Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock at UnHerd wonders if, at last, we're seeing the end of genderism:

Sometimes, I wonder how I will know when the reign of genderism is definitively over. As philosophers say, I like to consider various possible worlds. Will it be when a national inquiry is held into child transition? Or when a whole month goes by without a drag queen story on the BBC website? Or when the head of MI6 finally takes the pronouns out of his X bio? “Gradually, then suddenly” is how Hemingway described going bankrupt. One hopes this applies to the morally bankrupt too.

Despite the recent Supreme Court ruling, some parts of the UK seem more stuck in transactivist delusions than ever. But this week, tantalisingly, I discerned signs of imminent collapse. The Scottish media appears gripped by the Sandy Peggie tribunal, with daily revelations of unsympathetic NHS managers defending the presence of a male doctor in the nurses’ female-only changing room. One newspaper even referred to the man at the heart of the case as “he”. Down south, the NHS has announced the terms of reference for a rapid investigation into a Brighton GP practice that prescribed puberty blockers to minors, and it sounds like it is not messing about. And in academia, Oxford philosophers Daniel Kodsi and John Maier just published an excoriating takedown of the Yale philosophy department’s own attempt to prop up child transition.

[See here for that excoriating takedown.]

Even during my most depressed phases in academia, I knew that these people were taking a big risk — albeit one they apparently didn’t notice. The higher they flew in daring reconstructions of familiar concepts, the further there was to fall, should their central proposition be later rejected. And surely it eventually would be. For “woman” and “man” are categories associated with distinctive visual appearances, and the adaptive capacity to discern the difference between them has been honed over millennia. Sometimes you just know you are looking at a man, despite what the people with the fancy titles are telling you. Indeed, it is a testament to the awesome chutzpah of the latter that they ever thought they could persuade people otherwise.

The risk for them, to be clear, was not merely that they would be proved wrong, a common enough occurrence in philosophy; but that they would be revealed as quite thick. If trans women are women, then not only are there surprisingly high numbers of children in the wrong bodies, women rapists, and mediocre female athletes etc, but those far-sighted philosophers making the case are bravely speaking truth to power. If trans women are in fact men, and have been all along, then the only major revelation is just how many gullible idiots have got into prestigious positions in academic philosophy.

It's perhaps not so much the bright young philosophers themselves as the gullible idiots, but more the people who enabled them. Chancers are chancers.

It just so happens that the arrival of gender ideology, coming out of Queer Theory, coming out of post-modernism as an American take on the French deconstructionists like Derrida, Foucault etc., provided the perfect opportunity for the rise of obscurantism in the service of ambitious young would-be intellectuals to make their mark with their intoxicating blend of impenetrable jargon and "progressive" arrogance. But with gender theory this advanced level of intellectual posing suddenly had real world consequences, as men started playing in women's sport, women could be rapists, lesbians were transphobic for not wanting to have sex with men, and so – endlessly – on. And then people outside of the philosophical academic bubble noticed that this was, in fact, complete nonsense. We were being conned. Or gaslighted, as we say now. And the arrogant young philosophers were left, suddenly, exposed as charlatans. As buffoons.

And all the people who quietly or not so quietly went along with this are now being revealed as the gullible idiots.

A view from India on the disastrous betrayal of medical ethics in the West that came with the gender cult. Janhavi Nilekani:

In the spring of 2022, a 50-year-old grandfather in North Carolina decided that he wanted his daughter’s newborn to suckle at his nipple.

Rather than keep this thought to himself, he opted to confide in his doctor.

You may wonder what happened next. Was the doctor a mandated reporter? Did Child Protective Services show up at his house to investigate a possibility of child sexual abuse? After all, the CPS is so vigilant that they investigate 37% of American children. Or perhaps he was referred to a therapist?

Well, no. Because this particular man identified as a transgender woman, doctors and academics from Duke University wholeheartedly supported his “unique desire”. Indeed, they published a research paper in Breastfeeding Medicine, providing details of the cocktail of hormones and drugs they used. With these, he was able to produce secretions, that were administered to his grandchild. The paper does not have a single sentence about the potential impact on the grandchild.

It is an unimaginable breach of ethics….

Worth a read. 

From the Daily NK:

North Korean authorities are doing everything they can to stop the spread of South Korean pop culture, or hallyu, but young people keep using South Korean expressions and speech patterns anyway.

Article 41 of North Korea’s Youth Education Guarantee Act, passed in 2021, forbids young people from speaking or writing “in odd speech patterns that are not our own.” While North Korea has legally banned youth from using “non-socialist” language, South Korean speech patterns are quietly spreading among young people regardless.

According to a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong province recently, four people in their twenties were arrested in Chongjin by local state security officers for talking like South Koreans. A local resident had tipped off authorities after spotting the group mimicking lines from South Korean films and dramas.

The four are currently being questioned at the city’s Ministry of State Security branch and will likely face six months to a year of forced labor.

“These days, young people are careful to avoid South Korean speech during official activities because they know about the crackdowns, but when they’re with friends, they use it without hesitation—mimicking lines from South Korean movies and shows,” the source said. “They copy the patterns quite naturally, probably because they’ve grown up watching this content.”

When young people hang out together, they freely use South Korean expressions like jagiya (honey), oppa (elder brother, used affectionately by women), daebak (awesome), and jjokpallinda (embarrassed).

This might be their way of mocking North Korean society, where constant surveillance and informing on each other have become normal. North Korean youth embrace South Korean speech patterns, adapting what they hear in films and dramas while laughing and smiling as they do it, the source explained.

Sounds good to me.

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— Andrew Fox (@Mr_Andrew_Fox) July 24, 2025

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A comprehensive look at the food situation in Gaza. Too long to reproduce in full, but, from the conclusion:

Hamas, of course, bears primary responsibility for all suffering in Gaza. Not only did it spark this war, but it also consistently prioritises its military agenda over the welfare of Gaza’s population, profiting from shortages and deliberately perpetuating the crisis. The international community, despite pouring in aid funds, has at times made political blunders, as demonstrated by the ill-timed ceasefire letter that has likely prolonged the fighting.

Is Gaza starving? Many Gazans are, tragically, suffering from starvation in the literal sense: children with swollen bellies, parents skipping meals for days. This should not be dismissed, but it is not because there is no food to be found; it is due to a collective failure to deliver the food to the people. The world’s media often presents it in the simplest terms (“Israel is starving people”). The reality is far more complex, a perfect storm of war, blockade, misrule by Hamas, and a paralysed aid system. Understanding this complexity is not about absolving any party of responsibility, but about recognising what needs to change.

What must change, first and foremost, is that the guns should fall silent, temporarily, to enable a full-scale humanitarian effort. A sustained ceasefire, even if unilateral, would enable food distribution to occur safely and provide negotiators with an opportunity to resolve the GHF-UN impasse. Unlike previous temporary ceasefires, at this stage, Israel, having greatly weakened Hamas, could afford to pause and use that goodwill to secure the remaining hostages’ release.

The UN and aid groups must demonstrate flexibility to ensure that aid reaches every family in need promptly. In the longer term, Gaza’s governance and reconstruction will require creative, likely unprecedented solutions, such as an empowered Palestinian Authority, an international mandate, or some hybrid arrangement. These debates are difficult, but they cannot be postponed indefinitely; otherwise, any Israeli victory on the battlefield will be pyrrhic. History shows that wars often end with new realities on the ground, sometimes including population movements or border changes, but any such outcomes here must centre on the return of the hostages and the welfare and wishes of Gaza’s people, not force them into another tragedy.

Currently, saving lives and reducing suffering are the top priorities. No child in Gaza should be dying of hunger when food is available just a few miles away, sitting on a pallet or locked in a warehouse. This is a solvable problem, provided there is political will. Gazans are not starving due to drought or fate; they are starving because humans, both their own leaders and the international community, have failed them. Whilst Israel has no legal obligation to provide aid that will be repurposed by their enemy, stepping up and ending the failure of others should be a moral duty.

Moe on the NHS Fife tribunal, this time from Alex Massie in the Times:

Dr Kate Searle, a consultant within the A&E department at the Royal Victoria hospital, assumes she must be a woman because that is what it says on her birth certificate. Sex, you see, is assigned at birth rather in the manner in which a roulette ball is assigned red or black. Don’t press Searle for details, however, for she’s “not an expert” on any of this.

Is this idiocy genuine or merely performative? Neither possibility seems reassuring and one wonders if Dr Searle and those medical professionals who think like her are quite so cavalier when it comes to their own work. For even in Fife we must presume physicians remain capable of distinguishing between male and female patients.

Throughout this saga one person’s wishes have been indulged at the expense of everyone else’s needs. What Upton wanted, Upton must have regardless of its impact on anyone else. He wanted to use facilities previously reserved for women and who, really, were these women to object to that? They were only little people, of no great consequence. Nurse Peggie’s objections to a man’s presence in her changing room were axiomatically proof she was a dreadful bigot. Being kind to Upton meant being unkind to Peggie but so what? She should suck it up and know her place.

There are other victims too and some of these receive less sympathy than they merit. Like Dr Hilary Cass, I believe gender dysphoria is a real though very rare condition. Real trans people — a term I am very comfortable using — have seen their condition hijacked by frauds insisting that men with fetishes are indistinguishable from people with a genuine medical need. The ever-broader definition of “trans” cheapens the reality of the lives led by people possessing a Gender Recognition Certificate. That is no more in their interests than it is in anyone else’s.

Some of Sturgeon’s allies once acknowledged this distinction without, quite typically, even realising it. Shona Robison, while serving as cabinet secretary for social justice, once talked about “genuine” trans people, thereby conceding the possibility of fake ones. How one might be distinguished from the other was, alas, a question too difficult to even allow, let alone answer.

Thus we reach a situation in which people incapable of determining their own sex are nevertheless also sure that a person such as Upton is indubitably a woman because, well, because he says he is and so that must be true. This contradiction cannot be acknowledged since doing so is the precursor to admitting it cannot be resolved.

Above all, however, remember that this Scotland of magical thinking is the Scotland a majority of our MSPs wanted. Some things really are binary. You are Team Peggie or Team Upton and most of our political representatives chose to be the latter.

Ah yes, that James O'Brien business. Charlotte Henry at the Spectator:

When the story of how the British media responded to the October 7 atrocities is told, there will be a number of villains. High up on the list will be James O’Brien. The LBC host is smugness personified most of the time, but gets even higher on his horse whenever Israel is the topic, which it is frequently. Obviously.

Things reached a new low this week. On Tuesday, O’Brien read out a text from someone called ‘Chris’. This person said his Jewish wife had, as a child, attended something called ‘Shabbat School’. There she was taught that one Jewish life was worth thousands of Arab lives and other racist, dehumanising concepts.

‘There is a danger perhaps,’ O’Brien said in his very serious voice, ‘that we only ever hear one side of the dehumanisation and propaganda processes.’

That's certainly true – though not perhaps in the way O'Brien meant.

The problem, of course, is that Shabbat School is not real. No Jew has, to my knowledge, ever even used the phrase ‘Shabbat School’.

Not of course that O'Brien would be interested in such details. Or would go to the trouble of checking, when presented with such a juicy piece of antisemitic bile that so happily echoed his own prejudices.

All this should have been an immediate red flag to both O’Brien and his producers. That it wasn’t appears to suggest how keen that show is to air things that are anti-Israel and, ultimately, anti-Jewish.

To make matters worse, the clip of O’Brien reading this message was pushed out on LBC’s official X channel. It was later removed, but by that point the damage was well and truly done.

A big-name host on national radio had aired a blood libel against the Jews, seemingly without questioning the information in front of him. That blood libel was spread on social media, where it was probably seen by more people than ever tuned into the original broadcast. It all puts Jews in the UK in danger at a time when simply sitting in a Kosher restaurant can be enough to get you harassed and attacked.

Karen Pollock, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, told me: ‘These comments are absolutely vile and it beggars belief that they were read out on air when they are clearly false and obviously antisemitic.’

Reflecting on her personal experience, Pollock explained: ‘I attended a Jewish primary school, Hebrew classes as a child and was immersed in Jewish education. Not once did I hear such vile assertions about another group of people – and I have never heard of anyone else hearing it either. I cannot believe James O’Brien and LBC thought it appropriate to promote this hatred.’

Meanwhile, Andrew Gilbert, a vice president of leading communal organisation the Board of Deputies, called on O’Brien to be taken off air. He’s right. This should not have been a matter of ‘deputy heads will roll’, with his producers taking the flak. While they certainly have questions to answer, O’Brien is the ultimate arbiter of what gets read out on air and he should not have been allowed back on the radio the following day.

This being the UK in 2025, he was. Having avoided sanction, it wasn’t until nearly two hours into his show yesterday that O’Brien said sorry. The LBC host said he regretted ‘taking those unsubstantiated claims (in the text) at face value’. His apology is too little, too late.

Over the last twenty months, Jews have endured torrents of hatred from all manner of media outlets. We couldn’t even watch clips from a music festival without being bombarded with hate. This week was the nadir though. A well thought of and seemingly intelligent host read out, and took at face value, a message that would have made Goebbels proud. He then kept his job. It’s a disgrace.

I'm reminded of Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children play, with that theme of Jewish children being taught to hate Arabs and to cultivate a sense of supremacy. This O'Brien case is a lot cruder, no doubt, but it's the same line, so enthusiastically pushed by anti-Israel activists. The irony is that the ideological indoctrination of children is exactly the other way round, with Gaza schools, courtesy of UNRWA, teaching children to hate Jews and to dream of martyrdom in the battle against them as their highest aim. Plus the fact that Arabs make up some 20% of Israel's population, which is some 20% more than the Jewish proportion of the population of Arab states….

From the Times:

The hard-left former head of the Fire Brigades Union has been elected permanent general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers.

Despite having no teaching experience, Matt Wrack, 63, won a vote in which only 4.7 per cent of members took part — the union’s first contested leadership election since 1990. He secured 5,249 votes, defeating Neil Butler, an NASUWT official who polled 3,126.

As the JC noted the other day, Wrack is a big Corbyn fan, and has been accused of skewing an antisemitism survey in schools that highlighted right-wing hate while ignoring left-wing and Islamic concerns. 

It's quite a time for union Corbynistas, what with all the news about Len McCluskey.

The Sandie Peggie employment tribunal is currently exposing, as perhaps no court case to date has, the issue of class as it relates to the top-down imposition of gender identity ideology in the workplace.

'Diversity officer' Isla Bumba has now admitted in court that she didn't…

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 23, 2025

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Full text:

'Diversity officer' Isla Bumba has now admitted in court that she didn't bother consulting the 1992 regulations guaranteeing single-sex spaces when she told a trans-identified male, Dr Beth Upton, to use the female changing room at the hospital where he was working. Bumba justified this decision with comments that I assume sounded really clever and convincing, inside her own head.

'I don’t know anything about Beth’s body. I didn’t at the time. I don’t now. I don’t need to know. But it wouldn’t be something that I would ever have the information of exactly what she is made of, biologically.'

Kate Searle, a consultant in emergency medicine, backed Bumba up, expressing outrage on the witness stand that anyone would be so insensitive as to ask about Upton's chromosomes.

‘I could only imagine how upsetting and invasive a question that would be for Beth, and also not relevant to a colleague to ask another colleague. Beth identifies as female, and it does not matter what her chromosomes are to her.’

In Bumba and Searle's world, a belief that gender identity trumps biological sex is proof you're intellectually and morally superior to women like Sandie Peggie, so I'd imagine it's come as a shock to discover, in a blaze of public and press scrutiny, just how idiotic and cruel they appear to people outside their dinner party circle.

When Upton, a 6' tall, 28-year-old ex-rugby playing male, claimed that a petite 50-year-old female nurse was making him feel 'unsafe', his word appears to have been taken as gospel. Searle, Bumba and management fell over themselves to coddle the middle-class doctor who shared their voguish post-modern views on gender. What did Sandie matter? She's just one of those ghastly uninformed bigots who still thinks sex is real and important – so embarrassingly gauche and simplistic! Whisper it – she probably drinks red wine with chicken, too.

According to @tribunaltweets , an emotional Searle blurted out on the stand 'I am kind.' This is not something genuinely kind people need to say. Genuinely kind people don't find themselves compelled to explain in court why they helped whip up a witch-hunt against a woman whose only crime was wanting to change her clothes without a man watching.

Well, the nurse who was supposed to shuffle off in disgrace wasn't having it. Sandie Peggie refused to be sacrificed on the altar of elitist ideologues who believe themselves to be higher and better than she is. She fought back, for herself and for every other woman who's currently being silenced, persecuted and punished by a smug management class that preens itself on its virtue while imposing rampantly misogynistic policies on its workforce.

Sandie Peggie is a heroine. The woman NHS Fife thought they could treat abominably without any consequences to themselves has succeeded in shining the brightest spotlight yet upon the brain rot and compassion deficit suffered by supposedly intelligent people when they embrace gender identity ideology. Women everywhere owe her a debt of thanks. Whatever the outcome of this tribunal, Sandie Peggie has already won.

That's a key element of this whole gender business. This is a middle class "progressive" movement, imposed on a recalcitrant workforce by management and HR and the people who go on expensive courses about the latest management fad. It thrives in universities and the arts. It marks you out as a good caring person who keeps up to date with new developments and is capable of understanding difficult concepts like gender identity which, frankly, the lower orders are incapable of getting to grips with. 

Or, as Orwell put it, ‘There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.’

From Genevieve Gluck at Reduxx:

A man convicted of the brutal murder of his mother has been quietly transferred into a women’s prison in Illinois. Kmuel Kevin King is currently incarcerated at Logan Correctional Center (LCC), a facility for female inmates, despite being described as “male” within the state’s Department of Corrections records.

As LCC has been housing trans-identified male convicts in recent years, King’s transfer suggests that he has claimed to identify as a woman in order to secure the move, though this detail is not explicitly stated within his listing on the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) website. Additionally, recent photos of King provided by the DOC reveal him as having an overtly masculine appearance.

They do indeed.

King is serving an 80-year prison sentence for the cold-blooded murder of his mother….

It is unclear when King was first transferred into Logan Correctional Center, a women’s prison that currently houses 12 biological males who are claiming to be “transgender women.” Among them are at least two men who have been convicted for child sexual abuse, James “Jamie” Boots and Michelle Blessent.

Illinois Department of Corrections officials released an Administrative Directive which went into effect in April 2021 allowing convicts who “self-identify as transgender” to be housed according to their preference.

The Directive was designed to “address the adjustment of offenders self-identified as transgender or suspected of having Gender Dysphoria or other concerns related to gender identity,” and to ensure that prison officials provide “appropriate accommodations … related to gender identity throughout their incarceration.”

Buffalo, New York, ca. 1910. "Main Street and Lafayette Square."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company. Composite of two 8×10 inch glass negatives]