Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Everyday cancellation in publishing

    A damning report on the sorry state of publishing – governed by trans orthodoxy and viciously dismissive of gender-critical viewpoints – from Matilda Gosling, for Sex Matters and SEEN in Publishing. Some highlights:

    Publishers have made poor commercial decisions guided by ideology, not markets. There is a vast gulf between books commissioned on gender-identity beliefs and what actually sells: the analysis done for this report on trade non-fiction books shows that the average book about women sells seven times more copies than the average book based on gender-identity beliefs. Gender-critical books sell, on average, nine times more. Commissioning editors have run scared of bold, brave, interesting books that reflect a diversity of ideas and that readers want, and instead commissioned books that fit the beliefs of their junior staff. 

    Helen Joyce received a £20,000 advance for her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which went on to sell over 23,000 physical copies in the UK and over 100,000 internationally. Munroe Bergdorf, by contrast, received a six-figure sum for Transitional, which sold fewer than 3,000 copies in the UK.

    Abuse of those with gender-critical views in publishing has been relentless. People – usually women – have received death and rape threats. Others in the industry have threatened them with reputational damage and loss of work, have used slurs and insults against them, and conflated their views with transphobia, homophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry. Gender-critical individuals working in publishing have been accused of wanting the deaths of trans-identifying teenagers and working towards genocide. There have been industry calls for those with gender-critical beliefs to be demonised, and they have been labelled as fascists for thinking that there are two sexes.

    In 2020, the former children’s author Gillian Philip added the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling to her Twitter (now X) profile. She was then subjected to an extreme 24-hour social-media pile-on that included death threats. Philip’s contract was immediately terminated by her publisher with the tacit support of her agent. 

    Mainstream media outlets have compounded the problem. Coverage of published books was perceived by our interviewees to be biased towards those based on gender-identity beliefs. It is notable that gender-critical books have sold so well despite this apparent bias – analysis conducted for this research shows that in non-fiction, the average gender-critical book sells 10,000 more copies than the average book based on gender-identity beliefs. 

    Journalists on BBC Radio 4’s flagship women’s-affairs programme Woman’s Hour have not interviewed best-selling gender-critical authors about their books, despite the issues they cover being so relevant to women. By contrast male gender-studies academic Grace Lavery has been interviewed, despite selling only 1,723 copies of Please Miss – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. So has Juno Dawson, a male transactivist who also identifies as a woman. Dawson has depicted womanhood as a submissive sexual identity: “I knew I wanted to be ‘the woman’ when it came to sex… It was a conscious urge to get fucked, be penetrated as a woman would be.” It is surprising that somebody with such a perspective, which arguably undermines the position of women in society, has been platformed on a programme about women instead of authors who argue for women’s rights. 

    Unfortunately, knowing the BBC's record, it's not in the least surprising.

    The trans emphasis in children's books is particularly alarming:

    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. 

    Plenty of powerful endorsements. Anne Fine, for instance:

    “An astonishing report that lays bare how a once open-minded publishing world has allowed a minority of activists to bully it into so far abandoning its core principles that it has begun to work, not only against its own ethos, but also against its own interests.”

    Richard Dawkins:

    “When history looks back on the epidemic of collective lunacy that was the trans cult, special odium will attach to psychiatrists, counsellors and teachers who warped the minds, and surgeons who mutilated the bodies, of vulnerable people in their care, especially children. But lesser culprits will not escape blame, and high on the list will be publishers who, contrary to their normal editorial judgment, censored or even cancelled brave authors critical of the cult. Authors who asserted scientific truth in the teeth of fashionable ideology. Authors who stood up for real women, or stood up to the bullies who sought to intimidate them. I know many publishers, and I hear multiple stories of relentless pressure from junior colleagues, and of abject capitulation to it. But anecdotes demand proper substantiation, and this splendid document provides it in spades…."

    Added:

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  • Islamophobia concerns

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  • The British Medical Association and Israel

    It's always the way. Unions attract the ideologically committed – and there's no better example than the BMA. Jawad Iqbal in the Times:

    A staggering one in ten motions on the agenda at the annual conference of the British Medical Association (BMA), the doctors’ trade union, are about the Israel-Gaza conflict. No wonder the union has gained an unenviable reputation as a home for campaigners pushing a political agenda that has little to do with the day job of practising medicine. In total, 467 motions have been put forward for debate at the meeting this week in Liverpool — 45 relate to Israel or Palestine.

    One motion claims that Israel is establishing a “system of apartheid”. Another calls on the BMA to support doctors who refuse to pay their taxes because the UK government is “complicit in genocide”. If union members vote in favour of the motions, they are adopted as official policy. So what? The Middle East crisis is not going to be resolved by a vote at the BMA conference.

    Another item up for debate is a call for a boycott of Israeli medical institutions and universities, arguing for Israel to be treated similarly to the “South African apartheid regime”. How a doctor might go about explaining to a patient that they were being denied lifesaving treatment because the medical breakthrough came from Israel is not clear. Real world problems don’t bother those who inhabit the fantasy universe of BMA activists.

    Then there’s the motion calling for medical students and doctors who hold pro-Palestine protests or display Palestinian symbols to be spared any disciplinary action or “punitive measures”. This follows attempts by NHS trusts to prohibit staff from wearing shirts or badges in support of Palestine in NHS hospitals. What are patients — and not just Jewish patients — to make of this? Hospital wards and GP surgeries are no place for staff to parade their political leanings.

    The bigger problem with this juvenile politicking is that it comes at a time when the NHS faces huge challenges, due to staff shortages, financial pressures and the increasing demands of an ageing population. These are issues people really want to hear about from doctors. It would be welcome if medics stayed focused on the day job, which is to look after their patients.

    The same advice goes for the doctors’ union: its core job is to represent its members on pay and working conditions. International politics is not part of the remit. The witless campaigning of a hard core of BMA activists obsessed with taking a public stance on Gaza runs the risk of alienating the wider public, and for little discernible gain or purpose. The BMA needs to get its house in order.

    They could make a start by dealing with accusations of antisemitism in the BMA's leadership:

    The British Medical Association has been accused of a cover-up after terminating an antisemitism complaint about its president despite an external review’s finding of a case to answer.

    Mary McCarthy, a leading GP, was accused of creating a “hostile environment” for Jewish doctors by using her account on X to share provocative posts focusing on the conflict in Gaza.

    The Times understands that the BMA appointed an external lawyer to carry out an independent review of the complaint made by Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS).

    It concluded that McCarthy had a case to answer for a potential breach of the BMA’s code. The review found that she had a duty to be representative of the BMA’s membership but had posted one view of the conflict in the Middle East.

    Alex Hearn, from LAAS, who made the complaint, was told four months ago that a resolution panel would be set up. However, he was then informed that according to the BMA’s articles and bylaws, only its own members and staff could make complaints. As a result, his complaint would not proceed any further, the BMA said.

    What a surprise.

    Hearn said that the BMA had dragged its feet since the findings of the external review and “now, at the very last moment, has orchestrated a shameful cover-up to stop the case going ahead”.

    He went on: “The BMA’s leadership should hang their heads in shame. Their refusal to investigate concerns of anti-Jewish racism at the very top of their organisation suggests that there is indeed a systemic problem. What message does this send to Jewish doctors and, ultimately, to Jewish patients?”

  • Dystopian healthcare

    Stella O'Malley at Spiked – No more experiments on children:

    In saner times, nobody would need to spell this out: puberty is not a problem. It’s not a pathology. It’s not something to be halted, postponed or ‘paused’. It’s a normal, necessary part of growing up. But today, in an upside-down world where truth must tiptoe around ideology, even the most basic biological facts need defending.

    That’s why Genspect, which I founded, has launched the ‘Memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the role of puberty in adolescent development’. It should be redundant. But it’s not. We now live in a world where the UK Supreme Court needs to clarify that men aren’t women, where state-funded studies propose prescribing powerful drugs to delay puberty in confused kids, and where medical authorities have outsourced their moral compass to activist groups.

    This MoU is a line in the sand: puberty is not optional, and children deserve the right to grow up – unmedicated and unmanipulated. Genspect has created a platform, ProtectingPuberty.com. Groups like Sex Matters, CanSG, Transgender Trend, LGB Alliance and Thoughtful Therapists – alongside many other well-informed organisations – have already signed the MoU. Together, we’re pushing back against a tide of institutional cowardice and ideological capture. Around the world, organisations are downloading the MoU compliance badge and joining this public stand for a basic, commonsense truth that should never have been up for debate.

    This isn’t some fringe concern. Last year, the Cass Review’s scathing findings led to the closure of the discredited Tavistock gender clinic and to a ban on puberty blockers. Yet despite all this, the NHS is now throwing £10million at a study that will dole out puberty blockers to gender-distressed kids – again.

    Yes, even after all we’ve learned, the medical establishment is still flirting with the idea that we can chemically freeze children in time and expect no consequences. Effectively, UK health secretary Wes Streeting has banned puberty blockers with one hand and reintroduced them with the other – dressing up the same failed experiment as ‘research’.

    A puberty blocker trial, as I understand it, was recommended by Hilary Cass as part of her review. It was a mistake. We don't need more evidence about the effects of powerful drugs – as used to chemically castrate sex offenders – on confused young children. It would be a horror show: like taking a group of "gender dysphoric" young girls, giving half of them double mastectomies, and see which group – the mutilated or the unmutilated – feels better afterwards. It's contrary to every medical ethic.

    This is not a healthcare model. It’s dystopian. It tramples over ethics, evidence and common sense, echoing the darkest chapters of medical history, when vulnerable people were used as guinea pigs in experiments dressed up as ‘care’….

    Let the tomboys be. Let the feminine boys wave their fairy wands and find their own path. Let kids be weird and wild. That’s childhood.

    Puberty is not an error to be corrected. It’s the bridge between who we were and who we’re becoming. Blocking it doesn’t hit pause. It derails the individual onto a pathway of lifelong medicalisation.

  • Hebrew and Yiddish

    Interesting.


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    Full text:

    As a linguistics PhD student, I always find it interesting when anti-Zionist activists hugely praise Yiddish representation. It is such a contrast to the derision with which they often treat Hebrew, which to this day is the only successful example of large-scale linguistic revival. An indisputably remarkable and unmatched linguistic feat.

    It illustrates how, at best, anti-Zionist activists want Jews to be: minorities all over the world who should be allowed to express their identity (at least the aspects of that identity that are deemed acceptable) within their diaspora countries, but not a liberated people. Not a people with self-determination: speaking their indigenous language daily in a nation of their own in their ancestral homelands.

    Added, from Simon Schama:

    "anti Zionists today also fearful of Hebrew as proof of indigeneity – however much revived as daily vernacular it remains in all crucial respects the identical language as that used by the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ( beautiful ) Hebrew of the Mishnah"

    "the Mishnah btw codified in 3rd century Galilee.. Hebrew and Judaism never left"

  • Trans for Iran

    It's like Queers for Palestine, up a notch. "The Islamic Republic subsidizes sexual reassignment surgery + gives legal recognition to transwomen". 

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    Further comments:

    "Yes, the Iranians kill gays but help people change sex. I get the feeling this is the direction of travel of the trans agenda in the west too."

    "In Iran they trans away the gay. It's illegal to be a gay man in Iran. If caught they're forced to have genital surgery whether they like it or not. Many are so distressed they commit suicide."

    "Think this through Philip. A country notoriously anti woman and gay people but supports trans. Have you joined the dots yet?"

    [The "India" Ted Cruz refers to is of course notorious trans activist and Rowling-hater-extraordinaire India Willoughby, who's come out for Team Iran and will no doubt be thrilled by this extra bit of publicity.]

  • At the Palestine Action protest in Manchester

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  • Falsely accused of Islamophobia

    A sign of the times:

    The University of Bristol has been ­accused of failing to protect one of its professors who was falsely accused of Islamophobia.

    Free speech and academic groups have asked the Office for Students (OfS) to examine alleged government and management failings that were said to have put Professor Steven Greer at risk.

    The groups pointed out parallels between the Bristol case and Sussex University, which was fined £585,000 by the OfS for failing to uphold freedom of speech in relation to Kathleen Stock and her views on sex and gender issues.

    Greer had been at the University of Bristol for 36 years when he was wrongly accused in 2021 of insulting Islam and the Quran during one of his courses. He was subjected to an aggressive social media campaign, received hostile emails and temporarily left his home because of fears for his safety.

    And did the university support him? Of course they didn't.

    He believes that the university put his life in danger to avoid being seen as ­anti-Muslim.

    The issue arose during a discussion with students taking a human rights module when Greer raised the Islamist attacks in Paris in 2015, in which ­journalists and cartoonists at the ­Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine were murdered. The module had been praised by external examiners for its “rigorous and critical” examination of contemporary human rights issues.

    Six months later a student, who had not attended the course, made a complaint of Islamophobia. The university acted upon it even though it was after the three-month deadline to lodge such complaints.

    The university’s Islamic Society then released details of the complaint on social media, where ­Greer was falsely accused of mocking Islam and the Quran.

    He was subjected to a five-month ­inquiry, after which he was wholly ­exonerated. However, the university said that it “recognised” the concerns of students and scrapped the module, ­titled “Islam, China and the Far East”. Greer resigned.

    Greer said: “Not only did they fail to protect me, and failed to deal with the complaint appropriately, they then compounded the risk by ­equivocating about my innocence.

    “By saying they recognised concerns, and taking off the module because of student sensitivities, it looks like a whitewash, like they still had lingering suspicions about me.”

    He was stitched up, and the university went along with it. Sheer cowardice.

    Twelve groups, including the Free Speech Union, Academics for Academic Freedom, Alumni for Free Speech and Christian Concern, have written to the regulator asking it to investigate Bristol.

    They pointed out that the university had a legal duty to take reasonably ­practicable steps to ensure freedom of speech within the law for its students and staff, but took no visible steps to do so in Greer’s case. They allege that ­Bristol’s failures resulted in the ­censorship of lawful expression and that, as in the Stock case, there was a failure to take reasonable steps to ­protect academics from physical harm.

    Key failures, according to the groups, include allowing the complaint despite numerous procedural flaws, failing to take action on the aggressive social ­media campaign by disciplining any students who were involved, and ­cancelling Greer’s module even though he had been exonerated.

    Given the scandal, the complaint notes, it would be a “brave scholar” who would make legitimate observations about Islam in a similar context.

    Well quite. Discussion of Islam, let alone criticism of Islam, is becoming increasingly discouraged. As if, perhaps, it might be blasphemous.

  • The NHS trust Pride calendar

    The NHS trust at the centre of the Darlington nurses dispute would seem to have an agenda. From the Times:

    A hospital trust at the centre of a row over transwomen sharing female changing rooms has come under fire for producing a Pride calendar celebrating “polyamory” and “pansexuality”.

    County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust is being sued by eight nurses who claim that a policy allowing transwomen to use single-sex changing rooms puts women at risk….

    But a Pride calendar sent to staff has stirred further criticism of the trust over claims that bosses are more concerned with protecting LGBT rights than those of women.

    The 36-page document, Pride Month 2025, begins with a graphic in which each day in June is dedicated to celebrating an LGBT theme. These include images of flags placed on different dates that represent a variety of “genders” and sexualities that people can identify as.

    Among these are flags for the polyamorous — defined in the booklet as “a relationship style in which more than two people engage in intimate, consensual relationship” — and the pansexual, described as individuals “attracted to all types of people” regardless of “gender or sexual orientation”.

    Other flags represent those who identify as asexual, explained as people who “may experience little sexual attraction or none at all”….

    Elsewhere the document advises staff advice on providing “safe spaces” for LGBTQ+ people.

    There's someone high up at the Durham and Darlington trust that seems to be pushing this, and no one dares speak up – apart from the Darlington nurses.

    Some staff at the hospital say the exercise is “divisive”, particularly in the light of the case of the eight Darlington nurses, strengthened by the recent Supreme Court ruling that, under equality law, women and men are defined by biological sex.

    One female hospital employee said: “Why should an individual’s sexuality or kinks be not only brought into the workplace but actively promoted and forced on staff? Following the Supreme Court ruling, it is incredibly insensitive and hostile to be trying to ‘educate’ staff on these issues.

    “This exposes that County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust has an extreme agenda and are keen to be seen as ‘inclusive’ while continuing to exclude women and ignoring their rights to basic dignity.”

    Further concerns have been raised over the booklet’s directing staff towards Mermaids, a charity for trans youth, as one of the 11 “LGBT focused charities” it lists.

    Hmm. Someone high up with a transed child, perhaps.

    Shelley Charlesworth of Transgender Trend, a parent-led group that campaigns to raise awareness of the sharp rise in children identifying as trans, said: “No part of the NHS should be endorsing Mermaids, a charity which was opposed to the ban by the NHS on puberty blockers and which has a history of controversies in its dealing with children.”

  • Abandoning self-identification language

    From the Times:

    Judges will no longer have to refer to criminal defendants by the gender of their choice in an update after the Supreme Court’s transgender ruling.

    The revised guidance abandons self-identification language and reaffirms the binary definition of sex to state that the legal definition of a woman means biological female rather than sex attained by the acquisition of a gender recognition certificate (GRC).

    It says that non-binary status has no legal footing and sets out that courts may refuse contested pronouns.

    Rape suspects should not be referred to as female and there is “no entitlement” for anyone to use single-sex services intended for the opposite sex, the guidance says.

    It previously stated that judges should refer to criminal defendants by the gender they have chosen for themselves.

    About bloody time. Will we now see an end to press reports of women rapists, "her penis" and so on? That'd be nice.