Mick Hartley

The latest from Reduxx. It's a tragic tale of a poor trans woman hounded to death by cruel right-wing jibes. Well, that's the story that won a Pulitzer Prize for Esquire magazine.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

Announcing the reception of the prestigious award on May 5, Esquire described their article, written by Mark Warren, as an “extraordinary, deeply moving account” of the “beloved” cross-dressing Alabama mayor Copeland, who “took his own life after a right-wing news website exposed private online activities he’d engaged in that involved transgender role play.”

“With great sensitivity, Warren, an author and a former longtime editor at Esquire, interviewed scores of Copeland’s friends, family, townspeople, and fellow congregants in order to render a heartbreaking account of the man’s final days, and to portray the full scope of the visceral, grief-stricken, perhaps counterintuitive response of a small southern town in all its rich complexity,” said the Esquire editorial team in their statement.

“In so doing, he illuminates how very much was lost when Copeland was driven to despair. The story explores themes of immediate, even urgent relevance: our evolving norms of gender and sexual difference, the brutal culture wars that have us tearing at one another often without thought or regard, the profound effect of social media on our lives, and the astonishing power of the Internet.”

But that's not quite the whole story. The guy was into "bimbofication" – expressing arousal and enjoyment at the thought of being reduced to a feminine sexual object for male use.  He promoted the use of feminising hormones for men to become "whores". He stole women's identities, even writing a story about killing a (named) local woman and taking her place. Read the whole piece – and the earlier Reduxx article – for more of the sordid details.

But hey, trans. Hero, right? Got to be.

A report from the Henry Jackson Society:

Since 7 October 2023, the UN has issued 367 reports that are filed under the subject of “Gaza Strip”. A search of these reports reveals that the UN has rarely acknowledged and never asserted the use by Hamas of “human shields”. The phenomenon of “human shields” has only been mentioned four times, in each case in only a single sentence, as either an “allegation”, an Israeli “claim” or an unverified “report” that this practice occurred. The UN has never dedicated a single paragraph, let alone an entire report, to analysing how Hamas has fought the war in Gaza.

In contrast, the UN has issued at least ten reports critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, from accusations of “indiscriminate attacks” to illegal “attacks on hospitals”. A November 2024 investigative report by the UN accused Israel of committing genocide, but the document makes no mention of Hamas’s fighting tactics in Gaza, let alone provides an analysis. The NGOs (non-governmental organisations) Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch each released reports in December 2024 accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Over hundreds of pages of text, the reader would struggle to realise that Hamas even exists in Gaza. Neither report provides any discussion or analysis of Hamas’s human shield strategy.

This report by the Henry Jackson Society represents the “missing chapter” in all the UN and NGO reports. It provides a comprehensive analysis of Hamas’s systematic use of human shield tactics during the 7 October Israel–Hamas war and the broader Gaza conflict. Drawing on extensive evidence from international media, military assessments, legal frameworks and firsthand accounts, the report outlines how Hamas has embedded its military operations within civilian infrastructure, weaponising Gaza’s population and urban landscape to achieve both tactical and strategic objectives.

For UN here you could, with a few minor alterations, substitute BBC.

Full report here.

After repeated warnings, Stonewall is still saying on LinkedIn: “It's important to remember that the ruling hasn’t gone through the parliamentary process yet.”

Once again, for those at the back – and those who haven’t yet understood that this is disinformation: the ruling…

— Bev Jackson (@BevJacksonAuth) May 6, 2025

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"Once again, for those at the back – and those who haven’t yet understood that this is disinformation: the ruling explained the existing law. The law became the law in 2010 by going through the parliamentary process to make it a law. That is how it became a law.

"The ongoing campaign of disinformation is reprehensible and needs to be halted."

From the Telegraph – Female NHS workers ‘humiliated’ by trans guidance in hospitals.

Sex Matters, a women’s rights group, said dozens of NHS trusts were “breaking the law” by continuing to allow trans women to use female facilities in defiance of last month’s Supreme Court ruling.

It has written to the NHS Confederation, which represents trusts, to demand that it withdraw guidance that says trans people can use whichever lavatories and changing rooms they wish….

Maya Forstater, the chief executive of Sex Matters, said in the letter: “Those that are following the current guidance from the NHS Confederation are breaking the law. There is no reason for delay. The fact that your guidance is ‘informal’ is no excuse.

“It encourages NHS employers to uphold policies that create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment for staff who do not wish to share single-sex spaces with members of the opposite sex and to breach workplace health and safety rules.”

In her letter, Ms Forstater said the NHS Confederation’s trans guidance was “legally illiterate” and “encouraged NHS employers to break the law”.

The guidance states: “In all types of workplaces, trans and non-binary people should be supported to use the bathrooms they feel most comfortable using. At no time is it appropriate to force staff to use the toilet associated with their assigned sex at birth against their will.”

It also tells management, senior healthcare leaders and human resources directors to take a “zero-tolerance attitude” to transphobia, even though this approach led to NHS staff such as Sandie Peggie and the Darlington nurses being disciplined for asserting their rights to single-sex facilities at work.

They – the NHS Confederation – got the law wrong. The Supreme Court ruling makes that clear. They're now muttering about how "elements of our guide on trans and non-binary allyship are now dated":

We will update the guide more fully as soon as the Government has responded to the EHRC’s updated code of practice after it has been publicly consulted on, so that the implications of the judgment for NHS services are fully known.

“We will continue to work with our members while we do this. The resource on our website remains as guidance and is not official policy for the NHS.”

The implications are clear enough: their guidance is wrong. Why the prevarication?

This is absolutely no surprise, but at least now we have some attempt at quantification of the rot in the arts world. Artists ‘terrified to voice unfashionable opinions’.

The arts world is petrified about tackling controversial subjects because ­creative people are scared to speak their mind, according to a survey that outlines a dramatic decline in artistic freedom over the past five years.

The report revealed widespread fears over dissenting from ideological conformity over a range of issues including Israel and Palestine, gender ideology and even whether one was ­politically right of centre.

Yep. Israel and gender ideology. Them's the two. Know where someone stands on one of those and you're fairly clear on where they stand on the other. In the arts world, it seems, positions are pre-determined if you know what's good for you and your career. So brave; so edgy.

Five years ago, 32 per cent of arts workers felt free to express their personal opinions and only one in 25 said they would “never” speak up. Now it is 10 per cent and one in six.

The report by Freedom in the Arts ­also found that 81 per cent of people felt the sharing of controversial opinions on topics risked ostracism compared with only 35 per cent in 2020.

Detailed interviews found that viewpoints deemed taboo included disagreeing that trans women are women, the supporting of Israel, the questioning of the tactics of movements such as Black Lives Matter, any criticism of ­diversity, equality and inclusion policies, Brexit, and even fox hunting.

The report collated a series of cases where people have been forced out of publicly funded organisations because of their “taboo” views, and sidelined from book festivals, poetry readings and art exhibitions, as well as being vilified on social ­media platforms….

One respondent said that a decade ago “people didn’t care about an artist’s personal views as long as the art was good, whereas now if they find out you’ve got the wrong opinion, they don’t want to know about your art”.

The report also stated that “women who voiced gender-critical viewpoints reported being subject to psychological torment, social ostracisation, [and] attempts at economic sabotage” by colleagues.

Part of the reason for this, with the trans debate, is surely the patent absurdity of gender ideology. If the arguments were clear and logical, no pressure would be needed. People would automatically gravitate towards the sensible view. But no one really, deep down, believes TWAW, or that you can change sex by fiat, and men should be free to use women-only spaces if they feel like it. A strong degree of social pressure is required. And, it seems, no group is keener on peer approval than the conforming artist.

Also, the BBC and the Arts Council….

Photographer Yu Ting Lei, who featured in the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition, on the immovable buildings that stood in the way of China's relentless new urbanisation, as the old world is swept away:

During China's rapid urbanisation, the buildings left behind after the demolition of rural areas held the memories of countless people. Now, only one or two remain, standing in solitude and no longer carrying much nostalgia.

[Photos Yu Ting Lei/Sony World Photography]

Those "Protect the dolls" t-shirts – is that really the slogan they want to go with when protesting the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces? Trans women as dolls? To most people, I'd imagine, it just reinforces the sad image of trans women as men dressed up as parodies of femaleness, with girly clothes, bad wigs, and faces smeared with wildly inappropriate and over-the-top make-up.

Julie Burchill at Spiked:

When Tilda Swinton and a host of lesser-known fashion and showbiz faces (I had personally never heard of Pedro Pascal or Troye Sivan) put on one of these hilariously over-priced garments – £75! – and smiled self-servingly for the cameras, did they have no inkling of how the use of the word ‘dolls’ would play? Not after all the years when we gender realists declared so many times that women are born, not made? That ‘female’ is not a costume you can wear in the way that Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs wore the skins of his victims?…

So, in a way, transwomen are ‘dolls’. But not the kind they think of themselves as. Social media have fuelled the rise in images of men with body dysmorphia and / or a kink portraying themselves as fairies and little girls, even when they’re six-foot-four abattoir workers called Big Al. Whether these men are deluded or having a laugh is a matter of conjecture, but I’d say that either one indicates what the centrist dads call a ‘bad-faith actor’. The silly and the sinister often overlap on certain issues. ‘Palestine’ is one, trans is another.

There are without doubt ‘transwomen’ who have simply got carried away with the thrill they get from dressing up like Widow Twankey when their wives are at book club. But there are some who are downright creepy, and their embrace of the ‘dolls’ motif only draws attention to this, however unwittingly.

It makes one think of sex dolls, and thus ‘sissy porn’. This is the unwholesome genre of porn in which a man is ‘forced’ to transform into a woman, whether through the administration of hormones or the donning of makeup and lingerie. It has apparently drawn a sizeable number of ‘normal’ men to cross-dressing, while being altogether less innocent than the desire to spend alternate Fridays wearing frills’n’furbelows and answering to Fiona. One self-confessed fan of this genre is transwoman and literary critic Andrea Long Chu, who also once described his ideal / idea of womanhood as ‘an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes’.

Mr Chu has also argued there should be unregulated access for all, including children, to cross-sex hormones and surgery. A surprising number of activists involved in the ‘respectable’ end of trans activism believe that children should be allowed to ‘transition’ at an age when they aren’t even allowed to be legally left alone at home overnight.

For more on Andrea Long Chu, and many other trans voices, see this video from Mary Cate Delvey (who featured fabulously in the previous post). It's long – over two hours – but Chu comes up early on as case number three, at a minute and a half in. "Getting fucked makes you female, because fucked is what a female is." "To be female is in every case to become what someone else wants."

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This is great:

Here’s @marycatedelvey laying out the facts. https://t.co/9REihRY9iU

— Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ✡️⚢ ❌❌ (@sappholives83) May 4, 2025

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Just stunning that a man in his 40’s is over the top joyfully celebrating beating a 14 year old girl. Congratulations to @usacycling for their leadership in developing young girls on how to lose to men. The Board of Directors at USA Cycling and Brendan Quirk are spineless… https://t.co/3ZtjOkUxoe

— Inga Thompson Fdn OLY💚🤍💜 (@ithompsonfdn) May 5, 2025

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Another cheap victory for the anti-Israel crowd. From the JC:

A joint gig featuring Israeli singer Dudu Tassa and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has been abruptly cancelled by its Bristol venue following a wave of public pressure.

Hmm. Public pressure implies general support from the public. This was a nasty campaign by a hate group targeting an Israeli – Jewish – artist. 

The show, which had been due to take place on June 23, had attracted the ire of local pro-Palestine campaigners given Tassa’s firm stance on collaboration between UK and Israeli artists..

The group called on the venue to cancel the gig, offer “solidarity” to the Palestinian people and “reaffirm its commitment to ethical, inclusive cultural programming”.

Unless Jews are involved.

The Bristol Beacon has now announced that the concert has been cancelled, saying: “The Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa concert on Monday 23 June will no longer be taking place. All ticketholders will receive a full refund.”

A spokesperson for the venue later said: “Given the small-scale nature of the performance in Lantern Hall, and with other events taking place in the venue, we do not feel that we can run the event viably with the wellbeing and safety of everyone in mind considering the potential for disruption from advertised protests.

"We apologise for the disappointment this may cause.”

BPA has hailed the move as a “victory” adding: “Public pressure works."

Threats work – if the venue is sufficiently lacking in backbone.

Talk of a Gaza genocide is bad enough, but "the Gaza Holocaust"? Vile. They know what they're doing.