Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Removing gender books

    Well now. From a shocked BBC:

    A council has removed all transgender-related books from the children's sections of its libraries, its leader has announced.

    In a post on social media, Kent County Council leader Linden Kemkaran said the books were to be removed with immediate effect in a "victory for common sense in Kent".

    Paul Webb, Reform UK's communities portfolio holder who oversees libraries, said the move came after a "concerned member of the public" contacted him….

    Defending the decision, Webb said: "In our society, children are quite rightly and properly protected from items and actions that could cause them harm – for example alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.

    "My fellow Reform members and I believe that our young people should be protected from exposure to potentially harmful ideologies and beliefs such as those held by the trans lobbyists."

    When the BBC asked if Reform UK had carried out an assessment to understand the impact of removing the books, Webb said: "As far as impact assessments are concerned, I would have thought that question should have been asked before these books were placed in the children's section to begin with."

    A good response.

    Plenty of horrified LGBTQ+ people are quoted, of course.

    Steven Pullen, founder and director of Swale Pride, described the move as "deeply upsetting".

    He said: "It emboldens anti-trans rhetoric and contributes to a culture where marginalised people feel unsafe, unwelcome, and silenced."

    And Erin Strawbridge, the manager of the Folkestone Bookshop, an LGBTQ+ bookshop, told BBC Radio Kent: "Censorship does not stop people from learning information but it does send the message, and it's sending a message to the young people of Kent that they're not safe and they're not welcome if they're LGBT or trans.

    Nonsense. Teaching children that they could be "born in the wrong body" and can change sex if they want to  – like the ghastly Pop'n'Olly – is a grotesque abuse of their innocence, pushed by trans activists. As always the T gets smuggled in via the good will towards the LGB.

    A reminder, from Matilda Gosling's report last week on publishing:

    The promotion of gender-identity beliefs in children’s publishing is widespread and its ramifications are serious. Children who identify as trans are more likely than other children to have underlying vulnerabilities such as autism, poor mental health, a history of abuse or having grown up in care. They are several times more likely to grow up to be lesbian, gay or bisexual. They need support to feel comfortable in their bodies. Children’s books, on the other hand, paint a shiny, sparkly world of trans identities that supposedly fix deep-seated underlying challenges, resolve bodily hatred and create enduring joy in the form of “trans euphoria”. 

    These publications are steeped in stereotypes. The blurb for the book I Am Jazz, for example, reads:

    “From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body. She loved pink and dressing up as a mermaid and didn’t feel like herself in boy’s clothing. This confused her family, until they took her to a doctor who said that Jazz was transgender and that she was born that way.”

    Jazz Jennings is now an adult who has had several transition-related surgeries and experienced post-surgical complications, as well as many other health issues. 

  • A tale of two tweets

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  • “A very dangerous organisation”

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  • A supporter of progressive causes

    And, talking of Reduxx, here's their latest report – Trans Activist Day Care Worker Arrested For Sexual Abuse Of Six Young Children:

    An assistant early childhood educator in Florianópolis, Brazil, has been taken into custody after multiple children alleged that he sexually abused them. Allec Sander de Oliveira Ribeiro, 34, worked at the Nossa Senhora de Lourdes Center for Municipal Childhood Education and was known for his vocal support of progressive causes.

    On July 1, the Civil Police of Santa Catarina arrested Ribeiro following a month-long investigation into reports of sexual abuse at a local daycare. The probe began in June, after several parents reported that their children had disclosed abuse. According to the parents, the children had exhibited troubling behavioral changes in the lead-up to their disclosures. Authorities notified the Municipal Secretariat of Education, which suspended Ribeiro from his position on June 5.

    Police subsequently raided Ribeiro’s home and searched his electronic devices, uncovering more than 6,000 files containing child sexual abuse material. Investigators say many of the files appear to have been produced by Ribeiro himself. Some of the victims were identified as Ribeiro’s students, and there was material that had been recorded on the daycare premises. Officers also discovered three additional hard drives concealed in his home; the total number of illicit files is now estimated to exceed 10,000….

    Jornal Razão reports that Ribeiro was known as a supporter of progressive causes, and displayed both the LGBT and trans pride flags on his social media accounts, where he also frequently posted popular cartoon characters and references to youth media. Journalist Lorran Barentin described this as a “possible strategy to mask criminal conduct.”

    Ribiero’s progressive public persona helped him cultivate trust with parents, one of whom noted: “The hardest part is that he was close to everyone. He used the right words, said the right things, and no one suspected him. But now the mask has fallen off.”

    So it would seem.

  • Men with a misogyny fetish

    Genevieve Gluck, co-founder of Reduxx, knows the psychology of trans-identified men better than most.

    Something I have learned in the process of writing about trans-identified male rapists and pedophiles for several years is that most women truly have no idea how much these men hate them.

    "Trans women" are men with a misogyny fetish. They hold women in such contempt that publicly humiliating the female sex arouses and thrills them. To be a woman is a humiliating experience, they believe, and so play-acting as though they are women is their sadomasochistic and exhibitionistic game.

    Womanhood is a vehicle for their masturbation, nothing more. When they demand the public "validate" their version of womanhood, they are implicitly forcing agreement with their view that women exist to be used, to be sexually abused, to be objectified and humiliated.

    Yet despite this, women and girls are gaslit about it at every turn – chastised, condescended to, and told to be kind to men who have made a fetish their entire personality.

    All the while, women and girls are also blamed for these men's actions. For not standing up for themselves, for being too permissive, or, as a monolith when other women support them.

    So it's better to establish a firm boundary, to say "no" as loud as we like, and to not let ourselves be made to feel guilty for recognizing woman-hating when we see it.

    That X post has a video which I don't really want to put up here. Nasty. But it certainly shows a particularly vile trans misogyny – and Gluck's been involved in exposing this stuff for years, so she knows what she's talking about….

  • Sex slaves in Syria

    Paul Wood in the Spectator: 

    Syria’s Alawite communities are in the grip of a fear that their women and girls could be kidnapped and held as sabaya, or sex slaves. After the Assad dictatorship fell, amid revenge attacks by militias loyal to the country’s new rulers, there were reports of abductions for rape and even of forced marriage. Alawite human rights activists say that some women are still being held prisoner and that kidnappings are still happening. They accuse the Syrian authorities of being unwilling or unable to stop it.

    The activists say that between 50 and 60 women and girls have been taken. These numbers are small compared with the 1,600 or more civilians killed in a spasm of sectarian violence in March. Sunni militias rounded up Alawite men and boys to be shot in the streets; some – as I wrote at the time – were made to crawl to their deaths howling like dogs. But the idea that jihadis are trying to revive the practice of taking sabaya holds a special terror for Alawites. There are some credible accounts from families and in a few cases from the victims themselves.

    Assad, of course, was Alawite – an offshoot of Shia Islam – so it's no surprise that, with Turkish-backed Sunnis now running Syria, revenge is in the air. And, as so often in Islam, it's usually women who suffer the most.

    The bulk of the article describes the nightmare ordeal of "Samira", who was abducted off the street, gang-raped, and sold into a forced marriage. What's notable is how her captors and rapists clearly saw themselves as devout Muslims, with some sporting black headbands with the first part of the Shahada in white script: ‘There is no god but God’, while cursing her as an  ‘unveiled whore’.

    The historic practice of taking female slaves was reintroduced by Isis during the brief rule of the ‘Caliphate’ in Syria a decade ago. Thousands of women and girls from the Yazidi minority were held and openly traded in slave markets. I interviewed two sisters in their teens who had been kidnapped by their father’s gardener, who enjoyed their humiliation. A woman in her forties told me she had been bought by a man too poor to own a car and who had wanted a servant. He and his wife turned her out when she got cancer. There were many such stories.

    The group that now rules Syria, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, never took slaves. But there are almost certainly former Isis loyalists in its ranks. Occasionally a fighter in one of the militias backing the government is spotted still wearing an Isis patch….

    Human-rights activists say the police often don’t want to investigate when an Alawite woman or girl disappears, or they try to blame the immediate family. In some cases, girls have posted videos saying they ran away to get married. The authorities point to these videos as evidence that no crime has been committed; the activists say the girls are being coerced. The activists say that all kinds of violence are continuing against the Alawites. One posted a video of a restaurant being attacked by bearded gunmen for selling alcohol. They fear the future in Syria is Islamist and authoritarian.

    In Afghanistan, the Taliban Mark 2 returned to power promising a new, more liberal version of rule by sharia. Now they are as hardline as ever. In Syria, the international community is giving President al-Sharaa’s new government the benefit of the doubt for the time being. He was put into power by a wide coalition of armed groups. His government may be too weak to protect the Alawites; some of his men may not want to. Can’t or won’t? For the families whose wives or daughters were taken, it makes little difference which.

  • Organ harvesting in Xinjiang

    The forgotten Uighurs. From the Telegraph:

    China is to triple the number of facilities it uses to forcibly harvest the organs of detained Uyghur people, it has been claimed.

    Experts have raised the alarm after it emerged that the Xinjiang Health Commission, a branch of China’s national health authority, plans to open six new medical centres by 2030, bringing the total in the region to nine.

    The expansion has heightened concerns over China’s treatment of Uyghur people, against whom the government already stands accused of genocide.

    Beijing has also been accused of forcibly harvesting the organs of prisoners from minority groups and, in some cases, selling them to wealthy recipients willing to pay the equivalent of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds.

    An international tribunal, conducted in the UK in 2019, found that as many as 100,000 organ transplants had been carried out in China annually – nearly three times the number that its government reported to the international register.

    Sayragul Sauytbay, a Kazakh doctor who was previously detained in Xinjiang, has spoken publicly about camp-wide “health checks” where detainees had their blood tested and, depending on their results, were then sorted into groups.

    She began to notice that those who were given a pink check mark would soon disappear, concluding it was because of “organ harvesting”.

    While the decision to build the new facilities was made in December last year, the plans have only recently been made public by End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), an Australia-based human rights charity.

    The 2019 tribunal determined that the organs of marginalised detainees in China were being forcefully harvested, sometimes when the patients were still alive, to serve a transplant trade worth over $1 billion (£733 million).

    While China has a voluntary organ donation scheme, Wendy Rogers, the chairman of ETAC’s advisory board, told The Telegraph that in many cases they were harvested forcefully, including from otherwise healthy prisoners against their will and who are slowly killed as their organs are removed.

    Earlier this year, it was estimated that at least half a million Uyghurs were in prisons or detention centres. They have also faced decades of persecution by the Chinese government, including mass detention and forced sterilisation.

    Given the history of abuse against the Uyghurs, of whom there are 10 million in Xinjiang, there is concern that the new transplant facilities will result in more forced organ harvesting among the population.

    The imprisoned Uighurs, obviously, make an ideal captive source for organ harvesting. It's a huge market, and the wealthy buyers will pay more for organs from healthy donors – or rather, healthy bodies. Members of the persecuted Falun Gong religious sect, who didn't smoke or drink, used to be favoured, but the abstemious Muslim Uighurs make a fine replacement.

    “The concept of informed, voluntary consent is meaningless in Xinjiang’s carceral environment,” said David Matas, an international human rights lawyer who has previously investigated organ harvesting in China.

    “Given the systemic repression, any claim that donations are voluntary should be treated with the utmost scepticism.”

    Even before the new facilities were announced, Xinjiang was known as a hub for organ transplants.

    In the province’s capital Urumqi, its airport has green arrows on the ground – known as “Green Passage” lanes – to fast-track the transit of those transporting organs.

    A real dystopian nightmare, then – but of absolutely no interest to the Gaza-obsessed protestors on the streets every day.

  • Shadowy, Kafkaesque complaints

    Jo Phoenix at UnHerd on yesterday's Sullivan Report:

    There is page after page of personal testimony. It speaks of gender-critical academics being taken through shadowy, Kafkaesque complaints processes and of research ethics committees over-reaching their mandate to subvert the research of academics interested in sex and gender. It goes on to describe actual harassment and bullying….

    As if detailing the bigotry faced by gender-critical academics was not enough, the report also tells us something about our universities as a whole. They have become  lawless places where adherence to a political dogma mattered more than the quest for knowledge and truth using the scientific methods of debate, discussion and critique.

    For anyone who has been paying attention, the findings of the Sullivan Review should be no surprise. After all, many of us have been sounding the alarm for nearly a decade. We’ve been saying that a small but highly vocal, very disruptive group of academic activists have been using whatever tactics they can to stop any questions or critique of the (frankly) ridiculous idea that humans can change sex.

  • Moving beyond the gender binary

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  • Because the victim was a Jew

    No "Jews Lives Matter" for Karen Diamond: she's already forgotten.  Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:

    A woman has died following a savage racist attack. She was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire by a man barking bigoted insults in her face. She later succumbed to her injuries, her precious life extinguished in a 21st-century lynching by fire. But you will not see blacked-out squares on Instagram for this victim of racist violence. The left will not march. No hashtag will trend. Few hands will be wrung in woke circles over this most hellish assault. Why? Because the victim was a Jew.

    Her name was Karen Diamond. She was 82 years old. She was one of 29 people who gathered at Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado on 1 June to call for the release of the Israeli hostages. Their small, prayerful assembly was intruded on in the most sickening fashion by one Mohamed Sabry Soliman. He is suspected of having splashed the gathering with petrol before wielding a homemade flame-thrower to try to immolate them. It’s 2025 and they’re burning Jews again.

    Thirteen people were injured. Karen Diamond’s injuries were too severe to survive: she died last week, as revealed in court documents filed this week. What made this act of savagery especially heinous was the age of the victims. The eight people hospitalised were aged 52 to 88. The oldest, Barbara Steinmetz, was a Holocaust survivor, having fled Nazi Europe as an infant in the 1940s. She escaped Hitler’s flames, but not the flames of the rabid ‘anti-Zionism’ raging in the West in 2025.