Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Iranian death threat

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  • Music festival goers 3

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  • Music festival goers 2

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  • Music festival goers

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  • Starmer and Duffield

    Kate Maltby at i news:

    When Labour leader Keir Starmer faced voters on BBC Question Time last week, he was tripped up not, as some male pundits predicted, by a question about his equivocations on Jeremy Corbyn, but by one about his equivocations on Duffield – which provoked an explosive intervention by JK Rowling. Debating Rishi Sunak this Wednesday, Starmer refused to even respond to a direct question about Duffield from chair Mishal Husain.

    To understand the depth of Rowling’s anger, and of women who share her perspective, we need to go back to that first major parliamentary speech. It should have been the defining moment of Rosie Duffield’s career.

    Colleagues wept. The Speaker, John Bercow, termed it “simultaneously horrifying and as moving a contribution” as he had heard in his 22 years in parliament. Harriet Harman, the godmother of the Labour women’s movement, said of Duffield: “What she said just now will save lives. We are incredibly proud of her.

    ” Here, it seemed, was an abuse survivor, who had lived the female experience of male violence and was prepared to give a voice to it. It was two years after the #MeToo movement erupted, a moment when the energy of the women’s movement, in Westminster and the world, was all about breaking silences.

    Within a year, Duffield was a pariah. Her first crime was to press the “like” button on a Piers Morgan tweet in August 2020, in which the broadcaster had responded to a CNN article about “individuals with a cervix” at risk of cervical cancer, with the phrase “do you mean women?” A local opponent of Duffield – a Corbyn supporter named Sarah Cundy, formerly notorious for expressing “solidarity” with North Korea – highlighted this activity on her own feed, tweeting “add to the list of reasons Rosie Duffield needs booting, she’s a transphobe too”. Duffield challenged her, raising a question: “I’m a ‘transphobe’ for knowing that only women have a cervix….?!”

    All hell broke loose. LGBT+ Labour called for Starmer to take “swift action” against Duffield. Two of Duffield’s staffers resigned. A year later, Keir Starmer was finally pinned down by Andrew Marr, who asked specifically if it was transphobic to say “only women have a cervix”. Starmer replied that “it is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.”…

    But none of this is what Starmer was asked about when Marr simply asked him in September 2021 whether it was “transphobic” to say “only women have a cervix”. None of this was at issue when Starmer replied: “It is something that should not be said.” None of it explains why he changed tack this April, accepting when asked on ITV about Duffield’s cervix comment that “biologically, she of course is right about that”.

    That is why it was so galling to Duffield’s supporters when Starmer recently told Question Time that he had chosen his words to Marr because he was “worried at the time… about how the debate was being conducted, because it got very toxic, very divided, very hard line”. To JK Rowling, as she later wrote in The Times, “the impression given by Starmer at Thursday’s debate was that there had been something unkind, something toxic, something hardline in Rosie’s words”.

    Like Duffield, Rowling is a survivor of domestic violence. Like Duffield, she now faces violent threats. No wonder that neither woman reacts warmly to men telling them their own language is the problem. But Starmer’s answer also rankled with other gender-critical women who had been denounced by comrades in Labour and were amazed to hear Starmer suggest that he was helpfully detoxifying this debate by adding to the pile-on.

    Starmer seems not to understand this anger. Before the election was called, Labour even thought they had a chance of winning Rowling’s endorsement; I believe that Labour-linked figures employed political consultants to war-game such an announcement. After Starmer’s Question Time appearance, a male friend asked me if there was any answer Starmer could have given to the question about Duffield to satisfy other gender-critical women. There was such an answer: Starmer needed to acknowledge that Duffield’s original tweet in August 2020 was legitimate speech in a free society.

    Instead, Starmer made things worse by framing his position on biology as an endorsement of Tony Blair’s views “with regard to men having penises and women having vaginas”. Biological reality, it seemed, is acceptable when stated by a man (Blair); but not by a woman who has experienced its violent effects (Duffield).

    Gender-critical feminists have plenty of reason to worry that Starmer still doesn’t grasp their concerns. Yet what women want in Labour most of all is an acknowledgement that they have been punished for stating facts which men – like Blair, like Starmer – now freely assert. This matters, even more than clarifying Labour’s still-muddled position on how to reform the gender recognition certificate or even its refusal to accept that the Equalities Act needs clarifying. (Despite Starmer’s denials, the terms of the Act for biological sex are sufficiently unclear that there is a judicial review working its way towards the Supreme Court.)

    Women resent being ordered not to speak. This is why the actor David Tennant caused such anger this week when he said of Kemi Badenoch, the gender-critical equalities minister, “I just want her to shut up”. That is why this issue will continue to dog Starmer. He needs to apologise to Duffield, as Wes Streeting did so admirably last year, for his failures to respect her voice. That kind of apology might look like leadership.

    There's something perverse about Starmer's unwillingness to apologise to Rosie Duffield. Does he really not understand the problem? – or, as I'm beginning to suspect, has he been warned by colleagues that he mustn't go there, on pain of rejection by all the trans-friendly Labour figures who've been so rude to her.

  • At Glastonbury

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    "But go ahead – wave their flag and chant their battle cry and don’t say a fucking word about the Jewish children murdered at a music festival for peace"

  • Non-binary composer

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  • Making money the gender way

    Helen Webberley, interviewed in the Times:

    Webberley, 55, who co-founded GenderGP with her doctor husband Michael, 65, styles herself as an advocate for transgender people in the UK and across the world.

    However, Michael has been struck off for treating transgender children, Webberley herself was taken to a tribunal (her suspension was later quashed), and the High Court has been told how a patient at the clinic was prescribed “dangerously high” hormone levels.

    The issues have prompted concern about GenderGP, including from Dr Hilary Cass, the author of the comprehensive review of transgender healthcare in the UK.

    One former GenderGP employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that staff at the clinic had been told they were treating 10,000 patients.

    “When I started GenderGP I thought: ‘We’ll get a cohort of people that need us and then it’ll just stop’,” Webberley said this week in London. “(Then) everyday more and more. The demand… we’ve just never caught up. We have tens of thousands of people needing our care and more all the time.”

    GenderGP is registered in Singapore, a country where gay marriage is illegal, and is not registered with England’s Care Quality Commission.

    Webberley denied that the decision to base it in Singapore was to avoid scrutiny, explaining that they chose the nation due to GenderGP’s “mission to serve globally”.

    Ha! 

    Scrutiny has intensified on private gender clinics since the closure of the Gids clinic at the Tavistock Centre, which was shuttered after whistleblowers warned that children were being rushed through the service and set on a medical pathway.

    Webberley agreed that the clinic needed to be closed, but said that it wasn’t affirmative enough. Traumatised parents told her that clinicians asked children “horrifically abusive” questions and conducted “horrific examinations”.

    She added: “A few years later, we have the Tavistock scandal. And the Tavistock scandal is: they’re giving our children treatment too soon.

    “And I’m like: ‘You could not be further away from the truth here’. So the Tavistock… got closed down for being too affirmative, when it was completely the opposite.”

    But what about the whistleblowers?

    “They don’t like trans people”, Webberley exclaimed, before defending the use of gender medicine.

    She described puberty blockers as “the most natural medicine”. Testosterone, when used on people whose testicles don’t work, was the “most natural drug in the world”.

    “People are alarmed at the side effects — well, these are the natural hormones we produce every day”, she added.

    Puberty blockers as “the most natural medicine”?? They suppress the natural production of hormones in growing children. They're prescribed as treatment for prostate cancer and endometriosis. There's absolutely nothing natural about them – quite apart from the evidence that they almost invariably lead to hormone replacement therapy and invasive surgery. And girls' testicles don't work because they don't have any – which is why testosterone, for them, is not at all natural. Jesus.

    Still, the money keeps rolling in…

    Comments for the article turned off. Why do they do that? It would have been fun seeing the Times readers tearing into this appalling woman.

  • Cinicinnati incline

    Ca. 1915. "Mount Adams incline, Cincinnati, Ohio."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

  • Indifferent to her discomfort

    After those Darlington nurses, more NHS changing room outrage:

    A female NHS worker is taking a health board to an employment tribunal after being forced to use a changing room alongside a male colleague who identifies as a woman.

    The woman was initially suspended by NHS Fife after complaining to her bosses that allowing men who had changed gender to use the room breached the Equality Act which protects female-only spaces.

    Although this is the first legal case to emerge in Scotland, at least another four female health workers have contacted women’s rights groups over similar issues.

    Health boards in Scotland now follow NHS guidance that allows transgender men and women to use female or male-only spaces such as toilets and changing rooms according to their gender identity.

    In England, a group of female nurses are already taking their NHS trust to a tribunal claiming sex discrimination and harassment after they were forced to use a changing room alongside a man who identifies as a woman.

    In late 2023 the female NHS worker was in the female-only changing room alone late at night at the end of her shift when the trans woman started to undress in front of her.

    She said that she felt intimidated and embarrassed by her presence, but she contends that the trans woman was indifferent to her discomfort and told her that she had the same right to be in the female-only changing room.

    The trans woman then complained to NHS Fife about the worker in late December 2023 and shortly after, and without any investigation, they placed her on “special leave” and then suspended her from duty in January 2024 pending an investigation into her “alleged unwanted behaviours towards another member of NHS Fife staff”.

    They never say whoops, so sorry – do they? – these male interlopers into women's spaces. Never a moment's concern about the women they intimidate. Which is largely the point, I suppose. That and the "validation".

    For Women Scotland, a women’s rights group, has been alerted to four similar cases in health boards across the country. A spokeswoman said: “It’s incredibly important that female NHS staff are afforded basic privacy and dignity at work..

    “Staff often have to get changed in and out of uniforms several times a day and it only takes one man in their changing room to have a detrimental impact on multiple women.

    “All health boards need to be aware of women’s human rights and not cast them aside in a mistaken belief that a man who declares he feels like a woman takes priority.”