Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Fencing USA revisited

    After the woman fencer refusing to compete against a man, here's more from the exciting world of competitive women's fencing, where men just seem to thrive. Anna Slatz ar Reduxx:

    Two trans-identified males are set to compete in USA Fencing’s April North American Cup this weekend, just under two weeks after a dramatic knee-taking protest against men in women’s sports at a fencing event in Maryland.

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    Annika Suchoski, 40, and Daniel “Anne” Crocket, believed to be 66, are entering their respective age categories for the women’s epee at the tournament, both of which are set to begin on April 11 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

    News of Suchoski’s participation in the women’s category first came to light in September of last year when, after just six months of competing in the sport, he came second in the Fortune Fencing Regional Championships in Ontario – beating all but one of his female competitors.

    Men, eh? They just pick up this kind of stuff so easily. Much better than the silly women!

    Concerningly, Suchoski has posted multiple photos to his Instagram page where he has used filters to make himself appear child-like, a practice known as “affirming edits.” In one of the captions of the images, he claims he has been “doing a lot of work to heal [his] inner child.”

    Well…maybe humiliating women is another way of healing his inner child. It's not uncommon.

    Crocket, who has been calling himself “Anne” since at least 2022, currently serves on USA Fencing’s Domestic Assignment Committee for Referees, meaning he has control over the hiring for the referees of the eight national tournaments held each season by the organization, including the North American Cup this weekend. Crocket is also a member of the Rules and Examinations Committee, which is responsible for making decisions on fencing rules and maintaining the USA Fencing rulebook.

    Useful.

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  • “It is incontrovertible that the expression of gender-critical belief cannot be banned outright in a higher education workplace”

    Akua Reindorf in Times Higher Ed – Many UK universities’ trans inclusion policies contravene equality law:

    During the 2010s,…without widespread consultation or announcement, a tranche of strikingly similar policies were adopted by higher education institutions that afforded entitlements to trans employees going significantly beyond what was required by law.

    In large part, these were cut and pasted from a template disseminated in 2010 by the accreditation organisation Advance HE. Often, they were enhanced by elements taken from literature published by LGBTQ advocacy charity Stonewall, whose Top 100 Employers list adds kudos to the marketing materials of universities included in the ranking.

    These policies insisted that trans employees be allowed to use single-sex facilities in accordance with their gender identity. They stated that “misgendering” was a disciplinary offence. Many mandated that trans people always be represented in a positive way. And many adopted the Stonewall definition of “transphobia”: any failure to “accept” a person’s gender identity.

    Thus, they banned employees from saying, teaching or often even thinking anything that contradicted the contested idea that gender identity prevails over biological sex as an organising category in society. That is, they prohibited the expression of gender-critical belief: the idea that sex is binary and immutable and (most importantly) that it sometimes matters.

    These policies have now begun to disappear from university websites in the wake of the £585,000 fine imposed by the Office for Students (OfS) on the University of Sussex because of the potential of its Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement to stifle academic freedom and free speech. The fine follows a four-year investigation prompted by the treatment of Kathleen Stock. The gender-critical philosopher resigned from Sussex in 2021 in the face of a vicious campaign of targeted harassment triggered by her temperate, innocuous observations about the challenges posed by gender identity theory to women’s rights, lesbian and gay rights and academic freedom.

    The fact that the vilification of Stock was permitted to escalate so shamefully must be due, in no small part, to a university culture that had been formalised and cemented by the adoption of the policy in 2018.

    As well as finding that the policy breached academic freedom regulatory conditions, the OfS report also suggests that it might contravene the UK’s Equality Act 2010. That observation need not have been so tentatively expressed. A remarkable series of successful cases brought by gender-critical employees has shown clearly that policies replicating the Advance HE 2010 template and the Stonewall definitions cannot withstand the scrutiny of equality law.

    By the time Stock resigned, Maya Forstater had already won her landmark employment appeal tribunal victory establishing that gender-critical beliefs are worthy of respect in a democratic society and so are protected philosophical beliefs under the Equality Act. Hence, contrary to popular mythology, it is incontrovertible that the expression of gender-critical belief cannot be banned outright in a higher education workplace. That includes “misgendering”, which in some circumstances can be an unobjectionable manifestation of gender-critical belief.

    And that's not all.

    It follows that trans people do not have a legal right to choose single-sex facilities matching their gender identity. An employer that allows this practice risks breaching both Equality Act prohibition on indirect sex discrimination and health and safety law.

    Finally, with Sussex University deservedly leading the way, the trans dominoes in higher education are beginning to tumble.

  • FA trans rules

    The FA isn't reading the room. From the Telegraph:

    The Football Association has quietly updated its transgender rules that stop short of preventing athletes born male playing in women’s matches.

    If they're born male that means they are male. This absurd "born male" formulation just plays along with the trans delusion that people can change their sex. Which they can't.

    Following a years-long review of its transgender policy, the FA has ignored calls from campaigners to follow the likes of the Rugby Football Union in permitting only those registered as female at birth to compete in women’s fixtures.

    The amended rules instead lay out a formal process by which individual trans women could be excluded from such matches on the grounds of safety or fairness on a case-by-case basis….

    The updated policy was denounced by Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns for Sex Matters, who said: “Female footballers will feel very let down by this revised policy, which does nothing to restore fairness and safety in the women’s game. By merely requiring male players to prove once a year that they have lowered their testosterone to a level that is still far above normal female levels, it’s unscientific, already out of date and not compliant with the Sports Councils’ guidance. No wonder the FA published this without announcing it.”

  • TRA charlatans

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    Full text:

    Sex differences between males and females generate skeletal differences – height, and hand size, for example. Likewise for muscle strength. But in their measurement of grip strength the TRA charlatans *control these out*.

    Effectively they say – 'Well, yes, males have greater grip strength, but that's not because they are male, that's because they have bigger hands. If we control for bigger hands, then the sex differences disappear.' So they do control (or 'normalise').

    Of course, the fact that males have bigger hands is just a fact. It arises from their/our maleness. So this effectively says – 'If you discount sex differences, then there are no sex differences.'

    It is sometimes difficult to fully grasp how intellectually dishonest this stuff is. It's good to see it aired in court, and not just here.

  • A lack of interest in real life misogyny

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  • “If it’s not from the party, it’s not true”

    Parents concerned about their sons in the North Korean army told not to worry – everything's fine.

    Families with sons and daughters serving in the military have been ordered to write letters of encouragement, Daily NK has learned.

    “On March 23, the Kimchaek party committee issued an order through neighborhood offices to neighborhood watch units directing families of service members to write encouraging letters to their children in the military,” a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK recently. “The order included specific instructions about what to write.”

    Party officials believe the directive was issued to ease growing family concerns over their children’s safety, sparked by rumors about North Korean troops being deployed to Russia to support Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

    Officials acknowledge the order came because the party has received reports that increasing numbers of families are losing sleep worrying their children may have been killed or wounded in Russia, as rumors circulate about heavy casualties among North Korean troops fighting against Ukraine….

    Some party organizations have responded with threats, telling families “not to be swayed by needless rumors” and that “if it’s not from the party, it’s not true.” Others have tried to console families by telling them to wait because “good news will arrive.”

    The Kimchaek party committee instructed families to write letters telling their children that parents, siblings and other relatives at home are doing well, along with positive news about construction projects in the city.

    That should do the trick. 

  • The return of Eric Gill

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    It is weird. BBC puts statue by sex abuser Eric Gill back on display.

    The BBC has once again unveiled a controversial statue of Prospero and Ariel created by one of the 20th century’s most influential artists who also sexually abused his own daughters.

    Hardly "one of the 20th century’s most influential artists". A minor figure at best.

    Maybe if it was somewhere less obvious – but this is on the front of Broadcasting House, in a big protective case, as though to say: look, this is what we're all about. A statue of a man with a naked little boy…

  • A national scandal of epic proportions

    Stephen Pollard spells it out in the Spectator – Labour’s grooming gangs position is contemptible:

    We do not know exactly how many girls have been raped by so-called ‘grooming gangs’. We do not know the full extent of police and local authority involvement in covering up these rapes. We do not know where these rapes are still continuing. We do not, in reality, know anything beyond the facts of the individual cases and towns that have so far emerged and which have been properly investigated.

    And it seems that if Jess Phillips has her way, nor will we ever.

    In a Commons statement yesterday, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls announced that the government may no longer be proceeding even with the five pathetic, utterly inadequate local inquiries that the Home Secretary announced in January. Instead, a ‘more flexible’ approach will be taken, with the £5 million made available for these inquiries potentially spent on ‘more bespoke work, including local victims’ panels or locally led audits of the handling of historical cases’.

    In January, Yvette Cooper’s decision not to set up a national inquiry was met with anger and outrage. This is a national scandal of epic and astounding proportions. It is inconceivable that the British state should point blank refuse to try to find out the full extent of what happened, why it happened and what can stop it happening with a national inquiry. And yet that appears to be the government’s unshakeable position.

    Why? Well, we know why. It's for the same reason that the scandal went on for so long – is still going on – and why the police turned a blind eye, and why the local councils were reluctant to get involved, preferring to let the rapes and the grooming of young teen girls continue rather than confront the problem.

    In her response to Ms Phillips’ statement yesterday, shadow minister Katie Lam laid out the horror of what the victims have endured. It is too graphic to repeat here, but I do urge you to read her speech in Hansard if you have the stomach for it. It matters that we understand just how unspeakable these crimes were.

    The two key questions underlying all this are how rape gangs have been allowed to operate – and why there is such resistance to uncovering the full facts. These are, in reality, the same question, the answer to which was provided in a simple statement of the facts by Ms Lam yesterday:

    ‘The girls we are talking about are predominantly white. The men who preyed on them were predominantly Muslim, generally either from Pakistan or of Pakistani heritage.’

    The look on Phillips’s face when Ms Lam dared to state this typified the problem – as if she had said something that should always remain utterly unsayable.

    That's why.

    So cowed were the police by the fear that they might be accused of institutional racism that they started to invert reality. Professor Alexis Jay’s report into Rotherham shows one detective waving away the complaint of a girl, who was 12 when the abuse began, as ‘100 per cent consensual’.

    A further report into Rotherham by Dame Louise Casey found that the council deliberately covered up the rapes because it was worried about racial tensions. Professor Jay’s inquiry also reported that a senior police officer told a victim’s father that the town ‘would erupt’ if the routine abuse of white children by men of Pakistani origin became widely known. Political correctness was placed above protecting girls from rape and torture. The same story was repeated elsewhere.

    The existence of the rape gangs shame Britain. But the decision that there must never be full accountability or a full understanding of why and how they have been allowed to operate is, in its own way, no less contemptible.

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  • Muppet

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  • Bringing stability to the region

    Wow.

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    That's where you get if you think all the problems in the Middle East are down to Israel, and cover your ears when Iran repeatedly broadcasts its divinely-inspired mission to wipe the Jewish state off the face of the earth.

    He's the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, you'll be pleased to hear.

    In his 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer argues that the Israel lobby wields disproportionate influence over U.S. foreign policy. His more recent work focuses on criticism of the "liberal international order" and why he believes the West is to blame for the Russo-Ukrainian War.

    And a favourite of the London Review of Books, as I recall.