Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Women’s sport “illegal”

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  • “One of the virtues of Islam”

    A Female Genital Mutilation ban has been upheld in Gambia:

    Lawmakers in the West African nation of Gambia on Monday rejected a bill that would have overturned a ban on female genital cutting. The attempt to become the first country in the world to reverse such a ban had been closely followed by activists abroad.

    The vote followed months of heated debate in the largely Muslim nation of less than 3 million people. Lawmakers effectively killed the bill by rejecting all its clauses and preventing a final vote.

    The procedure, also called female genital mutilation, includes the partial or full removal of girls’ external genitalia, often by traditional community practitioners with tools such as razor blades or at times by health workers. It can cause serious bleeding, death and childbirth complications but remains a widespread practice in parts of Africa.

    Activists and human rights groups were worried that a reversal of the ban in Gambia would overturn years of work against the centuries-old practice that’s often performed on girls younger than 5 and rooted in the concepts of sexual purity and control.

    Religious conservatives who led the campaign to reverse the ban argued the practice was “one of the virtues of Islam.” 

    So the ban remains – good news of course, but it seems that it's not been widely observed.

    In Gambia, more than half of women and girls ages 15 to 49 have undergone the procedure, according to United Nations estimates. Former leader Yahya Jammeh unexpectedly banned the practice in 2015 without further explanation. But activists say enforcement has been weak and women have continued to be cut.

    The first prosecutions occurred last year, when three women were convicted for bringing their daughters to be cut and performing the practice. The cases sparked a public debate, and some said the prosecutions inspired the attempt to reverse the ban.

    Gambia’s Islamic body in 2023 issued a fatwa, recommending the lifting of the ban of what they defined as “female circumcision,” as opposed to female genital mutilation or cutting. Following Monday’s vote, top members of the Gambia Supreme Islamic Council (GSIC) declined to comment.

  • Why puberty blockers should be banned

    Another look at the effect of puberty blockers, from clinical psychologist Dr P:

    The child whose puberty is being blocked does not live in a vacuum. They are part of a network of siblings, friends and peers. They are part of a community.

    What then, is the broader impact of blocking puberty?

    For the sake of illustration, let us assume a 10-year child old ‘diagnosed’ with Gender Dysphoria who is started on PBs, to give them “time to think” about what gender they want to be.

    This 10-year-old goes on PBs for two years. They are thus frozen in their development: physical growth slows down or stops altogether; the development of secondary sexual characteristics stops; neurobiological and emotional development is halted, or even reversed.

    Growth: A boy would have grown by about six inches. A girl by about eight inches.

    Neuro-cognitive: Between ages 10 and 12 children move from basic to advanced cognitive flexibility. They begin to think abstractly; hypothetical reasoning emerges; moral reasoning develops, and the child starts to move beyond thinking in absolutes (black and white).

    Interpretative thinking, (the ability to recognise cause and effect sequences) also develops. We have perhaps always instinctively understood this; the age of criminal responsibility in England starts at 10 years old, which perhaps reflects the changes in cognitive development starting around this time….

    Peer relationships: Because the child has not moved from basic to advanced cognitive flexibility, their social behaviour is affected. By age 12, our puberty-blocked child will be behind their age-matched peers in their interpersonal skills.

    They are more likely to become dislocated from their IRL social networks. They turn to the internet for support, where they are at risk of what is frankly open predation by trans activists, (often adult transvestite men) who will then further cement the child's pseudo-trans identity and false gender dysphoria…

    Worth reading in full.

  • In prraise of Wes 2

    More on the same lines in the Telegraph – this time from Suzanne Moore:

    Now Wes Streeting knows what it’s like to be a certain kind of woman. I jest, but not much. Since the Health Secretary announced he is going to maintain the ban on puberty blockers that Victoria Atkins brought in, he has received levels of hysterical vitriol to which women like me have become inured.

    His motive is to protect children from the irreversible effects of these drugs, which may include infertility, anorgasmia, osteoporosis and an impact on brain development. His great crime is to look at the available evidence and err on the side of caution. The known harms outweigh the benefits of this experimental treatment.

    Immediately after Streeting announced this, he was accused of having blood on his hands. A lot of incorrect statistics were bandied around about the suicides of teenagers who have been said to kill themselves because of a lack of access to puberty blockers.

    Is it any surprise that those who cheer on the sterilisation and mutilation of young female bodies (for that is mostly what we are talking about, this huge spike in adolescent girls identifying as trans) are also happy to use these figures to fuel social contagion, therefore ignoring all the guidelines on how we talk about suicide?…

    Notable figures such as the fox-killing tax lawyer Jolyon Maugham and my former “colleague” Owen Jones – as well as some delusional Labour MPs (Lewis, Whittome, Creasy, Sultana among them) – seem unable to look at the actual facts because they are invested in a belief system that needs the “trans child” to justify all sorts of misogynist ideas about trans adults.

    What we have seen over the last decade is that middle-aged men, who choose to identify as women, really have little to do with confused teenage girls, as Bev Jackson of the LGB alliance pointed out. Adults may change their bodies as they desire, children may not – and this is basic safeguarding, seemingly abandoned by the Left….

    I am not holding my breath for any acknowledgement that all the women who put their jobs on the line because of our concerns knew what we were talking about. We were told we did not care about gender non-conforming children – on the contrary: we cared enough to fight this insidious medical experiment.

    Where have you been Labour? Incurious and incorrect mostly. Now that you are taking a stand, the deluge of abuse begins, you may one day consider how you became indoctrinated or you may rewrite history. Once the arguments about trans kids fall, the whole damn house of cards begins to collapse.

    But among the rubble, don’t forget those of us who have kept the receipts still know exactly where they are.

  • In praise of Wes

    Kathleen Stock in the Telegraph. Wes Streeting is right about puberty blockers – "We need brave adults in the room to defend vulnerable families from the policy demands of activists".

    [I]n the aftermath of the Cass Review, the evidence – or more precisely, lack of evidence – in the area of medical interventions upon children is absolutely clear. According to its author, eminent paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass: “we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender distress”.

    Even so, for decades – both at UK’s Gids clinics and globally – endocrinologists in league with psychologists have been chemically arresting natural puberty in physically healthy children under the auspices of tackling mental illness: a bold gambit indeed, and one that many would call utterly reckless. A growing number of international clinicians are now expressing grave reservations, both in light of serious potential side effects and because it is far from clear that blocking puberty systematically alleviates mental distress in any case.

    One well-recognised problem is a potential reduction in future fertility; another worry concerns early onset osteoporosis; and another has to do with arrested cognitive function at a crucial stage of brain development. Post-Cass, the use of blockers is to be strictly controlled within NHS settings, but commercial providers such as GenderGP have insisted they will carry on supplying what they claim is a huge market. Thanks to the leadership of Streeting and his counterpart Victoria Atkins before him, we now seem closer to protecting thousands of families from the clutches of these unscrupulous businesses.

    Predictably the Health Secretary is now facing a backlash, and especially from those who have staked careers, reputations, or incomes on claiming that puberty blockers are simply a fully reversible “pause button”. Susie Green, former CEO of Mermaids, has called the ban “murderous” and said Streeting has “blood on his hands”, referring to her long-debunked claim that the use of puberty blockers reduces the risk of suicide in gender-distressed youth.

    Former tax lawyer turned activist Jolyon Maugham – whose organisation The Good Law Project is currently mounting a legal challenge to Atkins’ original legislation – has referred to an “explosion of deaths amongst those on the NHS waiting list since NHS England introduced a softer version of the ban”, also demanding that Streeting “listen to trans people”.

    Not forgetting Owen Jones, who tweeted that "there is already evidence of a huge surge in the deaths of young trans people since their healthcare provision was trashed. A terrifying moment." There is, of course, no such evidence.

    Yet when questioned about Maugham’s suicide claim by a US newspaper, Cass said she had “spoke with a member of Gids staff who reported that there had been an increase in deaths among children on the waiting list, but no evidence was provided.” With what we now know about the ideological bent of Gids and its unstructured and chaotic approach to treatment, the fact that its former staff are once again making wild claims without supplying evidence is hardly surprising.

    The tragedy of this area of medicine for a whole generation is that it ever became so intensely politicised, with advocates arguing for child transition because it supposedly helps achieve social justice, and not because there is robust, non-anecdotal evidence that it helps the child.

    Literature on medical scandals generally describes “the therapeutic illusion”, where both patients and doctors can end up falsely believing they see a drug working in particular cases. Given this possibility, allowing patients and their families to decide whether physically invasive interventions are needed or not would be unconscionable. And yet this is what activists such as Green and Maugham appear to be pressuring Streeting to do.

    Thankfully, he seems to recognise that fantasies of justice or personal liberation cannot be allowed to override the sober application of established research methods – and especially when it comes to the wellbeing of young people. It is to be hoped that Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is paying attention: for as Cass makes clear, “The importance of what happens in school cannot be under-estimated … it is important that school guidance is able to utilise some of the principles and evidence from the Review”.

    In both education and medicine, making up policy for minors according to loud activist demands is no longer a morally defensible option. We need brave adults back in the room; and in this case, Streeting seems to be one of them.

    Also, see Prof. Sallie Baxendale explaining how important puberty is for cognitive deevelopment, and how irresponsible are the claims that you can just stop it and then turn it back on again. 

  • Multiplied and become more savage

    The Europeans campaigned to get rid of the Jews by packing them off to Palestine – and now the Americans are planning to do the same with their black population, packing them off to Egypt. Dr. Wassim Al-Sissy, urologist by profession and an avid Egyptologist, has the details:

    Wassim Al-Sissy: "[The Europeans] had enough of the Jews, and were looking what to do with them. There was a lot of persecution in Europe, and they wanted to get rid of them."

    Interviewer: "Get rid of the Jews?"

    Al-Sissy: "Yes, the Jews. There was the story from 1897 with Theodor Herzl and his Congress and all that… The Jews also wanted to leave and have an independent country, where they would not be second-class citizens. The motivation on both sides converged – the [Europeans] wanted to get rid of them, and the Jews wanted to leave. So the [Europeans] decided to pave the ground, by robbing history: 'Palestine is yours, it's the Promised Land, you used to live there.' […]

    "The [Americans] now have the same problem with the blacks, who have multiplied and have become more savage. I was at a conference in New York. I was standing on the sidewalk, watching. For every twenty cars driven by a black person, there was one car with a white driver. This is how far it has gone. The blacks have done even better than the Jews. They reached the White House – Obama, for example. So [the Americans] started to think that they should get rid of these people. But how? By sending them back to [Africa]?"

    Interviewer: "And those are supposed to be the countries of equality, no racism, and no discrimination…"

    Al-Sissy: "No, no. This is all nonsense, from A to Z. It was exposed recently with regard to Gaza. So what to do? They decided, first of all, to rob history. Where should we send them? Let's send them to Egypt. This will resolve many things. We will get rid of them, and they want this as well, because they do not want to remain second-class…"

    Interviewer: "So this is how the West wants to get rid of the blacks?"

    Al-Sissy: "Yes, get rid of them. They expect global Zionism and Israel to help in this, because these American blacks would replace the Egyptians as their neighbors. The Egyptians boycott Israel and they know this boycott will remain forever."

    Interviewer: "Absolutely."

    Al-Sissy: "If the history and geography of this region change, Israel will be pleased. This is the reason for the massive funds that Israel and global Zionism provide to the Afrocentric movement. The amounts are crazy. You have no idea. […]

    "There are tribes called the Esbet, or something like that. They eat human flesh and sleep on the skulls of the people they eat. Is this the Egyptian civilization? This is what they like to bring here? They are cannibals. These tribes in Senegal are cannibals. Maybe they have stopped doing this, but they used to do this in the past. They live on the skulls of the people they eat. Can you compare this to what [the West] has gained from the great and wonderful Egyptian civilization?"

  • Following the evidence

    A surprise Streeting ally:

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  • Labour civil war

    Some Labour responses to Wes Streeting's puberty blocker ban, from Steerpike at the Spectator:

    1. Stella Creasey: ‘Cass review recommended caution, not exclusion, for any treatment… [I] will always be [an] MP who listens to demand for better research and evidence base for help for those with gender dysphoria, not [one who] abandons them.’
    2. Nadia Whittome: ‘I know the distress the puberty blockers ban is causing… No matter what happens in court, I will continue fighting for the government to scrap it.’
    3. Zarah Sultana: ‘Young people – cis and trans – must have access to healthcare they need. I’ll always stand with the trans community.’

    This one isn't going away. 

  • Reporting from Gaza

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  • Misrepresentation and institutional capture

    Victoria Smith at UnHerd on the puberty blocker ban:

    It certainly feels extreme, even to those of us who know it shouldn’t. Labour Health Minister Wes Streeting reportedly plans “to make trans puberty blocker ban permanent”. It’s a decision which, according to the commentator Owen Jones, “will devastate the lives of so many trans people”. The Good Law Project’s Jolyon Maughan goes further, claiming: “these measures will kill trans children.” Vulture Capitalism author Grace Blakely agreed: “Kids are going to die because of this.” Presumably, this is not the speedy end to the culture wars for which Keir Starmer was hoping.

    Around 15 years ago, this would have looked very different. Let’s try to imagine it: in response to disturbing reports from whistleblowers, a report finds that vulnerable children — predominantly those who are autistic, have been in care, have experienced sexual abuse and/or would otherwise grow up to be gay — have been given experimental drugs which set them on a path to sterilisation and lifelong health problems. It would be a scandal. Any health minister willing to stop it would be a hero, while those who had facilitated it would be justifiably shamed. And yet here we are, in 2024, with Streeting the one accused of having “blood on his hands”.

    It is hard to fathom the degree of misrepresentation and institutional capture that has led us to this point. Fathom it we must, however, if we are to undo all of the harm that has been done. While in the run-up to the election Starmer sought to appeal to both sides in “the trans debate”, suggesting that the only real problem was the “toxicity”, most of us could have told him it was never going to be that easy.

    The past decade has seen the medical abuse of gender non-conforming children recast as a progressive cause. The child who fears puberty, hates their sexed body, wishes they had been born the opposite sex — the child, that is, who needs love, support and acceptance as they move through one of the most volatile, difficult life stages — has been reinvented as “the trans child”, whose flight from the self must be validated. Experimental drugs and surgeries are now sold as “gender affirmation”. If we do not affirm these children they will kill themselves, at least according to those who have overseen and endorsed the building of this harmful narrative.

    Poor Wes Streeting is now experiencing the kind of vitriol that was reserved in the ranks of the Labour Party for Rosie Duffield. Well…worse, in fact. He was one of theirs, but he's finally understood what's at stake. A traitor to the cause, in other words.

    It remains to be seen whether some of Labour’s more “trans-friendly” MPs finally take a step back. Eventually, they will have to, no matter how implicated — either personally or politically — they have become in the transing of children. The shamefulness of the situation is there for all to see. The construction of the trans child has served a broader political purpose, and once this is dismantled many other central tenets of trans activism will fall apart. It has to happen now, though, regardless of how brutal and lacking in that all-important nuance it feels.

    Labour cannot “both sides” this. We either go back to recognising that all children, especially the most vulnerable, have a right to grow, or we move further towards treating drugs, surgeries and lifelong pain as “just the way things are” for some. Streeting was brave and principled enough to change his mind on this issue. Others have to follow. It may not be comfortable, but this is the only way back.