Mick Hartley

Another sign that the gender tide is turning:

A social worker who was suspended over her gender critical views has been awarded almost £58,000 in damages from Westminster city council and Social Work England.

In what lawyers described as an unprecedented move by a court to award exemplary damages against a regulator, an employment tribunal called for both the council and the watchdog to train their staff in the principles of freedom of speech.

Rachel Meade, the social worker, said she was “delighted with such a positive judgement after a such a long and dreadful experience. It’s been a hard fight, but I feel relieved and liberated that justice and freedom of speech has prevailed.”

Meade, from Dartford, Kent, had sued the council and Social Work England in 2022 for harassment and sex discrimination after she was suspended over her belief that a person “cannot change their sex”.

Meade was given a one-year warning by case examiners at Social Work England after the regulator received a complaint from a member of the public in 2020 about posts that she had shared or liked on Facebook. The council then suspended her on charges of gross misconduct before giving her a final written warning….

Awarding the damages, the tribunal judge, Richard Nicolle, said that Social Work England’s actions constituted a “serious abuse of its power as a regulatory body”….

As well has making the damages award, the tribunal recommended that the council act within six months to ensure “that all of its managers and human resources staff receive training on freedom of expression and protected belief”.

A thread from Legal Feminist:

Exemplary damages are awarded to punish conduct that is "oppressive, arbitrary or unconstitutional".

They are rare. The Legal Feminists are not aware of any other case in which exemplary damages have been awarded against a regulator.

Explaining the award, the tribunal said that SWE had "allowed its processes to be subverted to punish and suppress the Claimant's lawful political speech".

Both respondents must also pay aggravated damages.

Aggravated damages are awarded when a party has behaved in a "high-handed, malicious, insulting or oppressive manner" in committing the act of discrimination….

This is, in other words, a big deal.

This comment by @billybragg perfectly sums up what left wing women have taken from left wing men over the last few years. The problem isn’t whether Julie Bindel and I are correct on the issues, but that certain right-wingers agree with us.

If you’ve spent any time at all on the… pic.twitter.com/4Xhcu2n0Cv

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 28, 2024

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Full text:

If you’ve spent any time at all on the left of politics, you’re familiar with the progressive male class warrior, usually middle-class himself, whose interest in women’s issues begins and ends with sex work, stripping and abortions. He might claim to be a feminist ally and mutter vaguely about ‘equality’ if the need arises, but when a genuine assault on women’s rights erupted under his nose, he cut left wing women adrift without a second thought. He expected us to be so blindly tribal that we’d surrender single sex spaces, jettison the very language we use to describe ourselves, give up fair sport, agree rapists should be locked up in women’s prisons and that lesbians are bigots for not wanting to sleep with the penis-ed, because (horrors!) some people on the right thought these things were wrong, too.

Over the last few years, a huge number of PMCWs have become men’s rights activists in all but name, and it’s been profoundly depressing, if not entirely unexpected, to see how enjoyable they’ve found it. Even while attacking women for finding themselves on the same side as right-wingers, the PMCWs stampeded to join the team that was threatening women with rape and violence, harassing women’s conferences, attempting to block access to gender critical events and physically assaulting female demonstrators. PMCWs are everywhere online, lecturing women reliant on state-run services for not welcoming the male-bodied into communal changing rooms and rape crisis shelters, presuming to police women’s language and tone, turning a blind eye to all statistics on male sexual violence that might contradict the ‘you’re all scaremongering bigots’ narrative and demonstrating that their deepest empathy will always be reserved for those who were born with a penis.

The truth is that the left has fucked up monumentally on gender identity ideology and until it owns the mistake, it will continue to hand the right valid talking points. As more and more PMCWs realise this, they’ll take shameless refuge in accusations that we, the women criticising the injustice and insanity of gender identity ideology, were enabling the far-right. The fact is that they’ve done exactly that, by refusing to accept that there was anything wrong with a movement that was causing serious harm to troubled young people, trampling all over women’s rights and seeking to remove single-sex services for the most vulnerable.

The sense of betrayal women on the left feel towards men like Bragg will take a long time to disappear, if it ever does. I think we all take some grim satisfaction, though, in the fact that evidence of the PMCWs’ misogyny and complicity is a matter of public record, because the panicky back-pedalling and whitewashing that’s just begun is quite something to behold.

Here's that Billy Bragg Observer interview.

Photographer Steve Conlan in a new addition to the Café Royal Books catalogue. 

[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Steve Conlan]

Here's the trailer:

See the full film here.

From the JC:

A documentary about the rape and sexual crimes committed by Hamas terrorists on and after the October 7 massacre has been published online to watch for free.

The film, entitled Screams Before Silence and featuring eye-witness testimonies from survivors, accounts from first responders, and interrogation footage of members of Hamas, provides considerable evidence for a campaign of systematic rape by the terror group during its devastating assault on southern Israel six months ago.

The documentary is fronted by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg who in the film returns to kibbutzim that were targeted on October 7 with former residents to hear in heart-wrenching detail what happened to them that morning.

Sandberg also travels to the site of the Nova music festival massacre, which is now scattered with hundreds of newly planted trees, Israeli flags, and the pictures of all those murdered.

Between footage filmed by both Nova festival survivors and Hamas, first responders to the massacre tell Sandberg harrowing accounts of what they witnessed when arriving.

“Everywhere we go there are bodies on the road, there are bodies everywhere, everywhere. It’s an indescribable catastrophe,” one responder said.

A volunteer at ZAKA (Disaster victim identification) said that despite being trained to collect body parts and bodies in hard situations, he “doesn’t have words to explain what we saw.” They found mutilated bodies “cut to pieces, you couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman, everything was ripped,” he said, and many bodies were naked.

One woman was found by ZAKA inside a home, under a mattress, with “nails around her female organs… She’s a woman so you could do whatever you want.”

Another reasoned: “When you see one woman, then another, and another, all with signs of abuse in the groin area, you understand that this wasn’t a random thing.”

The Times of Israel:

The hour-long film, created in cooperation with Israel’s Kastina Productions, provides first-hand accounts from survivors, freed hostages, first responders, and legal, medical, and forensic experts. Sandberg is present throughout the film either interviewing individuals in a studio or accompanying them to October 7-related sites.

What emerges is not only an understanding of the mass scale and barbarism of Hamas’s sexual attacks against women but also their deliberate, pre-meditated, and systematic nature.

“When the body of the woman is violated, it symbolizes [the violation] of the body of the whole nation,” Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, former vice-president of the United Nations Commission on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, says in the documentary.

The film’s testimonies detail a horrific truth that was largely brushed aside by a report released earlier this week by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in which he declined to include Hamas among organizations suspected by the UN of committing acts of sexual violence during conflict. That report noted there is evidence that sex crimes were committed during the Palestinian terror group’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel, but did not specifically attribute responsibility to Hamas.

Transgenderism's most impressive feat was convincing a significant percentage of society that men attempting to coerce and manipulate women into sex they don't want is somehow "a sign of the changing times" when it's actually a tale as old as time. pic.twitter.com/3BjD0fCAta

— The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@Rob_ThaBuilder) April 27, 2024

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Welcome news from the Telegraph:

The NHS is to crack down on transgender ideology in hospitals, with terms like “chestfeeding” set to be banned.

Victoria Atkins, the Health Secretary, will this week announce a series of changes to the NHS constitution which sets out patients’ rights.

Referring to “people who have ovaries” rather than “women” will also be prohibited under plans to ensure hospitals use clear language based on biological sex.

The new constitution will ban transgender women from being treated on single-sex female hospital wards to ensure women and girls receive “privacy and protection” in hospitals.

Patients will also be given the right to request that intimate care is carried out by someone of the same biological sex….

Kemi Badenoch, the women and equalities minister, has backed calls for a public inquiry into the “pervasive influence” of transgender ideology in the NHS.

The new NHS constitution will emphasise the importance of using “sex-specific” language in the health service after references to women were expunged from advice on the menopause and diseases such as cervical and ovarian cancer.

Excellent. Though future generations may wonder how we ever got ourselves into this mess in the first place.

Susie Linfield wrote about The return of the progressive atrocity last November, in response to the left's embrace of Hamas after the Oct 7th pogrom, which she characterised as "a kind of moral rot". She's now interviewed by Robert Boyers in Salgamundi, again on the left's persistent determination to misread the situation in Gaza. On the grotesque attempts, for instance, to compare Israel to Nazis, and Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto:

Do I really have to delineate the differences between the Warsaw, Lodz, and other ghettos under Nazis supervision and the situation in Gaza before the war? Good lord. Well, for a start: Jews—who, of course, had never attacked Germany, Poland, or any other country—were herded into those Eastern European ghettos to be beaten, starved, tortured, terrorized, and murdered in large numbers in preparation for the remnants being deported to the death camps. Gaza is a mini-state run by Hamas, a well-armed, well-financed terror group that has built an enormous underground city for the express, and only, purpose of storing enormous quantities of military equipment with which to attack Israel. Before this war, the streets of Gaza were patrolled by Hamas, not Israel. Gazans are the recipients of massive amounts in international aid—and Hamas receives enormous sums from Qatar and Iran. So far as I know, no one was aiding the Jews in the ghettos. Gazan women have traditionally had a relatively high fertility rate. None of this sounds too much like Jewish life under the Nazis. Most of all: The Nazis aimed to kill every Jew in the world. That has nothing to do with the Zionist project, even in its most brutal and reactionary iterations.   

Should I go on?…

Gaza, even before the war, was a very bad place. And more important: It was a politically hopeless place. That is what is so devastating, and so dangerous. But it has attained an almost mythological status in much of the world’s imagination—the ninth circle of hell, so to speak. It was not “like a Jewish ghetto” in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, as Gessen charges, and it was not a “concentration camp,” as some have even more egregiously charged. In a recent report in the New Yorker, David Remnick quotes Mustafa Barghouti, a West Bank politician, castigating the destruction that Israel is causing to Gaza’s “cities, mosques and universities, schools and courts and hospitals.” Does this sound like the Warsaw Ghetto, or Treblinka? Far from being completely isolated from the world, Gazans have an entire United Nations agency, consisting of 13,000 workers for a population of two million, devoted to their health and education—which Syrian, and South Sudanese, and Rohingyan, and millions of other refugees definitely do not. Numerous humanitarian organizations worked there. It had apartment buildings, restaurants, shops, pharmacies. The charge of “liquidation” is also hyperbole. Palestinian casualties in the current war are staggeringly high. But there will eventually be a ceasefire, and Gaza will still be one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Virtually all the Jews in the Nazi ghettos were murdered; that’s liquidation. I feel angry, and somehow degraded, at having to address these specious, grotesque comparisons. Again: The Israelis aren’t Nazis, and the Hamas aren’t Nazis. There’s a kind of repetition compulsion at work here. Can we please put the Nazi metaphors to rest?

Worth reading in full.

The "debate" over trans women (men) competing against women continues to rumble on, despite the obvious fact which everyone knows: that men have an inbuilt biological advantage over women in sport which no amount of messing around with testosterone level tests can disguise. It's perhaps the clearest indication in the whole trans debate of how ideology can warp minds – can blind "be kind" people to the bleeding obvious. These trans athletes are not so much poor victims being denied their right to compete as mostly sociopathic men who see the chance to win stuff which they wouldn't have a hope of winning against other men, and care not one tiny jot for the women athletes they defeat so easily.

From the NYT this week, on what they like to call "the unsettled and fractious debate about bans on transgender athletes":

A new study financed by the International Olympic Committee found that transgender female athletes showed greater handgrip strength — an indicator of overall muscle strength — but lower jumping ability, lung function and relative cardiovascular fitness compared with women whose gender was assigned female at birth.

That data, which also compared trans women with men, contradicted a broad claim often made by proponents of rules that bar transgender women from competing in women’s sports. It also led the study’s authors to caution against a rush to expand such policies, which already bar transgender athletes from a handful of Olympic sports.

The study’s most important finding, according to one of its authors, Yannis Pitsiladis, a member of the I.O.C.’s medical and scientific commission, was that, given physiological differences, “Trans women are not biological men.”

Eh?? Then what the fuck are they? This is obfuscatory nonsense.

Joan Smith at UnHerd:

It’s one of those unfathomable mysteries. Generations of athletes have been segregated by sex, with men’s times consistently faster than the women’s. Now it turns out that the whole thing was unnecessary, because a new study suggests that a bunch of unfit men don’t have much advantage over women who exercise regularly. I mean, really?…

One can almost hear the palpable sigh of relief at the paper, which has otherwise gone a bit terfy since the publication of the Cass Report. The study’s most important finding, the newspaper announces, is that “trans women are not biological men.”

Cathy Devine, who was senior lecturer in sport and physical activity at the University of Cumbria for more than two decades, was caustic on X. “This study compared unfit, overweight trans women (males) to fit females,” she wrote. Sports scientist Tommy Kundberg previously explained that “the cohorts are not matched and the main comparison is between fit/trained reference women and unfit transgender women.”…

It’s all a distraction from the obvious fact that men are bigger and stronger than women. Men are on average 13 cm, or five inches, taller and their skeletons are visibly different, which is how archaeologists are able to identify the sex of people who lived thousands of years ago. The difference can’t be hidden in photographs of medal ceremonies, where six-foot-something men tower over the women they’ve just beaten in manifestly unfair competition.

At a moment when the gender ideology juggernaut is in retreat, the New York Times tuts over the number of “outright bans” on transgender athletes in the US. These “bans” do not exist, except in the fevered imaginations of trans activists who regard a return to time-honoured practice — separate sports categories for men and women — as unspeakably “transphobic”.

With the Olympic Games on the horizon in Paris, the stakes could not be higher. Mediocre male athletes realised some time ago that previously unattainable success was within their grasp, if only they could compete against women rather than the world’s fastest men. They throw tantrums when they’re not allowed to impose their delusions on the rest of us, but they have an insurmountable problem. No research can blind us to the evidence of our own eyes.

Lionel Shriver in the Spectator.

Following the release of the Cass report deprecating NHS ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors as reliant on rubbish medical research, the number of comment pieces disparaging the cult of transgenderism has exploded. Such columns would never have been published even a couple of years ago. Finally, pushing disturbed children and adolescents into damaging and sometimes gruesome treatment in the service of adult fanaticism is starting to look, um – iffy. For outliers who’ve been frantically signalling, ‘Hey! Maybe a society that’s mutilating its own kids has lost its way!’ this watershed should constitute satisfying vindication. It does. That’s the good news.

The bad news: the lie that you can choose to be whichever sex you feel like is entrenched in Britain’s school system. Activist teachers who’ve blithely ignored cautious government guidance aren’t likely to drop their warped ‘genderbread’ lesson plans or their exciting collusion with children against their own parents merely because of a spot of bad press. The fashion for sexually neutral language that gave us ‘birthing people’ and ‘bonus holes’ is embedded in the NHS, the media and many charities, and these dehumanising linguistic abortions won’t likely evaporate overnight….

For the past decade or so, the cultural glorification of what was once sensibly characterised as a rare mental illness has displayed all the hallmarks of an irrational social mania. The fact that we all got the message from the off that if we’re not on board with this stuff we’d better keep our mouths shut is a red flag. Proper manias sweep virtually everyone up in their whirlwinds, and woe to anyone who clings to reality as if clutching a signpost in a gale. Social hysteria does not permit dissent. Those few who refuse to get with the programme will pay the price with exile, opprobrium and professional disgrace – if not, amid the very worst of our communal insanities, with prison or death. We like to think of ourselves as unique individuals, but in a crowd we’re a hive species.

Also:

The age of mania 24 mins:

For middle and upper middle class parents having a trans kid was a “designer handbag”… a gay kid was a passé… a little bit disappointing

Homophobia – internal and extend is at the heart of gender ideology

https://t.co/bWWM3Q6pKH

— Hassan Mamdani (@HassanMamdani) April 24, 2024

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"Baltimore waterfront and skyline." Circa 1912.

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Co.]

A skyline dominated by the Emerson Tower on the left, better known as the Bromo-Seltzer Tower, surmounted by a giant, 20-ton Bromo bottle.