Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • All the markings of a dangerous cult

    An article from Jamie Paul in Persuasion argues that the the trans movement – in America – moved too fast. People weren’t ready. Hence the current backlash:

    In the span of three years, trans activism became not only the beneficiary of an infusion of cash and support from gay rights groups, but it was also handed a level of cultural and institutional power unprecedented for a movement barely out of its infancy.1 From 2018 to 2023, the trans movement held considerable sway in virtually every avenue of culture and information, from universities to government agencies to nonprofits, entertainment companies, streaming services, social media platforms, publishing houses, media outlets, major corporations, professional associations, and even K-12 schools. In 2014, trans issues were hardly a blip on the public’s radar. By the end of the decade, institutional America marched in lockstep with trans activism while the mainstream press covered its most contested edge cases as though they were settled issues.

    The author, though, accepts the basic premise: that there is a trans issue to be addressed.

    Somewhere in the multiverse, there’s an alternate timeline in which trans activism grew more slowly and steadily, pushed and pulled by the tidal tensions of democratic pressures, forcing it to smooth over the extreme edges, engage skeptics, and hear out the moderate, concerned, or dissenting voices within the community. There’s a world out there in which the trans movement followed in the footsteps of previous campaigns for human rights by building durable liberal progress. Sadly, that’s not how things played out in our timeline. But it’s never too late to, well, do better.

    A response from John Connor:

    Your basic thesis is that the backlash against trans came about because trans activists moved too fast and failed to put in the work.

    I don’t see that. After the wins of Gay 1.0, the public was told, and believed, that Trans was just Gay 2.0. Initially, the public accepted it and did not make much fuss.

    But over time, the public witnessed a growing presence of trans in their communities, and in volumes that had never in history been witnessed. Trans (Queer Theory) was being indoctrinated in schools and, worryingly, their children, who had never before displayed any remote interest in trans, where suddenly announcing, sometimes in groups, that they were wanting to take life altering hormones and slice off body parts.

    What changed was that the public, who earlier lacked focus, began to pay attention. What they saw they did not like. Not only was what was being sold highly implausible, it had all the markings of a dangerous cult that had become embedded into every institution in society. The trans phenomenon turned from a voter side issue to, for many, the most important issue of our time. When Malcolm Gladwell says it is the singular issue of over 50% of voters, he is right.

    What solidified it was that the public’s legitimate questions were met with accusations of transphobia, authoritarian efforts to muzzle speech, and politicians willing to take away the rights of women, children, parents, families, gays and lesbians. Trans activism has also sought to rewrite reality, science, medicine, language, and law. This has made the blowback even bigger and the stakes even higher. Trans ideology in society is now seen as a malignant cancer that must be excised in its entirety.

    This blowback is not yet over. In fact, it is growing. The public was once willing to see trans as a civil rights issue. It no longer does. Trans is clearly a mental health issue.

    Trans identities are not real; no one is actually trans. Trans identities are avatars. They are the creations of minds fleeing internalized homophobia, trauma, emotional pain, autism-related rigidities, identity cries, or social anxieties. The core belief—that one’s psychological gender does not match one’s biological sex—is no longer entertained as potentially true. It is utterly bonkers.

    Gender dysphoria is a sort of cognitive dissonance created by excessive rumination on trans identities. It drives people to undertake harmful behaviours, such as the pathological desire to change one’s body.

    Trans has infected society. It will only be cured when the gender affirming model is gone and people are treated for their actual pain.

    There is still a long road ahead.

    See also Arty Morty’s response.

    This avoidance of the core, base-level problems with “trans” is a consistent problem I have seen, particularly and acutely in American liberal media circles. The specifically-American psychological concept of progressivism just cannot swallow the hard pill that transgender ideation is a mental disorder for which social awareness and enlightenment campaigns are not the appropriate tools to address it.

  • Selective outrage

    Nimco Ali, chief executive of the Five Foundation which campaigns against female genital mutilation, on the Hamas rapes on October 7th and after.

    The evidence is overwhelming. Women were raped. Bodies were mutilated. One survivor described hiding for hours while hearing women around her screaming as they were assaulted. Others have spoken about sexual abuse in captivity.

    Yet much of the international feminist movement hesitated, equivocated or simply stayed silent. That silence was devastating. I wish I could say I was surprised. But, as a black woman who has spent years challenging the way violence against women is sometimes softened or excused in the name of culture or politics, I have seen this selectivity before. For years some activists insisted on framing FGM as a “cultural practice” that simply required understanding rather than calling it what it is: violence against girls.

    What makes the indifference to the rape of Israeli women so disturbing is that it reveals something darker. Antisemitism. When Jewish women were raped during a massacre, many of the voices that speak loudly about women’s rights fell silent or, worse, questioned whether it happened at all.

    The world has gathered in New York for the United Nations commission on the status of women. There are speeches about ending sexual violence in conflict. There are panels about solidarity and justice. But how many have spoken about the women taken to Gaza and raped by a terrorist organisation? How many have acknowledged that the hesitation after October 7 has already weakened the global fight against rape as a weapon of war?…

    The suffering of women on October 7 cannot be undone. But the lesson we choose to take from their suffering will shape the future. Either rape in war is always a crime against humanity. Or it depends on who the victim is.

  • Exploiting rape victims

    Hadley Freeman on David Lammy’s cynical invocation of rape victims to push through his scheme for cutting back on jury trials:

    Rape is notoriously hard to prosecute, but it’s decidedly dubious to tie that 60 per cent to the backlogs in the courts. “Delays pre-charge or a change of mind pre-charge can’t be blamed on the backlog. So much of what Lammy says to defend those proposals is inaccurate. He must know,” one KC told The Times. Must he? I don’t know, this is about the level of understanding I’d expect of a man who once went on Celebrity Mastermind and said the king who succeeded Henry VIII was Henry VII, and that Marie Antoinette won a Nobel prize for physics.

    Grasp of detail or otherwise aside, Lammy has exploited the deeply emotive feelings that rape victims inspire to ram through his bill, arguing that if MPs don’t vote for it then they are extending victims’ suffering, even though that is far from proven. Instead of having a rational debate, he has misused statistics and played on emotions.

    Well, here’s some more emotion for him: I feel deeply scepticism about his concern for women who have been raped. Only five years ago he said that women who object to men who identify as women entering women-only spaces — including prisons, where many of the female prisoners have been raped and abused — are “dinosaurs” who want to “hoard rights”. He later defended this by saying, “I will always stand with those from a minority community.”

    He also suggested that trans women – men – can grow a cervix.

    Well, Mr Lammy, have I got a reading recommendation for you. It’s a 2017 review of minorities and the criminal justice system, which conclusively found that minorities prefer jury trials, seeing them as a safeguard against prejudice because they — unlike judges and magistrates — represent the local population. It was written by our old friend, David Lammy.

  • Heavy-handed high street aggression

    Here:

    And so even though Gail’s describes itself as “a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK”, its very presence 20 metres away from a small independent Palestinian cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.

    Because there’s that nasty hint of Jews.

    Added:

  • The trans appointment

    No chance of a gay or lesbian appointment, of course.

    This would be approved of in Iran, where gays are women in men’s bodies and get the full trans treatment. Either that or they get hung.

  • In the news

    Clockwise:

    Appeal after Pride flag stolen from business:

    Olympic swimmer makes a splash on RuPaul’s Drag Race runway

    Plea to save Pride event facing £20k shortfall

    BBC decision to axe LGBTQ+ dating show is two steps back, says contestant

  • Deleting her tweet

    Olivia Bailey has now deleted that post. The one where she proudly shared a picture of her round table meeting “to discuss how we can tackle LGBT+ hate crime” with disgraced former Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre head Mridul Wadhwa, and trans activist “Helen” Belcher. A post that was retweeted by Bridget Phillipson, Education Minister.

  • Hate crimes

    From the Times – Muslim hate crimes twice as likely to be prosecuted as those against Jews:

    Hate crimes against Muslims are almost twice as likely to result in prosecution than those against Jews, figures have revealed for the first time.

    The rate of the offences targeting Muslims that resulted in a charge or summons was 6.7 per cent in the year to March 2025, equivalent to one in 15 offences recorded by the police.

    However, just 3.8 per cent of anti-Jewish hate crimes led to a charge or summons in the same 12-month period, which was one in 26.

    It meant that Muslim victims were 76 per cent more likely to see their perpetrator prosecuted than Jewish victims of hate crimes.…

    Separate statistics published annually by the Home Office show Jewish people are almost ten times more likely to be victims of religious hate crimes. There were 106 religious hate crimes per 10,000 population targeted at Jewish people compared with 12 per 10,000 of population targeting Muslims.

    Fiyaz Mughal, founder of the Tell Mama organisation that monitors anti-Muslim hate, said the discrepancy between charging rates for anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hatred was likely to widen following the government’s introduction of an official definition of anti-Muslim hostility.

    So hate crimes against Jews are, per head of population, much greater than against Muslims, but are much less likely to result in prosecution.

    Partly, perhaps, it’s that old racism line: Muslims are seen as brown and therefore in need of protection, while Jews are seen as white and part of the oppressor class. But yes, there’s more going on here than that…

  • Alleged Iranian links

    What a surprise. Charity behind pro-Iran ‘hate march’ received £450k taxpayer funding:

    A charity which funds the group behind the banned pro-Iran “hate march” has received at least £450,000 in taxpayer-funded donations, The Telegraph can reveal.

    The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) Trust has been recognised by HMRC for Gift Aid, which means it can claim an extra 25p from the Government for every £1 it receives in donations.

    Accounts submitted by the trust to the Charity Commission show that it has claimed £458,500 in Gift Aid since 2020. It is under investigation by the watchdog for funding an event where “inflammatory” statements were apparently made.

    Like “Death to the enemies of Islam”, for instance? Fairly inflammatory, I’d say.

    The IHRC Trust is one of four charities with alleged Iranian links that are recognised by HMRC for Gift Aid and identified in a report on Iranian influence in the UK by Lord Walney, the former independent adviser to the Government on political violence.

  • Swinging dicks

    This is a perfect example of how the pieties of the Democrats, and the nice polite America they imagine they inhabit, are so easily skewered by the Trump approach. The case was brought by the Korean-owned Olympic Spa, who were appealing against Washington State’s ruling that they had to allow trans women – men claiming to b women – into their women-only spaces. The case was thrown out – with a dissenting opinion:

    A Donald Trump-appointed federal appellate judge invoked the term “swinging dicks” three times in an unusually crass opinion involving a nude, female-only Korean spa, drawing sharp rebukes from 29 of his colleagues.

    “This is a case about swinging dicks,” began a Thursday dissenting opinion from Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the US Court of Appeals. He said he would have ruled in favor of Washington state’s Olympus Spa, which had sought to bar transgender women from its spa facilities on free speech grounds.

    “You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong,” he wrote. “But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa— some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing.”

    He went on to say that it “feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds” and criticized “woke judges’ willingness” to sacrifice constitutional rights “on the altar of ‘social progress.’”

    Unusually crass, no doubt, but very much to the point. The assembled pompous legal minds had collectively decided that the rights of women and girls to have their own space free of male genitalia were of no consequence compared to the rights of men who claim to be women.

    VanDyke’s dissent prompted a harsh rebuke from more than two dozen of his colleagues, who wrote separately to say that the US legal system “is not a place for vulgar barroom talk” and that VanDyke’s dissent “ignores ordinary principles of dignity and civility and demeans this court.”

    Not half as much as their ridiculous decision demeans the court.