Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • On the Appleby report

    Joan Smith at UnHerd on the Appleby report, debunking the "suicide surge" line pushed by the likes of Jolyon Maugham and Owen Jones after the puberty blocker ban:

    The claim is sensational and designed to terrify the parents of young people with gender dysphoria. “Better a trans son than a dead daughter,” activists tell them. The argument has been made ever more loudly since prescriptions of puberty blockers were restricted by the NHS following a High Court decision (Bell v. Tavistock) in December 2020. We’ve been told repeatedly that children will kill themselves if they can’t get puberty-blocking drugs.

    I’m tempted to put the next sentence in capital letters: it isn’t true. A hard-hitting report, published yesterday, exposes the untruth of such claims, insisting that they “do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence”. Indeed, a review of suicides and gender dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, carried out by Professor Louis Appleby of Manchester University, could hardly be more damning.

    “The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide in young gender dysphoria patients at the Tavistock,” it says. It contains a stinging rebuke to people who have made such claims on social media, describing the discussion as “insensitive, distressing and dangerous”. The report also points out that it “goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide”.

    In a highly unusual move, the report singles out the Good Law Project, which is challenging a decision by the outgoing Health Secretary, Victoria Atkins, to end the prescription of puberty blockers to children by private clinics. Its founder, Jolyon Maugham KC, launched a vicious personal attack on Atkins’s successor, Wes Streeting, after he confirmed that the new government will make the ban permanent. Maugham claimed that the ban “will kill trans children” and said his feelings about Streeting were “unprintable”.

    In remarks that appeared to verge on deranged, Maugham made the hugely irresponsible claim that Streeting was locking his colleagues into “a future of bereaved parents tipping ashes outside No 10”. But he was not the only commentator to use such inflammatory language. “There is already evidence of a huge surge in the deaths of young people since their healthcare was trashed,” Guardian columnist Owen Jones stated on X last week….

    The report blows all this nonsense — and the emotional blackmail it’s given rise to — out of the water. Its conclusions are scathing about what it calls “the insensitivity of the ‘dead child’ rhetoric”. It goes on: “Suicide should not be a slogan or a means to winning an argument.” A lot of prominent people who have used it in just such a way should be hanging their heads in shame this weekend.

    The most powerful voice against the irresponsible threat of an increased suicide risk used to be the Samaritans. Now, though:

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    Also:

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  • Atrocity Denialism

    A long read from John Ware at Fathom on the denial of the Hamas pogrom from sections of the hard left  – 7 October and the Alt-Media: a critical examination:

    For Jews everywhere – not just Israelis – the denial that Hamas committed atrocities on 7 October has a familiar historical ring. Yet it is a fact that Hamas and their supporters have insisted their ‘fighters’ did not massacre music festival goers, or rape women, or ill-treat hostages. Direct to camera, one Hamas Politburo member after another has flatly denied that the Qassam Brigades did any such things. Also direct to camera was the evidence that they did murder unarmed civilians, sometimes sadistically, their violence immortalised by Hamas’s own body cams. which they proudly broadcast for propaganda purposes.

    Outright ‘Atrocity Denialism’ in the face of irrefutable facts is the latest civilisational clash between those of us struggling to maintain the norms of society – and a growing constituency who seem beyond reason. And this clash couldn’t be more fundamental because it is about basic facts and evidence, irrespective of what one may think about Israel or the way it is conducting the war in Gaza. The mainstream media has broadly given credence to Israeli claims that Hamas committed widespread sexual abuse on 7 October. But polling shows that most British Muslims don’t believe this. Just one in four accept that Hamas engaged in murder or rape. Over the last two decades, the mainstream media has been losing the trust of British Muslims. A majority now consider the BBC to be pro-Israel. Some of that vacuum is being filled by online alternative media outlets who typically challenge narratives they say the mainstream media don’t.

    In 2019, the Community Security Trust showed how UK based alt-media accounts and networks of Labour-supporting Twitter accounts promoted, endorsed and spread the idea that allegations of antisemitism against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party were fake news. Now a number of UK and US based alt-media outlets have been aggressively trying to show that allegations of widespread rape by Hamas and other armed groups are also fake. Today in Fathom, our entire issue is given over to John Ware’s investigation of the journalistic scruples – or the lack of them – that these outlets have deployed in making their case.

  • No evidence of a suicide surge

    The adults have entered the room:

    Activists lawyers are spreading “distressing and dangerous” claims that transgender children will kill themselves because of a ban on puberty blockers, a government review has found.

    Professor Louis Appleby, the government’s adviser on suicide prevention, found that there was no evidence to support claims of a “surge” in suicides among trans children.

    Well…children who've been persuaded they're trans. There are no "trans children".

    The Good Law Project, a campaign group led by the barrister Jolyon Maugham, has repeatedly invoked statistics on social media purporting to show an “explosion” in deaths among children being treated for gender dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust.

    And let's not forget Owen Jones.

  • Banning Cass

    The Pennsylvania Psychological Association has forbidden any mention of the Cass Review on its official listserv (email) platform. It could be hurtful to sensitive members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

    Ppa

    From Benjamin Ryan:

    The Pennsylvania Psychological Association, despite being adamant that it was being transparent with its members about the reason for forbidding discussion of the Cass Review, did not specify in its email why it believed that the review did not meet the group's evidence-based standards. Instead, in explaining its new policy, the PPA said that members of the LGBTQIA+ community on the listserv and their allies felt "targeted, harmed, and hurt" by the sharing of the Cass Review.

    As an alternative, the PPA recommended that members reference WPATH's Standards of Care 8 and the APA's policy statement on gender-affirming care. This came after the Cass Review found that the WPATH's guidelines “lack developmental rigor” and that the document “overstates the strength of the evidence.”…

    This move by the PPA to forbid discussion of the Cass Review directly follows the unsealing of internal WPATH communications in an Alabama court case regarding the development of the Standards of Care 8 that showed that some of WPATH’s own members knew that their guidelines were based on weak evidence. One WPATH leader stated in an email to colleagues that “we are painfully aware of the gaps in the literature and the kinds of research that are needed to support our recommendations.”

    Additionally, the unsealed communications revealed that WPATH suppressed systematic literature reviews it commissioned from evidence-based medicine experts at Johns Hopkins University about the treatment of gender dysphoria when the findings did not support WPATH's goals. WPATH also capitulated to outside pressure to remove age restrictions on pediatric gender-transition treatment and surgeries from the Biden administration, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Trevor Project.

    Never mind the science: feel the pain of the trans community.

  • Open goal

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  • Adidas and Bella Hadid

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    From the JC:

    Bella Hadid has been accused of “fanning the flames of antisemitism” by spreading misinformation about Israel. She has accused Israel of being an apartheid “Jewish supremacist” state and claimed “Jesus was Palestinian”.

    Stop Antisemitism called Adidas’ choice “on par” for the company, which has previously been criticised for its relationship with Kanye West. The company ended their creative partnership with the rapper over his “unacceptable, hateful, and dangerous” comments in October 2022.

    Still, last year, Adidas Chief Executive said West “didn’t mean what he said” and that he wasn’t “a bad person – it just came across that way”. He described the end to Adidas’ creative relationship with the rapper as “very unfortunate”.

    West has praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Speaking in an interview with Alex Jones, he said: “There’s a lot of things I love about Hitler”. He has shared violently antisemitic posts on social media, saying he was “going death con 3 on Jewish People”.

    Adidas was founded by brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler in Germany in 1924. Both brothers were members of the Nazi party, and during the 1936 Berlin Olympic games, many German athletes sported Dassler shoes.

    More on Hadid here:

    Bella Hadid is an American model, influencer, and social media poster child for online Jew hatred; she is also the daughter of disgraced Jordanian real estate mogul and former “Antisemite of the Week” Mohamed Hadid. Like her father, Bella Hadid obsessively spreads false and dangerous disinformation about the Jewish people and nation to her nearly 66 million followers on social media…..

  • GenderGP doctor’s licence revoked

    Helen Webberley, who makes money by flogging puberty blockers and hormones to troubled kids who've been persuaded they've been born in the wrong body, has had her licence revoked:

    The General Medical Council has revoked the licence to practise of a controversial British doctor whose offshore clinic treats transgender children.

    Dr Helen Webberley, 55, will lose her licence in Britain from Friday but will remain on the GMC’s register, following the decision by the medical regulator.

    The decision was made by the GMC after she did not comply with a registered doctor’s legal obligation to revalidate their licence every five years.

    Webberley runs GenderGP, an online company registered in Singapore, which facilitates access to puberty blockers and hormones for adults and children.

    She told The Times that the decision would not prevent her from continuing in her role at GenderGP…

    And continuing to pull in the money. She doesn't care.

    GenderGP assesses adults and children with gender dysphoria and connects them to doctors outside Britain, in the European Economic Area (EEA), for prescriptions for hormones.

    This means UK children as young as eight can access puberty blockers, despite the Cass Report, a review of trans healthcare led by the paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, concluding there was no good evidence for prescribing them.

    Webberley was suspended from practising medicine in 2022 after she was found to have committed serious misconduct by a Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service panel over her treatment of three trans children. She successfully appealed against the decision at the High Court in 2023.

  • Yard jockey

    John Vachon, March 1943. "Baltimore, Maryland. Associated Transport Company trucking terminal. 'Yard jockeys' or 'spotters' drive trucks around the terminal and back them up to the loading platform."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]

  • Good parents

    Jolyon Maugham's Good Law Project, in its campaign against the puberty blocker ban, has just published this letter – a parent's perspective:

    On 4 July, the safety and wellbeing of our child was hanging in the balance. No child should lie awake on election night fearing for their future and their right to exist, as our child did. She is simply living her truth, and no attempt to eradicate trans identity or remove her rights will change this.

    Our daughter has no recollection of living as male, as this has not reflected her lived reality for the last 10 years, since age four. It is not a reality we, or she, would have chosen, but it is one we have come to accept and defend, because the alternative would have undoubtedly caused her harm. As professionals, practicing in social work and emergency medicine, we are well-versed in informed decision-making and risk management, and we have always been careful, curious, open-minded and questioning in our approach to parenting a trans child.

    We are good parents, who deserve to be listened to, as does our child.

    Smug parents, that's for sure. Oh yes, we have a trans child. Transed at the age of four. Did he like playing with dolls? Not fit the boy stereotypes? Four years old.

    It may not be quite the clincher argument Jolyon thinks. And with puberty approaching, reality is about to break through the carefully constructed charade – unless they can get their hands on those powerful drugs, to cement the ruin of their son's life

    As many X users are saying, this is child abuse.

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  • Westerners want the Jews out of their consciences

    Melanie Phillips, interviewed by Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:

    Anti-Zionism is a polite fiction, designed to conceal the fact that people want to hate Jews. In theory, of course, it is distinct from anti-Semitism. That is, if you take Zionism to be nothing more than a political movement that began in the 19th century. But this is simply no longer the case. Zionism is a movement for the self-determination of Jewish people in their homeland. And no other group on Earth is told, as the Jews often are, that they are not entitled to a homeland.

    Self-determination for Jews in Israel is an essential component of Judaism itself. That doesn’t mean that all Jews are Zionists. That doesn’t mean that all Jews want to live in Israel. And it doesn’t mean all Jews support Israel. But it does mean that anti-Zionism, in many ways, is a dagger to the heart of Judaism. It deprives the Jews of their home.

    People often respond to this by saying that a lot of Jews are anti-Zionists today and that many Jews were opposed to Zionism at the turn of the 20th century. That is absolutely correct. But there is a tremendous difference between then and now. These Jews were anti-Zionists before the Holocaust and before Israel existed. They made their case before people even began to understand that the Arab and Muslim world was determined to remove all Jews from their homeland. The context now is that anti-Zionism would entail the destruction of Israel – a state that is essential for the continuation of the Jewish people because, crucially, other countries would not take Jews in. […]

    After the Second Intifada, a liberal journalist said to me that I had got the whole anti-Semitism thing completely wrong. What we were seeing was not anti-Semitism, he said, but ‘relief’ that we ‘don’t have to worry about the Jews anymore’. It was an ambiguous comment, so I asked him what he meant. He said: ‘Well, after the concentration camps, anti-Semitism was completely forbidden. We couldn’t say what we thought about the Jews. Until now.’ He was effectively saying that because Israel is defending itself against mass murder, the Jew had become the Nazi – and with one bound, anti-Semites were free.

    I do think that there is something in this. The West really can’t cope with the fact that it was complicit in the greatest crime in human history. Germany was the centre of it, of course, but the Holocaust happened because people turned their faces away from the rampant anti-Semitism at the time. Making the Jew into a Nazi effectively frees the West. After all, if the Jews can become Nazis, then any of us can. And so there was nothing particularly terrible about the Nazis and nothing particularly terrible about our failure to deal with it at the time.

    There is a feeling among the Jews that Westerners have had it up to here with the Jewish people. They don’t want to hear about the Jews ever again. They want the Jews out of their heads, out of their consciences and out of their world altogether. And they certainly don’t want to hear about the Jew as a victim. That’s why people ignore anti-Semitism. That’s why people ignore the rape of Israeli women. That’s why you have this attempt to turn the great crime of 7 October into a great crime by Israel.

    Nothing is allowed to disturb the narrative that the Jews are responsible for bad things. They are never the victims of bad things. If that narrative is ever challenged, if the Jews were no longer the West’s scapegoat, it would have to take responsibility for its own misdeeds. It would no longer be able to avoid its own moral culpability. That cannot be allowed to happen.