The AHRC is literally saying that lesbians are not entitled to be recognised in law by a category that accurately describes them because that would discriminate against straight men calling themselves lesbians. This is homophobia on steroids. https://t.co/ymMwq0PBo3
— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) February 24, 2026
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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He finally got there.
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From the BBC:
Four Russian soldiers have exposed the horror and brutality of conditions on their side of the front lines in Ukraine, with two men telling the BBC they saw soldiers being executed on the spot for refusing orders.
One man told a documentary team he saw a soldier executed on the order of his commander, who was made a “Hero of Russia” in 2024.
“I see it – just two metres, three metres… click, clack, bang,” he said.
Another soldier, from a different unit, says he saw his commander shoot four men himself.
“I knew them,” he says of the soldiers executed. “I remember one of them screaming ‘Don’t shoot, I’ll do anything!’”
One of them also says he saw 20 bodies of fellow soldiers lying in a pit after being “zeroed” by comrades. The term “zero” is Russian military slang for executing your own.
In the documentary, The Zero Line: Inside Russia’s War, men give detailed accounts about how they were tortured for refusing to take part in assaults they describe as verging on suicide missions. Russian troops call these attacks “meat storms” as waves of men are sent across the front line relentlessly to try and wear down Ukrainian forces.
For the first time, the BBC believes, Russian soldiers from the front line say on the record how they witnessed commanders ordering executions of their own men.
The Zero Line: Inside Russia’s War is on BBC iPlayer, and shows on BBC2 tonight at 9.
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“In South Africa the system of oppression implemented segregation as a form of control over Black people and People of Colour so as to uphold a patriarchal White supremacist system of power. We don’t think it is hyperbole to say that segregating women who play sport into a category of their own – Women’s Sport – and then policing that category violently, is an example of the use of the same method of oppression by the very same system of power. (131)”
Here’s the book in question – Open Play: The Case for Feminist Sport, by Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford. Released at the beginning of the month [actually it’s Feb 2025 I see now], it’s already garnered three 5-star and one 4-star reviews.
And, from Caster Semenya:
‘Imagine a world where anyone was free to reach their full potential playing the sport they love; a world where open competition replaced discrimination and exclusion, and where athletes were judged by their performances on the field rather than their conformity with gender norms. Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford show us how to get there, and how far we have to go. This courageous book should spark a revolution in sport.’
Review by Jon Pike here. Not open access, but he gives a quick breakdown on X:
But the book is terrible. Its central claim is that the performance differences between males and females in sport …are entirely a social construction, and would disappear if we abolished female sport. In the review I say that this is a preposterous claim that ignores thousands of scientific studies that explain the performance differences …… between the sexes by reference to the physiological differences between the sexes. It is a peculiar kind of pseudo-philosophical arrogance to ignore these studies, about heart size, limb length, musculature, skeletal structure, body shape, and so on (and on) and just …… explain these away as socialisation effects. There are resourcing, training time and attentional inequalities in sport, to be sure. But Mumford and Bekker undermine the argument for equal resourcing. They are, to repeat, for the abolition of women’s sport, not its equal… The abolition of sport specifically for women is part of a patriarchal, anti-feminist programme, not a feminist or egalitarian one, whatever its proponents say, and however eminent they are. …… This book should be roundly trounced and rejected.
Never did Orwell’s quote, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them“, have more resonance. The degree of ideological capture required to come up with this palpable nonsense defies belief. And, of course, this call for the abolition of women’s sport is dressed up as progressive and “feminist”.
What a time to be alive.
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If I lived in New York I think I’d be a little concerned:
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani attended Friday prayers at the Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Queens, NY, on the first Friday of Ramadan, February 20, 2026. Iman Dakmak-Rakka, principal of the Al-Iman School, affiliated with the Al-Khoei Center, and a representative of the Al-Khoei Foundation, thanked Mamdani for his work on behalf of “all of humanity and all the residents of New York.” During the following prayer service, the imam prayed that Allah make them among those who await the Mahdi and are martyred before him, adding that through the hands of the Mahdi “comes the relief for the believers and the killing of the infidels by your sword.”
The Al-Khoei Foundation has maintained financial ties with the Alavi Foundation, which U.S. federal courts and prosecutors have identified as a front for the Government of Iran and its state-owned Bank Melli. The Al-Khoei Foundation has publicly defended the Alavi Foundation against these accusations. In November 2023, Imam Fadhel al-Sahlani, an official representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani in North America, said that Hamas has made a “big difference” not only in the Arab Muslim world, but for the whole world.
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Joan Smith at UnHerd – No feminist should defend the niqab:
Over the weekend, pro-migration campaigner Zoe Gardner called out the broadcaster Colin Brazier, who had complained about seeing women wearing niqabs on Oxford Street in the centre of London.
Gardner denounced his post as “racist as fuck”, and asked the aforementioned question about the niqab. “Go on spell it out you nasty Muslim hater,” she added. What actually needs spelling out once again, it seems, is the fact that some cultural practices are hugely damaging to women. Culture is no more benign than nature, which gives us plagues and avalanches as well as sunsets and beaches.
There is a disturbing history here. In the Eighties, I used to argue with women, some of them feminists, who believed in equal rights but refused to condemn “female circumcision”. Their defence of mutilating women’s genitals always started and ended with the same statement: “It’s their culture.” Even Germaine Greer fell for it, describing moves to ban female genital mutilation as “an attack on cultural identity” in her 1999 book The Whole Woman. Now FGM is a criminal offence in Britain, and rightly so.…
Feminists who criticise the niqab or the burqa are not attacking the women who wear it, but the ideology which promotes it. In Afghanistan, the burqa makes individual women invisible, a daily reminder of the horrors imposed on them by a pathologically misogynistic sect, including a ban on girls’ education. In Iran, where thousands of protesters have been killed by another vile regime, women who remove the headscarf have been at the forefront of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. It started in 2022 when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being arrested for violating the regime’s rules mandating the wearing of the hijab.
It’s always seemed ironic that some women in the West are keen to defend a practice which is resisted at the risk of death in other countries. When women are dying for the right to uncover their hair and faces, the real question about the niqab is why any feminist would defend it.
There’s a grim history of feminists supporting Islamic dress codes for women. Naomi Wolf – of The Beauty Myth fame – was all in favour:
Ideological battles are often waged with women’s bodies as their emblems, and Western Islamophobia is no exception. When France banned headscarves in schools, it used the hijab as a proxy for Western values in general, including the appropriate status of women. When Americans were being prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were demonised for denying cosmetics and hair colour to women; when the Taliban were overthrown, Western writers often noted that women had taken off their scarves.
…many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualising Western gaze.
Hmm. The Islamic rationale for women covering themselves in public has little to do with protection from the “intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualising Western gaze”, and a lot more to do with the assumption that men cannot be expected to control their sexual urges, and women are therefore responsible for any sexual harassment that they may experience.
Good Muslim girls cover themselves, while young white girls don’t. As the grooming gang perpetrators have it, “this is what white girls are for”.
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An interesting take on the Beeb’s obsession with drag queens, from Andy Jones in the Spectator. It’s because they’re visibly gay.
The BBC has reached peak drag queen. These days, turn on any celebrity quiz, cookery show or news item by the state broadcaster and you are almost certain to be confronted by a bloke in heavy make-up and a dress….
Where does this almost religious adherence to all things drag come from? Some of it is partly because the Waitrose Lib Dems at the Beeb, who hold the reins when it comes to commissioning, think drag queens are cool, risqué or naughty – that somewhere in the Shires, a Reform voter will go red in the face at the sight of a man in a dress. But of course, anyone knows that once drag queens are regularly on The One Show they are about as edgy as a trip to Homebase.
As a straight man in media, I used to find it baffling that the most visible on-screen gay type in TV media was the catty, sex-obsessed diva, when few of the gay men I knew in London behaved in this way. That is, until I worked in TV myself, and came to understand how the BBC’s endless quest for diversity quotas shaped its output.
You see, while showing you have met on-air diversity requirements for ‘race’ is easy enough, it’s much harder to convey someone’s sexuality on screen in most contexts. Clive Myrie can’t really ask a contestant on Mastermind out of the blue: ‘So, what do you do with your boyfriend at weekends?’
Which is where drag queens come in. A drag queen is the most visible manifestation of LGBTQ you can get. Being instantly noticeable is the whole drag mojo. So putting one on TV – or in a BBC news story – is an immediate sequinned nod to the fact that you are meeting your diversity quotas and telling ‘vital LGBTQ stories.’ Hence why TV has become so obsessed with drag, despite it becoming tedious for audiences. Two drag queens in Eastenders, how exciting, you never hear people actually say.
When working at the BBC on investigative programmes, we also had to adhere to diversity with on-air case studies. As someone from a state school background in Birmingham, I absolutely believe publicly-funded TV networks should have voices and stories from different classes and experiences. But showcasing a diversity of views is tricky – especially finding characters that immediately ‘tick a box’ in the first three minutes they are on screen.
For instance, when creating programmes on the housing crisis, we once interviewed a live-alone gay man who had a compelling newsworthy story. But in order to hit a self-defeating diversity target set by bosses who never make programmes, we then had the issue of how to make him immediately ‘look gay’ on-air.
Cue pantomime among the production team. Can we interview you with your boyfriend? Can we interview you walking around Soho (while we play ‘Smalltown Boy’ in the background)? Our well-meaning bid for inclusivity had become preposterous and actually offensive.
This is where diversity eats itself. It ignores the realities of being for the sake of a bankable trope. Where are the hairy gay men that drink real ale and wear corduroy? They don’t exist for TV commissioners. And as a result there are surely confused teenage boys out there who think they might be gay, but presume they can’t possibly be, because they don’t like wearing heels and ‘voguing.’
The idea of gay men as sex-obsessed, bawdy divas has now become as cliched and predictable as a South Asian family in a soap opera owning a corner shop; driving a taxi; wanting their kids to be doctors and having a storyline about an arranged marriage. This immovable need for visibility means you are no longer describing real human stories but meeting a quota influenced by bodies like Stonewall. It’s insulting to everyone involved.
Yes, a similar dynamic as the Stonewall saga. Once gays had won their battles the whole issue of gay lib died, but to keep the money flowing in groups like Stonewall switched their attention to what they hoped to persuade people was the next liberation movement – trans rights. And they were remarkably successful. Gays just disappeared into the background. Just people like everybody else. So how do you keep signalling your diversity commitment, in an organisation like the BBC? By fixating on visible gays – camp, outrageous, dressing as sexist caricatures of women.
Which, inevitably, appeals to the trans movement too. and its beating autogynephiliac heart. And helps to explain why it’s always “the LGBTQ” movement, when the majority of gays want no truck with the T.
And why the Beeb loves to run gay-as-victim stories like this:
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Yes, the women got left out. But still….
Mick Hartley 