Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Higher suicide attempt risk

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    Um…isn't this the precise opposite of what we've been told, ad nauseam? – that without "gender-affirming surgery" all these "trans kids" would kill themselves?

  • The detransitioner’s tale

    Julie Bindel in the Sun:

    Sinead Watson, is a bright, humorous woman who speaks her mind and has a permanent twinkle in her eyes. But just over a decade ago, 33-year-old Sinead temporarily became Sean, a surly, angry trans man.

    At the age of 20, feeling desperately unhappy, and suffering trauma from serious sexual assaults perpetrated by men, she discovered online trans communities.

    Sinead convinced herself that all of her problems would disappear if she underwent gender reassignment treatment.

    Then, at 23 — having presented as “gender dysphoric” at the Sandyford Gender Clinic in Glasgow — Sinead was able to transition to a trans man with little pushback.

    But within five years of her first appointment she was “deeply regretting” her decision and, aged 27, began living as a woman again.

    Today, Sinead is in permanent pain and discomfort as a result of taking the male hormone ­testosterone, and has scars where her breasts used to be.

    She has been living in a homeless hostel for the past six months after the breakdown of a three-year relationship, and has struggled with alcoholism.

    Sinead tells me: “I’m currently single. My relationship was in tatters because I couldn’t cope with all the trauma in my life.”

    Sinead is angry at the professionals at Sandyford, who she claims led her to believe she could escape her female body.

    She says: “I now must live with the many permanent consequences of the ‘treatment’ I received there.

    “I realised I had made a terrible mistake when I woke up after my double mastectomy.

    “By then I had grown a beard, and my voice had deepened as a result of the testosterone I’d taken. I felt there was no going back.”…

    She explains: “When I was seen by gender clinicians, I was allowed to make a monumental, life-changing decision but I wasn’t offered in-depth counselling. Instead, I was effectively left to self-diagnose.

    “What I clearly needed was therapy. I had been the victim of sexual abuse and I told them, ‘I’m just out of psychiatric hospital. I’ve been suicidal. I have all these issues’.

    “What they should have said is, ‘Let’s talk about how you ended up there’.

    “But they didn’t ask me any questions about my ­history of trauma and abuse.

    “If they had told me, ‘You’ve had some terrible experiences relating to men sexualising you because of your breasts, but there’s nothing wrong with them,’ I may not have felt the need to have them cut off.”

    Instead, they affirmed Sinead immediately at her first appointment, calling out her name to see the ­clinician: “He’s ready for you, Mr Watson.”..

    After Sinead broke down in front of her GP, she was finally referred to a therapist. She says: “When I said I regretted my transition, they suggested that I was perhaps non-binary. It was ­dizzying.

    “I felt ready to kill myself. But I couldn’t put my loved ones through any more, so I decided to go online and find other detransitioned women.

    “I found a surprisingly large ­number of them. And then they told me their stories.

    “I basically went from being ­horrifically depressed and suicidal to so, so angry”.

    Most of the detransitioners Sinead is in contact with are in their early 20s.

    There's quite some way to go before we get the full measure of the lives destroyed by the gender cult, and its extraordinary success in getting young people mutilated in the fantastical belief that people can be "born in the wrong body".

    [Bindel – "Anyone bleating about "why did you write this for the Sun?" complain to the Guardian please."]

  • Mass delusional brainwashed perverse cosplay

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    Full text:

    I'm an Iranian woman and have lived under the Islamic Republic for 20,5 years. I moved to Germany because I thought the values I considered important would be respected in "free" Western countries.

    People cannot even imagine how triggering it is for us to see the unholy unity of islamists and radical leftists. This is the very phenomena that changed the history of my country for the worse. I am beyond disgusted and disturbed.

    To the women standing behind literal terrorists and islamists saying prayers at universities: You don't even know what you're getting yourself into. None of you have read the "Al Nisa" surah, where it is clearly stated that men literally own you and have the right to hit you if you refuse to have sex with them:

    "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband's) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them Means (of annoyance): For Allah is Most High, great (above you all)."

    What you are standing up for today is anything but being "woke" and progressive. You should have the right to protest and stand up for causes that are important to you. But fighting Jewish students, attacking them, not understanding the fact that the hostages have to be brought back home and no peace can exist before that happens is outright wrong. People who truly advocate about and fight for human rights are NOT selective with the causes they care about. Caring about human rights is one thing, standing up behind Islamists, waving Hezbollah and Hamas flags and saying slogans that are against Jews and outright radical are not it.

  • A Jewish student at Bates College in Maine

    Phoebe Stern in Tablet – My Friends Wish I Was Dead:

    What does it mean to be a Zionist student on a college campus today? I have friends at schools all over the country who are struggling. People who are afraid to wear their necklace with a Star of David for fear of repercussions. To be a Zionist is to be an outcast. Classmates think that you are supporting a genocidal, apartheid state. They don’t care enough to hear your story. They don’t care that you lost dear friends and are mourning the pre-Oct. 7 Israel that will never exist again. They turn a blind eye to facts and choose to look only at social media posts that support their antisemitic narrative. What’s the point of arguing with such people? I am reminded of Golda Meir’s line, “You cannot negotiate peace with someone who has come to kill you.”

    Now they have come for me. The antisemitic posts began on Oct. 7, and swung into a higher gear after I spent a week volunteering in Israel over Bates College’s spring break in late February. I pulled three choice quotes of what my fellow students had to say about me. Spoiler: They apparently wish me dead.

    “Big nose mafia going to cancel me but man you know who should’ve finished the job.”

    “Phoebe Stern did [go to Israel] … She fat and ugly anyways … just because she supports genocide doesn’t mean we get to be misogynistic.”

    “She’s a racist bigot and the only question we should be asking ourselves is if she really believes the violent, racist lies she’s been spreading.”

    My mind was reeling. Other Jewish friends at Bates were also attacked. They were accused of being racists and bigots, in writing, both online and on their dorm doors. One post from a Bates classmate advocated that “Hitler should’ve finished off the job.” People were using the anonymity of social media to spread lies and put words in my mouth, that I was going around campus telling people that my Arab peers want to kill me—a sentence that I have never uttered in my life, and wholeheartedly disagree with…

    "Big nose mafia". “Hitler should’ve finished off the job.” Oh boy. When it's presented as progressive and righteous, out come the old antisemitic tropes. Not gone, just lurking there, waiting for the chance to make a comeback.

    As Hadley Freeman notes, there are parallels with gender ideology. Once misogyny and homophobia are dressed up in progressive language, it all comes out…

  • Invited by the Houthis

    Following on from Iran's Shiraz University in their invitation to protesting US students, it's now the turn of those nice Houthis:

    Pro-Palestinian protesters who have taken over US campuses this week have been invited by the Houthis to study in Yemen’s Sana’a University

    Sana’a University, which is run by the Iran-backed Houthis, issued a statement on Friday applauding the “humanitarian” position of students in the US who have occupied university campuses.

    The statement included an email address for any students who wished to enquire about transferring.

    “We are serious about welcoming students that have been suspended from US universities for supporting Palestinians,” an official at Sana’a University said.

    “We are fighting this battle with Palestine in every way we can,” the official added.

    You might think that invitations and support from two of the most repressive regimes in the world – where gays are hung, women are veiled, and Islamic jihad by sword is the ideology – might cause a momentary flicker of doubt with the anti-Israel campus activists as to whether they really are quite the progressives they like to think. Considering the chants we've heard about the Houthis "decolonising" the Red Sea, though, and the "heroics" of Hamas for raping and killing Israelis, the level of delusion would seem to be way too strong for any such critical thinking. 

  • The Corbyn era opened a Pandora’s box

    Yesterday I posted that Hadley Freeman trailer for her Jewish Quarterly article Blindness: October 7 and the Left. Now there's an extract at UnHerd – Why the Left failed on October 7:

    A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: I now think it prepared many of us for the Left’s reaction to October 7, whereas American Jews seemed far more surprised. The gaslighting (the attack didn’t happen), the defences (if it did, Jews deserved it), the hectoring moral superiority (how can you care about that when this is so much more important?): all that we saw after October 7, we had seen under Corbyn….

    When Corbyn was pushed out of Labour in 2020, I dismissed him as a useful idiot, which was right. I also dismissed him as a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again, which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realised that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.

    Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions — values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.

    To make this simplistic ideology even more simple, identity politics divides the world into two racial categories: “white” (defined as colonising oppressors) and “people of colour” (the oppressed). This is how the Left pivoted from talking about class to talking about race. It is also why antisemitism is thriving again on university campuses, as supporters of identity politics combine with activists for black and Muslim causes, who see Jews as ultra-white and therefore oppressive. And to be clear, those activists aren’t necessarily Black or Muslim themselves; in fact, as multiple students have told me, they are often white, but see supporting these causes — and trashing Israel and Jews — as a means of proving their allyship and exonerating themselves from white guilt….

    One of the biggest problems with this framework is its inability to accommodate competing rights, and the idea that two groups can both be right. I got a glimpse of this in 2015, when I started to write about gender ideology, which argues that trans women should be accorded all the rights biological women have, such as access to female single-sex spaces. The problems seemed glaring to me, but as I quickly learned, asking any questions sparked furious accusations of transphobia from the progressive Left.

    Identity politics, you see, is a zero-sum game, and for one group to be all good, the group with competing rights must be all bad. So, in the case of gender ideology, trans people are all good, and women who are anxious about the erosion of their rights are evil. And so identity politics gave Left-wing men a self-righteous cover so they could deride women like me, and feel morally superior for doing so.

    It’s a similar story with the progressive Left’s reaction to Israel and Palestine: a lot of it is about antisemitism, but identity politics obscures the bigotry, giving the Left a preeningly self-righteous excuse to ignore Hamas’s terrorism and violence against Jews. This comparison between how women and Jews are discussed in identity politics is not new. In February, Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet magazine that, thanks to the energetic efforts of gender ideologue and anti-Israel academic Judith Butler, antisemitism has been “queered”, meaning anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist is seen as analogous to a bigot who hates trans people. Only trans people and Palestinians are seen as oppressed, and never women or Jews….

    Powerful piece.

  • Welcome to Shiraz University

    It's a win-win situation – Iranian university offers scholarships to expelled student protesters in US and Europe.

    An Iranian university is reportedly offering scholarships to American and European students who have been expelled from their universities for participating in pro-Palestine demonstrations.

    According to the Iranian state-owned outlet Press TV, Mohammad Moazzeni, head of Shiraz University in the southern region of Fars, announced the decision during a gathering of students and professors on Monday as a gesture of “solidarity”.

    “Students and even professors who have been expelled or threatened with expulsion can continue their studies at Shiraz University and I think that other universities in Shiraz as well as Fars Province are also prepared [to provide the conditions],” Moazzeni reportedly said.

    The students, free from the colonising imperialist mentality of Zio-American institutions, can experience the liberatory atmosphere of a society dedicated to Palestinian freedom…and the killing of Jews. Perfect.

  • Reporting parents of “trans” child to social services

    It's good that they've apologised, but yes, just a few years ago this was common practice for all those "inclusive" institutions desperate to get their Stonewall or LGBT Youth Scotland certificate of trans idiocy. From the Times:

    An independent school has apologised for reporting parents to social workers when they opposed attempts to classify their child as transgender.

    George Watson’s College in Edinburgh alerted social services in December 2020 after a long dispute in which the parents, acting on advice from psychologists, asked for the school to adopt a “watchful waiting” approach to their child. This involves closely monitoring a child’s view of their gender without making medical or social interventions, such as changing names or pronouns.

    However, the parents say the school insisted on facilitating the child’s wish to identify as a boy. The Times has seen correspondence in which the school said it felt compelled to “share our concerns” with child protection services….

    The mother, who has asked to not be named to protect her child’s anonymity, believes the school’s actions were shaped by its adherence to policies supported by LGBT Youth Scotland, which urges teachers to change toilets from mixed sex to gender neutral. The school had received a gold award from the charity for “LGBTQ+ friendliness” in April 2019.

  • Critical sociology

    What are the chances, eh? A "decolonization and anti-racism scholar" at a Canadian university thinks Zionists are Nazis:

    Brock University has launched a review after a professor praised Hamas’s October 7 atrocities against Israeli civilians, compared the Jewish state to Nazi Germany, and cited antisemitic conspiracy theories in a series of blog posts.

    Tamari Kitossa, a decolonization and anti-racism scholar at Brock University, where he heads the critical sociology department, wrote a four-part series written following the Hamas atrocities, which Kitossa describes as “miraculous.” He argues that Zionism and Nazism are one and the same.

    “Zionism is a colonial project that intended from the start on lebensraum, a project of ethnic cleansing that preceded the coalition of German industrialists, US bankers and Hitler’s gang of thugs that formed the Third Reich,” writes Kitossa in a blog post on his personal website.

    Where do the students get their antisemitism? It's what they're taught.

  • The progressive left hates the Jews

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