Politics and Culture
Guardian idiot: "The confusing and vague executive order underscores how complex sex is and why it's hard to reduce it to a neat binary"
Me: "Every human on the planet, you and me included, has one female mother and one male father, it is only pretend "complex" for clicks" pic.twitter.com/q1LHn4Hj5Y
— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) January 25, 2025
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Ridiculous Guardian article here.
Ca. 1910. "Schenley Park and vicinity. Panorama shows the University of Pittsburgh, Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, Carnegie Museum and Library, the Hotel Schenley, Forbes Field, Phipps Conservatory and Schenley Park. Also shown are the neighborhoods of Schenley Farms, Oakland, Shadyside, East Liberty and Squirrel Hill."
[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Co.]
A composite of four 8×10 inch glass negatives. To be viewed full size (click on image).
"hello police? Come quick, there's been a murder"pic.twitter.com/t17gXNwK5e
— The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦 (@Rob_ThaBuilder) January 24, 2025
That fifty-fold increase over the past ten years in the number of children who believe they're the wrong sex…Joan Smith blames the schools:
This is what happens when children and their parents are bombarded with scientifically illiterate messages. Girls are particularly susceptible, confirmed by the fact that the same study, published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, shows that twice as many girls are affected than boys. More than half the children in the research had anxiety, depression or had self-harmed.
Some girls have always felt uncomfortable about the rapid changes to their bodies that come with puberty, but now they have even more reason for anxiety. Very young boys are able to access porn, something that’s been linked to an increase in sexual assaults in schools. Last week, several charities wrote to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, pointing out that peer-on-peer abuse is affecting ever younger children, including in primary schools.
Yet many schools are switching to “gender neutral” toilets, forcing girls to share facilities with boys. The prospect of teenage girls having to change tampons within feet of jeering adolescent boys doesn’t appear to worry headteachers eager to demonstrate their commitment to gender ideology. The campaign group For Women Scotland has found that at least 60% of Scottish secondary schools allow “trans” children to use the toilets designated for the opposite sex, regardless of how other pupils feel.
What this represents is an increasingly hostile climate for girls. No one should be surprised if some respond by pretending that they’re not female at all, using the language they’ve been taught in sex education lessons to declare themselves trans or non-binary. This has been promoted by influential organisations and even Government ministers, who have been more concerned with being “trans allies” than safeguarding….
This is state-sanctioned child abuse. But when gender ideology has established such a hold in education, it’s easy to see how an unhappy or autistic child might think it’s the answer to their distress. The latest figures, if scaled up nationally, would mean that one in every 1,200 kids aged 18 and under had a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. At least the present government has stopped the practice of prescribing puberty blockers, but it needs to go much further.
There will always be young people, disproportionately girls, who find growing up difficult. Encouraging them to think they were born in the wrong body is no more ethical than affirming weight loss in girls who have anorexia. This is an entirely artificial phenomenon, created by activists determined to impose delusional ideas on impressionable young people. The damage is already apparent, and it needs to be removed from the education system without delay.
A sober assessment of the current gender state of play from Mary Wakefield at the Spectator:
Too many conservatives are behaving as if Donald Trump’s inauguration has somehow done to wokery what garlic does to a vampire; as if they can now sit back and watch the orange mist vaporise ideological insanity across the West. A study released today by the University of York shows just how crazy this sort of complacency is.
Academics analysed GP records and discovered what looks like a 50-fold increase in diagnoses of gender dysphoria in children between 2011 and 2021. They estimate that there were 10,000 diagnoses made in 2021, up from just 200 in 2011. It’s horrifying, especially when you consider all the countless others who currently self-identify as trans and are now somewhere in the rainbow pipeline, drifting towards diagnosis.
Do MPs imagine this is some sort of high-water mark, before the turn of the trans tide? It’s really not. The response to the story makes that perfectly plain. If we really were waking up, as a nation, to the state our kids are in, there’d be horrified comments from doctors and a commitment across Whitehall to addressing the situation; we’d be discussing the fact that the Stonewall agenda has grown live ivy into, and around, all the institutions we assume will keep children safe. In schools and in after-school clubs, on TV and online, children are surrounded by adults who actually suggest to them gender dysphoria may be a cause of their ordinary anxieties.
As noted in the previous post, Stonewall may be on the way out, but its influence remains. It's "grown live ivy into, and around, all the institutions we assume will keep children safe", as Wakefield has it.
On Wednesday, members of the Women and Equalities Committee (WESC) met to discuss the “evidence base on the safety and effectiveness of puberty blockers.” As Hannah Barnes, (author of Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service), says, it was an appalling sign of what’s to come.
Dr Hilary Cass spent four years looking into gender dysphoria and puberty blockers, but she was not invited to contribute. Instead, the committee heard from consultant paediatric endocrinologist Professor Gary Butler, who was responsible for prescribing medication, including puberty blockers and hormones, to young people at University College London Hospitals; and from Professor Simon Giordano, who has argued that it is in the best interests of a child to offer puberty blockers early. It seems to me that both of these two are so deep into sunk cost that they’ve almost no choice but to keep sinking.
Barnes said: “That the committee would try to better in two hours what the Cass Review spent four years carefully investigating is incomprehensible.”
If even after the Cass review – even after all the sad, sometimes horrifying stories of people who’ve “detransitioned” – politicians still cling to the idea of gendered souls, what hope do school children have?
Hannah Barnes' article at the New Statesman on the WESC meeting – Are politicians trying to undermine the Cass Review?
Yes, Stonewall is out, but it'll take a while to get rid of their lingering influence. From the Times:
Every major government department has left a diversity scheme run by the charity Stonewall after a string of controversies over gender ideology, The Times has learnt.
The exodus from Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Programme (DCP) came after concerns about the level of influence the lobby group had on shaping Whitehall’s internal policies.
Some of the biggest government departments, including the Home Office and Treasury, were among hundreds of public institutions and private companies who paid into the scheme. Stonewall describes it as the “gold standard for LGBTQ+ inclusion”, but it attracted criticism for promoting “gender identity” over biological sex, and was accused of favouring trans rights at the expense of women’s rights.
Well yes. The trans piggy-backed on all the goodwill from Stonewall's involvement in the Gay Rights movement, with organisations being fooled into thinking this was the next big liberation thing – instead of a regressive misogynist and homophobic scam.
More than 15 ministerial departments contacted by The Times this week confirmed they were no longer part of the scheme. The initiative still attracts major businesses, local government organisations and universities.
Last week Eleanor Frances, a civil servant who raised concerns about the promotion of transgender ideology, won a significant settlement after claiming the civil service’s approach to those issues and single-sex spaces was unlawful. Frances warned that, despite the civil service’s commitment to impartiality, transgender ideology had become entrenched to the extent that it did not feel possible to express gender-critical beliefs even though it was a view “worthy of respect”….
The Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office confirmed they let membership expire, and DCMS, Frances’s former employer, left in 2022.
However, Frances warned: “Leaving these schemes is not enough to undo their lasting influence. If organisations have incorporated biased or unlawful practices into their policies and strategies, then these will continue until they are actively halted.”
Maya Forstater, chief executive of the charity Sex Matters, said: “It’s fantastic news that the majority of government departments have stopped wasting public money on Stonewall’s scheme, but it’s just the first step. Gender identity ideology is now deeply entrenched in the UK civil service.
“In every department it worked with, Stonewall’s legacy is likely to be a raft of ideological policies, staff networks and programmes.
“Even if Stonewall’s consultants are no longer involved, activist staff networks continue their work across government and many are funded by taxpayers to do this activism in their working hours.
See here for more on Eleanor Frances.
Perhaps best known for documenting the Rock Against Racism movement in the late Seventies, photographer Syd Shelton takes his place in the illustrious Café Royal Books catalogue with his three-part Street Portraits:
These portraits are a sort of ongoing conversation with people in the theatre of the street. My approach, in some ways, has more in common with the studio photographer, and as I have returned many times to the same location, somewhere like Hare Row in Hackney I even called ‘my studio’. Usually I like to position people in a shallow theatrical space with a fixed backdrop and the combination of favourable available light which provides the venue for that conversation. Sometimes the trust between photographer and the people I am photographing happens very quickly and other times it takes a long time for the camera to disappear, and for it to become about me and the person I am photographing — there becomes a sort of implicit contract between us.
From the UK to Australia, the US, Ireland, Jamaica…
Chester 1981 [The Undertones!] / Brick Lane 1978
The Docks, Dublin, 1985
Johaneburg, 2011
Watts, Los Angeles, 1984
Brighton, 2014
Deal, Kent, 1981 / Walkerswood, Jamaica, 2011
Sydney 1973
Belfast, 1979
Brick Lane, 1980 / Hackney, 1979
Stamford Hill, London, 1987
The Docks, Dublin, 1985
Sydney, 1975
Sydney Harbour Bridge, 1983
Hare Row, Hackney, 1979
The Falls Road, Belfast, 1979
Dublin 1979
Hare Row, Hackney, 1979 (both)
[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Syd Shelton]
Yesterday I wondered if gender woo was the hill that the Democrats were choosing to die on. Kara Dansky at Spiked has had the same thought – Will Democrats ever drop the ‘transgender lunacy’?
It’s difficult to know exactly when the Democratic Party began its full-throated embrace of gender-identity ideology, at the expense of women and girls as a sex class.
We know that Joe Biden was saying as early 2012 that anti-transgender discrimination is the ‘civil-rights issue of our time’. That happens to be the same year that his friend, Tim McBride, decided that he is a woman named Sarah (he has since been elected to Congress). We know that Democratic members of Congress first introduced the so-called Equality Act, which redefined sex to include ‘gender identity’ for all purposes under US civil-rights law, in 2015. We know that under President Obama, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice issued a joint ‘Dear Colleague’ letter to US schools in 2016, instructing them to interpret sex to include ‘gender identity’ for all purposes under Title IX, which was originally intended to prohibit sex discrimination in education. Earlier this month, during a debate on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, a perfectly sensible proposal to maintain single-sex sports in US schools, every single Democrat who spoke in opposition to the bill came off as an unhinged lunatic….
One Democratic congressman did see the light. Less than a week after the election, Seth Moulton said: ‘I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.’ In response, Matt Chilliak, his campaign manager, had a temper tantrum and resigned….
Still, none of these criticisms or defections seem to have prompted any soul searching from Democratic leaders. Americans have heard nothing from Biden or Harris on this issue. We have heard nothing from senior Democrats Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer….
Sadly, things are not changing in the US Democratic Party, and it appears that the Democrats are indeed prepared to die on the hill that ‘some men are women’. … It’s still not too late for the Democrats to change course. They’d better do it soon if they hope to gain back voters.
I'm not holding my breath.
Here we go. Trump prepares to sell out Ukraine:
President Donald Trump claimed in part two of a televised interview that the nearly three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine that started when Moscow’s forces kicked off an invasion in 2022 was the fault of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s failure to preemptively capitulate before Russian troops began their attack.
Trump made the incendiary comments in a pre-taped interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that aired Thursday on Hannity’s program….
Zelensky, he said, is “no angel” and “shouldn’t have allowed this war to happen,” even though it was Russia that invaded Ukraine.
“First of all, he’s fighting a much bigger entity, okay, much bigger. When he was, you know, talking so brave… Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful. He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal, and it would have been a deal that would have been, it would have been a nothing deal,” Trump claimed.
He added that had he been in Zelensky’s position he could have “made that deal so easily.” He claimed that it was the Ukrainian leader who decided on hostilities even though it was Putin who ordered the invasion of Ukraine…
What deal did he have in mind? Surrender how much of Ukraine, exactly? Start with 50%, and work up till Putin nods his head in agreement? 60%? No. 70%? No. 75%? OK, that's a good start…maybe we can do business here. Plus of course no more talk of an independent Ukraine. And no Ukrainian language – all Russian. And Ukrainian children to be sent off to Russia for a proper education into how Ukraine doesn't really exist as a separate country and how you're all Nazis. And a few billion dollars reparation for all the trouble of getting an army together to invade and bomb your hospitals and schools. Reducing cities to rubble doesn't come cheap. After all, remember, we're a much bigger entity than you. In fact you're not even an entity at all….
Of course this could all be Trump braggodocio. He can't resist boasting about his best-ever world-beating negotiating skills. But, as we remember from his last presidency, there's quite a gap between what he says and what he does.
Yes, he has a weakness for Putin's alpha male style – hey, two alpha males head to head negotiating about the future of Ukraine…what could be better?
Apparently he's reinstated the bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. Perhaps, if he glances up, he'll be reminded that taking up arms against tyranny is sometimes the only choice.
(1/3) Steve Witkoff – Trump's man of the moment in the Middle East – noted other countries like Qatar could join the Abraham Accords if the Saudis lead the way. There are few in Israel who would oppose normalization with Qatar….
— Calev Ben-Dor (@Fathom_Editor) January 24, 2025
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Full thread:
(2/3) But they remain the main sponsors of Hamas (and Al Jazeera). 2 Israelis i recently spoke to (heavily involved in peacemaking for decades) talked about the sophisticated game Qatar plays and emphasized what a bad actor it has been.
(3/3) let's hope this will change – but we shouldn't hold our breath
Qatar is where the Hamas leaders lived their billionaire lives of luxury before Israel sent them off to meet Allah. So…normalisation, perhaps, but much would need to change…
Mick Hartley 