Mick Hartley

And a Times editorial:

Thursday marks a year since the Supreme Court delivered one of its most important rulings to date. In declaring that sex should be defined purely by biology, the court injected clarity and common sense into an issue beset by trans ideology. The court sided with For Women Scotland, a campaign group, which argued that protections based on sex should apply only to biological females, and against the Scottish government, which argued such rights should be extended to biological men describing themselves as women.

It was hoped that this ruling would mark the end of the “gender wars” that for years have been fought by trans activists. Instead, the past 12 months have brought only dithering by a ­government that appears reluctant to accept and implement the court’s verdict. Despite the lack of legal ambiguity in what defines a “man” and a “woman”, the education secretary Bridget Phillipson, who doubles as equalities minister, has yet to publish official guidance on how the court’s ruling should be put into operation. It is remarkable and disturbing that ministers see nothing wrong in frustrating the will of Britain’s highest court.

Especially given Starmer’s near-obsession with following the law.

The government says it must “get this right”, but in reality it appears to be happier doing nothing. It is to be regretted that Ms Phillipson has failed to respect the law and publish guidance in good time. This is political foot-dragging of the highest order. The result is that organisations in the public and private sectors may be breaking the law while awaiting instruction on, for example, the provision of lavatory facilities. This is especially concerning for institutions such as hospitals and leisure centres, which look to Whitehall for guidelines.

My dog after eating my philosophy book pic.twitter.com/20cgebtcAG

— Ramin Nasibov (@RaminNasibov) April 13, 2026

“I eat therefore I am.”

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph on a Labour Party still in thrall to the trans activists:

In 2024, the scale of violence against women was addressed by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC). An estimated two million women a year are victims of male violence, which now accounts for 20 per cent of all crimes recorded by the police. Maggie Blyth, deputy chief executive of the College of Policing, called it an “epidemic” and “a national emergency”. The conviction rates for rape are so low (according to government data released in 2025, just 2.7 per cent of rapes reported to police had resulted in a charge), it has been virtually decriminalised.

The police figures reflect a whole variety of offences against women, such as sexual assault, stalking, online revenge porn, domestic violence and coercive control. These are dark days. The constant threat of male violence is the backdrop to our lives.

It sickened me to my stomach to see it at the weekend, when women were out on the streets nationwide to protest peacefully. They were demonstrating about the fact that one year after the Supreme Court ruling clarifying, under the Equality Act, that sex means biological sex and that single-sex spaces should be protected, no government guidance has been released.

What did we see? Threats to women openly shouted and displayed. I am talking about placards saying things like “the only good terf is a dead one”, some featuring nooses, the usual demands for the murder of JK Rowling, men in masks physically disrupting women making speeches. This is done, of course, in the name of trans rights. But guess what? These new social justice warriors, whatever gender they may pretend to be, use a very familiar tactic. They threaten the rape and murder of women, or at the very least sexual submission: “Suck my Girl D—”.

The police do nothing but arrive in their vans dragged up in LGBTQAAA colours and try to keep them away from women who are outrageously asserting the rights that we already have.

When you have encountered these unhinged trans loons with their megaphones, their cheap-thrills outfits that reek of misogyny, one never goes away and thinks: “Oh these are women I would really love to hang with. Do let them in the changing room.” Quite the opposite. Their male entitlement is visible through the Lycra. Their aggression is totally masculine. Sure, there may be dysphoric girls who like to shout at you in the way a kid yells if you tell them to tidy their bedroom. But we have now had years of this insanity and if anyone in this Government really cared about violence against women, then why have they kowtowed to these vicious bullies?…

Every time I get a threat suggesting that I be cut up and mutilated, I find myself thinking that all I ever wanted was for people to be able to express themselves without being cut up and mutilated – castrations or mastectomies. Oh sorry, “gender-affirming care”.

Things are changing. Even the Americans are having to admit that mental health problems are not “solved” by transition.

But here, we have not been helped by this dithering Government and the myriad organisations who have betrayed women.

Excuse me while I put on my balaclava and pose with a hammer, following the latest Bash Back poster from militant trans activists – I mean that’s just hunky dory, isn’t it? That just screams tolerance, doesn’t it?

How long before Labour realises that the fight against male violence includes fighting these men, whether they are hooded or posing in little girls’ clothes? Enforce the law. Grow a spine. What are you so afraid of?

It’s not always clear how much the government’s uselessness here is due to a genuine belief in the whole Stonewall/trans lunacy, and how much is due to simple cowardice. Much more that latter, I think – especially Starmer.

Depressing 😢 our words are disappearing and only 5026 care enough to sign 🛑 https://t.co/gwzIuZkls5

— justsaymother (@justsay_mother) April 13, 2026

Some interesting background on Alexander Dugin, Putin’s favourit philiosopher, from Marc Weitzmann at Tablet Magazine:

:With his long beard, resonant voice, outgoing personality, and bellicose, mystical rhetoric, Dugin is regarded by his global fan base and by his enemies alike as a kind of geopolitical genius, the most prominent representative of contemporary Russian political thought, and, most of all, the inspiration behind Russia’s foreign policy—Putin’s personal Rasputin. Like most things in the 21st century, the reality is far more childish, more ridiculous, and, because of that, more frightening.

The puerile grandiosity of his book titles, with their aura of esotericism and science fiction—The Fourth Political Theory, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, Last War of the World-Island—is in line with their content, which is a jumble of nihilistic fantasies, fascist dreams, totalitarian plans, and ridiculous predictions. In a piece written in the aftermath of Oct. 7, Dugin announced that Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia were about to rally to the side of the Palestinians, who will launch an uprising in East Jerusalem that will lead to the sealing-off of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to World War III, during which Russia will “at last” side with the Muslims against the Israelis, the West, and the forces of LGBTQ.

At their even less incoherent, the so-called neo-Eurasian or fourth-political theories that he presents as original are, in fact, largely copied and pasted from more coherent anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment Western theorists and philosophers. The result is a vision of history that can only be called gnostic and that can be summarized in a simple paragraph:

The present geopolitical situation is the latest episode of an ancestral cosmic war. Two types of societies clash: The evil ones, which he calls “thalassocratic,” are essentially treacherous because they’re governed by the mischievous, untrustworthy “Atlanticists” and are engineered by commerce, exchanges, individualism, and egalitarianism. The good ones, the “tellurocratic” societies, are rooted in soil, knighthood, religion, and vertical hierarchy. The thalassocratists (the United States, Western Europe, protestants, atheists, Israel, and the Jews) are liberal children of darkness. The tellurocratists (the Russians, the Orthodox and the Catholics, and Muslims, especially Shiites) are children of light. At stake is the human soul. Should the Russians (or the Iranians) lose, there is no reason that the world should continue: In a recent interview, Dugin declared that Moscow would provide nuclear weapons to anyone dedicated to fighting “the West.”

Apparently Paris in the post-war decades wasn’t just the birthplace of third-worldism, with such leftist luminaries as Frantz Fanon, Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Minh mingling in the cafes. There was also a lively right-wing scene, with post-Nazi philosophy interacting with Islamist theorising. And Alexander Dugin was there.

A very murky world.

Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator – Israel won’t stop in Lebanon until Hezbollah is crushed:

As has been obvious for a while, the government of Lebanon has no intention and also no ability to disarm Hezbollah by force. (The Lebanese Armed Forces are around 40 per cent Shia and would almost certainly fall apart should such an effort be commenced. They are also, in any case, militarily weaker than the terror group). Hezbollah, equally obviously, has no intention of voluntarily disarming. The Lebanese government wants an end to Israel’s attacks on its soil, while also avoiding confronting the terror group. Israel is unlikely to be interested in such an arrangement for as long as Iran and Hezbollah remain committed to their long war for the Jewish state’s destruction.

From this point of view, it is a mistake to consider the events in Iran, Israel, Iraq, Hormuz and Lebanon since 28 February as constituting a ‘war’. Rather, they are a round of fighting in a much longer conflict that has been under way for decades and is likely to end only when the regime in Tehran falls. Short of that, prepare for more of the same.

It’s worth reminding ourselves, when discussing Hezbollah and Lebanon, that UNIFIL – United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon – has been sitting on its hands for decades now as a supposed international peace-keeping force. It plays a similar role as UNRWA does in Gaza – that is, it has a symbiotic relationship with Hezbollah, just as UNRWA has with Hamas. See here:

Hezbollah has been the dominant force in Lebanon for many years, with the Lebanese government and UNIFIL standing idly by, as the Iranian funded Hezbollah continued building huge underground launch sites on the Israeli border, contrary to the very Agreement UNIFIL were supposedly there to enforce. Indeed, by October 2023, UNIFIL had become no more than enthusiastic spectators, as Hezbollah launched their daily attacks on Israel, intervening only later to shoot down Israeli surveillance drones in the area.

Also Tony Badran in Tablet Magazine, from November 2024.

UNIFIL, in its current iteration, was given a mandate in 2006 via U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 to help ensure that the area south of the Litani River would remain free of any armed presence save its own and that of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Resolution 1701 was ostensibly meant to end the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war on terms that would prevent the Lebanese-based terror army from launching more attacks against Israel by giving the Israelis a demilitarized zone on their northern border enforced by international troops. The catch was that UNIFIL would implement its mandate in support of and in coordination with the Lebanese government and the LAF—which are both controlled by Hezbollah. Rather than decrease Hezbollah’s strength on Israel’s border, the group’s armed presence south of the Litani grew exponentially under UNIFIL’s oversight.

Just how blatantly Hezbollah operated with UNIFIL’s blessing became clear after Israel launched its invasion of southern Lebanon on Sept. 30. IDF units operating close to Israel’s northern border uncovered the openings of elaborate, large-scale Hezbollah tunnel networks a few yards away from UNIFIL positions. It was clearly impossible for UNIFIL commanders not to have been fully aware of the construction of those positions and their use by large squads of armed Hezbollah militants who moved in and out. Needless to say, the construction and deployment of Hezbollah’s tunnel network, which made a mockery of UNIFIL’s supposed role in demilitarizing southern Lebanon, was never reported back to the U.N. through official channels or made public. Instead, UNIFIL paid local Hezbollah operatives and supporters to act as contractors and provide other services, essentially melding its functions with those of the terrorist army for which it was providing cover.

Jesus Christ.

Oh no, sorry, it’s Donald Trump.

President Trump has posted an AI-generated image seemingly depicting himself as Jesus Christ as he attacked the Pope for not supporting his war in Iran.

Tim Black at Spiked on Sayyid Qutb: the godfather of Islamism, and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood after the First World War:

In Europe, the collapse of the pre-war liberal order fuelled radical vanguardism, be it Communist, fascist or modernist. The colonial metropoles witnessed a similar political and cultural insurgency, refracted through a more explicitly anti-Western, anti-imperial lens and framed in national, cultural terms. Nowhere more so than in Cairo, in British-occupied Egypt, where young and young-ish radicals challenged the status quo. It was in this context that Islam was effectively and implicitly repurposed as an ideology – indeed, as an –ism to sit alongside the others that were flourishing in Europe and elsewhere during this period.

This was not Islam as a set of devotional practices. This was Islam as a revolutionary solution to the perceived failure of Western, liberal modernity. Its advocates no longer measured their faith against Christianity. They pitched it into battle against liberalism and capitalism, as a revolutionary challenge to the liberal order to rival that of fascism or Communism – the latter being a political creed that Islamists dismissed as just another outgrowth of godless Western rationalism.

The creation of the Society of Muslim Brothers (otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood) in Cairo in 1928 is the key moment. Its founder, a then 22-year-old teacher called Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), gave Islamism its first organisational form. But it is in the later work of Banna’s contemporary, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian teacher and civil servant, that Islamism gained arguably its most influential and explosive articulation. In the multi-volume In the Shade of the Koran (1951-1965) and, above all, in Milestones (1964), Qutb presented Islam as a political order (Nizam), indeed, as ‘the only system’ capable of rescuing mankind from the spiritless descent of ‘Western civilisation’.

Since the goal of the radical left has long been, similarly, to rescue mankind from the spiritless descent of ‘Western civilisation’, the current red-green alliance becomes easier to understand. The enemy of my enemy….

Though wrought from the scenery, symbolism and parables of the Koran, Qutb’s Islam was also modern and revolutionary. He reimagined the first Muslims as professional, vanguardist revolutionaries. He reapplied the ancient era of ‘Jahiliyyah’, the pre-Islamic ‘age of ignorance’, to the present-day world. And he recast the ‘crusaders’ of America and Europe – and, above all, ‘Zionists’ and ‘world Jewry’ – as Islam’s cosmic, evil-doing enemies. He drew Manichean battle lines and pledged war on the unbelievers. As political scientist Bassam Tibi has it in Islamism and Islam (2012), Qutb is ‘the rector spiritus of political Islam’, the figure ‘who first interpreted jihad as an “Islamic world revolution” in the pursuit of an Islamic world order’.

And here we are.

Much has been written of Qutb’s immersion in the Koran, and of his affinity with the spiritual richness of his rural upbringing (captured in his 1946 work, A Child from the Village). But Qutb’s worldview was also nourished by Western cultural sources. Like al-Ayadd, he drew deep on the social protests of Romanticism, and its appeal to more authentic sources of experience. Like many of his generation, he also inhaled the darker, reactionary fumes of the later anti-Enlightenment turn among many European thinkers, writers and artists, from the end of the 19th century into the 20th century. He saw something valuable in their critiques of reason, autonomy and universalism in the name of feeling, crowd psychology and cultural particularism. He was familiar with Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1922), and above all Alexis Carrel’s Man the Unknown (1935), a jeremiad about the deadening effects of Western rationalism on man, which he quotes at length in his work. All this captures something important about the development of Islamism – it drew just as much on a distinctly Western counter-Enlightenment tradition, especially its radically reactionary descent, as it did on Egyptian or Islamic sources. Indeed, the affinity of large parts of today’s degenerate Western left with Islamism rests partially on the extent to which they both draw intellectually from the same reactionary well.…

And now Islamism’s toxic combination of anti-Westernism and anti-Zionism seems to have seduced swathes of the Western left, too.

Continuing the saga of Bridget Phillipson and her refusal to do anything about single-sex spaces, one year after the Supreme Court judgement – as called out by Baroness Falkner yesterday. New from the Telegraph – Phillipson ‘refuses to meet’ women who secured Supreme Court trans ruling

Bridget Phillipson has been accused of refusing to meet the women who secured the milestone Supreme Court trans ruling.

For Women Scotland said its attempt to arrange a meeting with the women and equalities minister to mark the first anniversary of the decision had been “blocked”.

Susan Smith, one of the FWS directors, urged Sir Keir Starmer to intervene, telling The Telegraph that Ms Phillipson’s failure to agree to talks was “outrageous”.

She added: “We’re really disappointed that Phillipson has not met with us yet. I don’t know whether it’s being blocked by Phillipson or the Civil Service.

“Somebody, somewhere does not want to meet us – it’s outrageous. I cannot believe we cannot get her in the same room as us. We cannot get through [despite] having won the case.”

Phillipson would be too embarrassed to meet them. They see right through her and her disgraceful procrastinations.

Update:

We are pleased to report that Ms Phillipson has now offered a meeting. https://t.co/eHuZzSHYSX

— For Women Scotland (@ForWomenScot) April 13, 2026

Transgender singer Ethel Cain's defiant explicit photos have sparked conversation online. https://t.co/Tp6MREcKcK

— Out Magazine (@outmagazine) April 11, 2026

The artistic photographs, posted the day after Trans Day of Visibility, have been given a “sensitive content” warning by Instagram, but have been left up on the social media site, despite showing Cain’s genitalia while she stares into the camera.

At a time when trans bodies are being policed like never before, and politicians are doing everything in their power to strip transgender people of their rights, it feels refreshingly liberating to show the full breadth of the same kind of trans body the Republican Party is trying to criminalize.

The photos are not overtly sexual, instead they lean into femininity, with a floral bedspread and draped curtains in the background. Other photos in the carousel show Cain in the same corset, but also wearing tight white shorts.

See also: “The feminine penis is different than the masculine penis”.