Mick Hartley

Prescient.

Another union dominated by the old left – with a Corbynist at the top in this case – decides to go against the law and demand that men be allowed into the girls' toilets and changing rooms whenever they feel like it. Jo Bartosch at UnHerd – The NEU has abandoned women — and the law:

When a union that claims to “stand up for the future of education” campaigns to overturn the UK’s highest court, it stops being a professional body and starts becoming a parody of itself. And yet this is exactly what the National Education Union (NEU) has done.

Over the weekend, the NEU — the UK’s largest teaching union — voted to defy a Supreme Court ruling which clarified that it is lawful to exclude men, no matter how they identify, from women’s spaces. The decision was not put to the union’s half a million members, but to the 52 people on its National Executive Committee. The motion, which with wearisome predictability was entitled “Trans Rights Are Human Rights”, attacked the ruling and derided the EHRC’s interim guidance as “incoherent [and] unclear”.

It's crystal clear. Women in the Equality Act means women: that is, biological women. But as ever for the old-school left the demands of trans women – men – are prioritised over actual women, with the absurd justification that men who want access to girls' safe spaces are somehow a persecuted minority.

Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s General Secretary, bemoaned that “a toxic climate has been created in recent years in which trans people, a small community, are treated as if they are a risk or threat to others.” He chose not to pass comment on the environment fostered within his union under his leadership: not a whisper for the teachers hounded out of classrooms, or dragged through tribunals, for the crime of asking basic questions about gender ideology.

While many teachers, sick of the radical posturing, are leaving the union. Or their jobs.

Meanwhile, in the real world — far from the NEU’s executive — classrooms are crumbling, behaviour is spiralling out of control, and burnout is baked into the job description. Teachers have spent years begging for clear, practical guidance on how to legally navigate the rising number of trans-identified students and staff. Now, the NEU’s overwhelmingly female membership has been let down by the very body charged with advocating for their rights at work.

The NEU isn’t standing up for the future of education — it’s preening in the mirror, nodding smugly while waging war on its own members. It’s time someone reminded union executives that teachers don’t need lectures from those to whom they pay their subs. They need safe workplaces and a union that puts safeguarding above student activist slogans.

Victoria Smith at The Critic on football rebel Cerys Vaughan:

Last year Vaughan, then aged 17, was disciplined by the FA for questioning the fairness and safety of her own women’s football team competing against a team fielding a biological male. At the time she was handed a six-match ban (four of these were suspended). In February this year, an appeal board found that she had been treated unfairly. A new process was ordered, but the complaint has since been dropped. 

Vaughan has now broken her silence on the case. Watching her in a BBC interview, I am struck by how perfectly she illustrates the difference between fake, performative gender norm defiance, and an actual, meaningful rejection of gendered beliefs and expectations. Repeatedly pressured to prioritise to downplay and deprioritise the needs of female people in relation to those of males, she refuses. 

“Do you have any sympathy for transgender women who want to play with women and may feel this decision has excluded them from a sport that they love and they get a lot out of?” asks the male interviewer. “No,”  says Vaughan. Just plain “no”. 

Perfect. She might also, perhaps, have pointed out that transgender women are men, and of course are not excluded from playing football with other men – but that way they wouldn't get the thrill of being able to dominate the game and bully the weaker women. 

The interviewer pushes further: “why is that?” “Because,” says Vaughan, “I also have a love for the game”:

I compete with other women. I love football. I think that if biological males get involved then that just makes the game experience worse for everyone else because then it’s not an even game when you turn up.

What I love about this answer is that it is so focussed on female experience, as something just as valid and important as male experience. It is neither apologetic nor an attempt to deny the feelings of male players. Male players want what they want, but female players matter too. This is what real gender non-conformity looks like….

I find Vaughan’s poise particularly impressive given her age. Centring women as a class is a risky thing to do when so many around you have adopted a version of “rejecting gender norms” that is anything but. Gender non-conformity in young women, we are encouraged to think, is having short hair, or crushing your breasts, or rejecting femaleness entirely. When Vaughan is challenged on her assertion of boundaries — “there should be a priority on inclusion rather than exclusion”, the interviewer proposes — the implication is that she is the one rejecting the dismantling of restrictive roles. On the contrary — she is the gender rebel here.

To some this might seem counter-intuitive. One reason why gender ideology has gained quick acceptance amongst self-styled progressives — despite being both regressive and completely irrational — is that if you don’t think very hard (or at all), the movement does seem to promote liberation from gendered expectations. This is what Judith Butler likes to imply when she writes of enabling “a proliferation of genders beyond the established binary versions”. It all sounds very exciting, providing you don’t start to question what “gender” means or wonder what’s stopping Butler from embracing the radical feminist proposition of rejecting gender entirely. 

Once you do that, you notice that what gender ideology actually does is maintain the depressingly limiting conflation of femininity with femaleness and masculinity with maleness. It just does so while pretending to offer you a choice. Don’t feel feminine? Maybe that means you’re not a woman after all! 

This makes it impossible for anyone to reject gender norms from within the framework of gender ideology itself. The issue is not just that someone who claims they are so gender non-conforming they’re actually the opposite sex is reaffirming, rather than rejecting, the idea that to be a woman is to be feminine, to be a man, masculine. It’s that in failing to address what gender does — the purpose it serves, as opposed to the arbitrary, variable dress codes it sets — gender ideologues make it easier for gender to perform its function of claiming more space and resources for men and boys, and fewer for women and girls (on the football field as much as anywhere else).

Men are the winners in gender ideology. It's all about trans women, with not just the thrill of dominating real women in sport, but the whole AGP thing of getting a kick from porn fantasies of feminine dolls and being submissive and all the panoply of male sex fetishes. In comparison trans men seem kind of sad. It's not at all about embracing fantasies of masculinity, because they just can't do it. Being super tough and aggressive and beating the shit out of people? Even if they wanted to they couldn't begin to compete with the real thing. And of course trans men in men's sport is a non-issue. The role model, as far as it goes, is gay men – with, always, that moustache. It not so much an embrace of male gender norms as a rejection of female gender norms, with a very fine line with those sad breast-binding non-binaries. 

Indeed, those who shout loudest about smashing the binary can be among the most gender conforming people on the planet. Men who claim to be women fetishise femininity while demanding even greater access to women’s time and resources….

Meanwhile, women such as the actor Bella Ramsay, who disidentify from femaleness on the basis that they do not feel “feminine”, do not and indeed cannot make a land grab for male status and authority. On the contrary, they are ceding more ground, leaving “womanhood” to the males who define it — the “dolls” — rather than messing things up with their unfeminine ways. Patriarchy 1.0 told female people they were innately feminine and had no choice in the matter; Patriarchy 2.0, aware that there’s nothing more unfeminine than a flesh-and-blood female human with an inner life, encourages such creatures to exit the “woman” category rather than spoil the fantasy for everyone else. 

For this reason, we should celebrate every woman who refuses to budge up. Cerys Vaughan presents far more of a challenge to gender norms — those of both left and right — than any girl meekly binding her breasts and handing her “woman” card to a doll-identified man who insists he needs it more.

It is pretty simple: If Qatar can arrange for a hostage to be freed, they can influence the captors. Freeing one while others remain means they’re not just mediators — they’re complicit in keeping the rest in captivity.

— David Wolpe (@RabbiWolpe) May 12, 2025

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Qatar are the (not so) hidden force now behind Hamas, as Iranian influence fades. It's where the billionaire Hamas leaders live in luxury – or used to before Israel started targeting them – while encouraging the people of Gaza to sacrifice themselves in the name of jihad against the Zionist entity.

Still, not to worry. They've just gifted Donald Trump a lovely plane for his personal use. It would, says Trump, be "stupid" not to accept.

Melanie Phillips in the Times wonders how many of the London audience for Giant, the play about Roald Dahl's antisemitism, are in fact on Dahl's side.

Last week I finally got to see Giant, the much-acclaimed play by Mark Rosenblatt about the antisemitism of the children’s author Roald Dahl. It’s superbly written and magnificently acted. But I found watching it in a London theatre deeply uncomfortable.

The audience laughed sympathetically at the on-stage Dahl putting down the Jewish woman who objects to his rampant Jew-hatred. Was the audience actually nodding along to what he was saying? For some of his vile lines are what British Jews are now hearing as a matter of unexceptional routine.

The play deals with the furore in 1983 after Dahl published a savage article in the Literary Review about Israel’s war in Lebanon. “Never before in the history of man,” he wrote, “has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers.”

That’s precisely the vicious claim that has caused many British Jews today to feel that their country has turned into a nightmarish alternative universe. After the Hamas-led atrocities against Israelis on October 7, 2023, many switched rapidly from pitying the victims of genocidal aggression to portraying them as barbarous murderers for defending themselves against it.

In the play, the publisher Tom Maschler presents Dahl’s grotesque antisemitism as moral because it’s wrapped up in compassion for the Palestinians. That’s precisely the gaslighting to which British Jews are today being subjected.

Given the extraordinary explosion of Jew hatred in the UK since the October 7th massacre, it's highly likely that there are many who not only sympathise with Dahl, but who agree with him.

In the play, Dahl says he’s antisemitic because there are Jews in England who support Zionism. The suggestion is that they therefore deserve to be loathed. Did the audience quietly agree? Given how so many appear to have gone through the looking-glass over Israel, this sickening possibility was no theatrical illusion. It was all too likely to be true.

Another BBC Arabic reporter. Honoured, this time.

A BBC Arabic correspondent who previously praised the “exquisite journalism” of a Holocaust revisionist has been named as one of the winners at the British Council’s Study UK Alumni Awards.

Layla Bashar Al-Kloub, a senior journalist at the public broadcaster, has also previously condemned the “Zionist entity”, labelled Israel as “terrorists”, and called the suspected killer of an Israeli rabbi a “martyr”.

Pretty much par for the course at BBC Arabic. 

Al-Kloub was named the 2025 Jordan Winner of the Culture and Creativity Award for her “remarkable contributions” to “storytelling and cultural engagement”.

But, in a series of exposés published by the JC over recent years, it was revealed that Al-Kloub has a long history of expressing anti-Israel sentiment online.

In May 2021, the reporter posted a gushing tribute on X for television journalist Muna Hawwa, a Palestinian activist suspended by Al Jazeera for producing a 2019 video that asked: “How true is the #Holocaust and how did the Zionists benefit from it?”

In her message hailing the Palestinian activist’s return to X, Al-Kloub wrote: “My dear Muna… there was a great victory for you, yourself specifically, the victory of the free word, and the victory of exquisite journalism, you have proved everybody you are capable of confronting large institutions by yourself, may Allah strengthen you.”

In the documentary, Hawwa also said: “Israel is the biggest winner from the Holocaust, and it uses the same Nazi justifications as a launching pad for racial cleansing and annihilation of the Palestinians… The ideology behind ‘the State of Israel’ is based on religious, national, and geographic concepts that suckled from the Nazi spirit.”

Exquisite journalism indeed.

A spokesperson for the British Council said: “An investigation into concerns that were raised about a national finalist in Jordan found insufficient evidence that would overturn the original decision.

“A review by an independent panel confirmed that Layla Al-Kloub was the strongest candidate overall for the Culture and Creativity award in Jordan, which recognises individuals who can demonstrate their influence and creativity through their work in arts and culture. We congratulate all our Jordan winners on their awards.

“The British Council operates in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and we are committed to ensuring that everyone we work with around the world feels respected and treated with dignity.”

BBC Woman's Hour is starting, from today, to hear "different perspectives on the recent Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman under the Equality Act. We’ll look at the practical questions it raises for organisations, businesses and individuals". First up today, in keeping with its proud tradition of prioritising men at every opportunity, is trans-identified male Robin Moira White. 

So far I've learned from this series:
1. Some people really don't like it when women say no
2. They believe women exist purely to validate men and their delusions
3. Woman's Hour needed the Supreme Court's permission to acknowledge that the word "woman" has a specific definition https://t.co/ipq3LdE7uZ

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) May 12, 2025

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Added:

Robin Moira White stands by use of the word “evil” in relation to EHRC chair Kishwer Faulkner on Women’s Hour. Very disappointing & unprofessional from a practicing barrister – completely inappropriate language to use about a public servant doing her job.

— Sonia Sodha (@soniasodha) May 12, 2025

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You have to wonder what world Matthew Parris lives in. Why are we closing our eyes to Gaza’s horror?

Why does the world look away? Are we simply bored, or do we flinch from the wreckage, the famine and the blood in Gaza? Are these horrors beyond the bandwidth of modern Britain as we burble about the woes of Prince Harry or the loss of heating allowances and wallow in a military victory that almost nobody today can even remember? VE Day was 1945.

This is 2025. As we speak, two million human beings face starvation at the hands of our close ally, Israel. As we speak, all hell is being rained down — rained down now. Within days, new atrocities may be imminent in a promised new offensive. Yet this hell on Earth has all but dropped from our headlines and we British continue to supply military kit, share intelligence and more. Why?

Look away?? Every day Gaza makes the headlines, as the BBC and the rest of the media report on the latest horror – copied straight from Hamas sources. Every day we hear about starvation in Gaza, though everyone knows that Hamas steals the food for itself. Almost every weekend there are marches through London calling for intifada, "Free Palestine", "From the river to the sea". They get huge news coverage. Universities have become hotbeds of antisemitism as condemnation of Israel, and of Jews, is de rigueur.

There's barely room for anything else. Genocide in Xinjiang – how's that going? No one knows. China keeps a tight lid on it, and no one's really that interested. Arabs slaughtering black Africans in Sudan? They've been doing it for years. Well, for centuries. Nothing to see here. Horrors in the Congo? Again, no one cares. But it's Gaza, for Parris, where we need to wake up and pay more attention.

Most recommended comment:

Ah yes, Matthew Parris — wringing his hands in moral anguish from the safety of a columnist’s perch, serenading us with high rhetoric and selective outrage.

Apparently, we’re no longer allowed to mention why Israel is at war — that would be “whataboutery.” October 7 is now a parenthetical formality, a polite cough before we return to calling the Jewish state a genocidal menace. Don’t worry, though — he’s “taken that as read.” How brave.

He speaks of “moral support” and “lost innocence,” as if Israel were a trust fund teenager who’s disappointed mummy. Not a democratic nation facing a jihadist terror group that uses civilians as human shields and schools as rocket sites.

He offers not a single workable alternative to military response, only an airy command: “Stop!” Stop what? Defending themselves? Existing? The luxury of moral clarity is always easier when you're not facing existential threats or genocidal neighbours.

The final insult is the historical amnesia: a lecture on “ethnic cleansing” delivered without a word on the Jewish expulsions from Arab lands, or on Hamas’s founding charter. No nuance there, oddly.

So let’s be clear. You can criticise Israeli policy — many Israelis do. But this isn’t journalism, it’s a sanctimonious sermon soaked in selective empathy and historical blindness.

This needed saying. A Times editorial:

The arrest of four Iranians last week over an alleged terror plot, described by Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, as one of the biggest threats Britain had seen in years, underlined the ongoing and extremely dangerous attempts by Iran to kill dissidents living abroad, sponsor terrorist attacks and spread an extremist message of hatred throughout the West. The alleged target of the plot was the Israeli embassy in London. The aim was probably to sabotage any resumption of talks with the United States on limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons research. The mastermind was undoubtedly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Astonishingly, this malign, powerful and vicious organisation is allowed to operate openly in Britain. It should be banned immediately.

The IRGC was set up 45 years ago to “defend” Iran’s Islamic system and provide a counterweight to the regular armed forces. It has since become the country’s main military, political and economic force. With as many as 190,000 active personnel, its own ground, naval and air forces and oversight of Iran’s strategic weapons, the IRGC operates as a state within a state. It controls the so-called Basij Resistance Force, largely responsible for suppressing, brutally, any domestic dissent. It sponsors terrorism throughout the Middle East and beyond, either by using proxies such Hamas and Hezbollah or by targeted assassinations of perceived enemies. Hundreds of American and ­allied military personnel have been killed by its operations. Dozens of Iranian exiles, seen as enemies of the state, have been hunted down. Using local criminals and paid assassins, the IRGC has tried to silence Iranian journalists abroad, including in London, and intimidate those exposing the corruption within the heart of the IRGC itself.

The argument has always been that by banning the IRGC, Britain would lose any influence it had in Tehran – which is laughable. It's the same fantasy that drove Obama's misbegotten rapprochement with Iran – a rapprochement which was entirely one-sided, given that Tehran has never stopped proclaiming, loudly and clearly, that its hatred of the west is theologically driven, is absolute, and is unchangeable, while its chief foreign policy goal is the destruction of Israel. 

Also, the IRGC, like the Iranian regime as a whole, is not going through a good period. They're suffering. We need to push against them rather than appease.

Despite bellicose threats of revenge, the IRGC had little response to the killing of Soleimani. It could not defend Hezbollah, its proxy in Lebanon, when it was all but ­destroyed by Israeli attacks. Its presence in Syria has crumbled since the ousting of President ­Assad. And it cannot suppress the jostling for power among would-be successors to the ailing Khamenei. Britain still has an embassy in Tehran and the limited ability to monitor events. It would make little difference if this was shut in response to a ban on the IRGC operating in Britain.

The evidence is plentiful, the plotting unacceptable and the risk of espionage and terrorism too great to ignore.

Joan Smith at UnHerd on the Government-backed data bill that opens the door to gender self-ID:

If MPs get their way, people could soon be entitled to possess an officially sanctioned app that falsifies their sex. The proposal effectively introduces a form of self-ID in this country, flying in the face of last month’s Supreme Court judgment emphatically stating the primacy of sex over gender.

Today, peers will make a last-ditch attempt to prevent this challenge to the ruling when the Government’s Data (Use and Access) bill returns to the House of Lords. If the bill becomes law in its present form, anyone will be able to apply for a digital ID endorsed with a government “trustmark”. That’s supposed to ensure that the data it contains, including sex, is accurate. But the app will say nothing about the source of the data, which could be based on documents that state someone’s gender identity rather than their sex.

Anyone can get a passport or driving licence that wrongly records their sex — and it won’t be clear that the sex marker on their digital ID is equally inaccurate. It’s estimated that tens of thousands of people in the UK have official documents that reflect their gender identity rather than their biological sex, including passports and driving licences. Last week a Conservative MP, Dr Ben Spencer, proposed an amendment that would have ensured that only reliable documents such as birth certificates could be used to create a digital ID. He pointed out that the Supreme Court has made it clear that public bodies must collect data on biological sex to comply with the 2010 Equality Act. “The new clause ensures that this data is recorded and used correctly in accordance with the law,” he said.

Some MPs responded with the kind of emotive language that’s become a familiar tactic of trans activists. Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Greens, crowed on X that the “transphobic amendment” had been defeated by 363 votes to 93. “It would have forced trans people to out themselves virtually daily, putting people’s safety and dignity at risk,” she claimed. Labour MP Stella Creasy condemned the amendment as “a targeting of the trans community which is deeply regressive”.

It’s hard not to see the outcome as payback for the Supreme Court judgment. The innocent-sounding data bill has provided gender warriors with an opportunity to circumvent the ruling, and they’ve seized it with both hands. Some MPs have even argued that expecting individuals to be honest about their sex would breach their privacy, as though deceiving other people is a human right.

The House of Lords will no doubt provide some robust opposition. I wonder how many like me, who once regarded the Lords as a relic of a previous age best done away with, have recently come to a deeper appreciation of its importance as a bulwark against the tyranny of the Commons.

Ministers aren’t listening. Neither are most MPs, confirming the widely-held suspicion that the House of Commons is packed with true believers in gender identity. The battle to record sex accurately isn’t over, but no one can say they weren’t warned.

Added:

The House of Lords have voted for the sex data accuracy amendment! 🎉

Contents 200/ Not Contents 183https://t.co/HCZsKmiPks

— Sex Matters (@SexMattersOrg) May 12, 2025

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