he only had that job because this is the kind of person and the kind of art — obnoxious, misogynist and crass — that the liberal culture of the last five years chose to celebrate. Manhunt is not a good novel: it lurches from scene to scene with little explanation of how you got there, and the characters are so loosely drawn that they blur into each other. This is not even James Herbert, and yet it was lauded by critics as though it were George Eliot. Felker-Martin could only have achieved cultural prominence in a milieu that prized rightthink above artistic quality.
Liking Manhunt was a test of allegiance to the cause. The more violence you could stomach, the more you were overcoming your unconscious transphobia; and (for female readers) the more you could find pleasure in the degradation of women, the more you proved that you weren’t a part of the despicable “cisterhood” who apparently deserved this degradation. His pattern of sexualised harassment against individuals such as Singal was ignored because, as a trans woman, Felker-Martin could claim the perverse privilege of the most oppressed.…
The recent rediscovery of free speech is difficult to swallow from people who have spent the last 10 years or so either airily downplaying the threat from their own, or actively making it worse.
Mick Hartley 