Mick Hartley

Kenwood and The Hill, yesterday:

Yes, Scotland's Sandyford Clinic has now paused handing out puberty blockers to troubled teens, but then, as we heard yesterday, Scottish primary schools are being bombarded with gender woo thanks to LGBT Youth Scotland. One step forward, two steps back. Victoria Smith at UnHerd:

There is progress here, certainly. Thanks to this belated return to ethical standards, some children who would have been harmed will be able to grow and thrive. Right now, however, many of them will not want to. The thought of being “forced” to go through the “wrong” puberty must be terrifying them. If the adults around you have spent most of your life affirming your own sense of wrongness, then how could the Sandyford decision seem anything other than barbaric? You’ve been told — by organisations visiting your school, by books in your school library, by teachers, parents and doctors — that the way you feel and behave is incompatible with the sex you have been “assigned”. Why, then, should anyone be barring your only escape?

The problem is not just that evidence-based medicine was abandoned in favour of cultural trends. Any return to basic standards has to go hand-in-hand with a serious critique of the culture. On the same day the Sandyford decision was announced, it was reported that “LGBT champions” are visiting primary schools in Scotland to teach children as young as four about gender identity. That is, to teach them that if they are gender non-conforming they may in fact be the opposite sex — there is no real “championing” of LGB in this entire enterprise.

It is not possible to reform “gender medicine” without addressing the incoherence, bigotry and cruelty of this ideology. Gender-variant children have always existed, usually growing up to be lesbian or gay. The “trans child” was constructed to validate trans-identified adult men and appease homophobic parents, before being championed by individuals more interested in appearing cutting-edge than engaging in the poorly-rewarded, unglamorous work of putting children first.

It is too late for those who were complicit to say they didn’t know. Now we must create an environment in which children bullied into fearing their own physical development can start to feel safe again. It’s time for the bullies to get out of the classroom and off the bookshelves. Back off and let these children grow.

“You are quite openly Jewish. This is a pro-Palestinian march. I am not accusing you of anything, but I am worried about the reaction to your presence.”

Enough is enough. It is time for a major change.

On Saturday 27th April — the next anti-Israel march — we are asking you,… pic.twitter.com/lfJr7UZnif

— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) April 18, 2024

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Full text:

“You are quite openly Jewish. This is a pro-Palestinian march. I am not accusing you of anything, but I am worried about the reaction to your presence.”

Enough is enough. It is time for a major change.

On Saturday 27th April — the next anti-Israel march — we are asking you, Jewish or not, to stand up for the tolerance and decency of which this country is so rightly proud, simply by going for a walk.

For those who want to walk together on the 27th, we will suggest a time and location where people can meet, which we will post on our social media accounts on the 26th. If you would like to be notified of the suggested meeting place and time by e-mail instead, please sign up at http://antisemitism.org/walktogether.

Clueless old fart. https://t.co/Ndbtgs9HZI

— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) April 18, 2024

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Mr Menno:

Dear Straight Man,

Lesbians, gays and bisexuals have every right to freedom of assembly.

Please stop denying us our agency and human rights by implying we have no legitimacy unless we include an entirely different group of people with entirely different, and often incompatible, goals.

Kindly shove this forced-teaming up your arse.

Kind regards,

A Gay Man.

One of many less than complimentary comments.

The Scottish trans saga continues:

Scottish primary schools are appointing children as “LGBT champions” and are being urged to ask pupils as young as four if they are gay, lesbian or trans, The Telegraph can reveal.

Documents show that schools are setting up LGBT clubs and “gender and sexual orientation alliance groups” for pupils as part of their membership of a scheme run by the charity LGBT Youth Scotland.

The charity, which received nearly £1 million of taxpayers’ money last year, also urges head teachers to install gender neutral lavatories and mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, an event critics say is designed to reinforce myths spread by trans activists.

Whack-a-mole. Stonewall is knocked down: up pops "LGBT Youth Scotland".

Miriam Cates, co-chairman of the New Conservatives group of MPs, said: “We have seen from the Cass Review the appalling results of using children as pawns in adult political battles. Indoctrinating small children with sexualised ideologies is deeply unethical and breaks all established safeguarding principles.”

Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Tory Common Sense Group, said: “Those responsible for the outrage of approaching four year olds in this way should be rounded up and charged with child abuse”

Carolyn Brown, an educational psychologist, said: “Children of primary school age are very suggestible and are still at a very early stage of their psychological and emotional development.

“What we are seeing here is the product placement of gender ideology in schools which is potentially very harmful.

“Kids in primary school cannot possibly know if they are LGBT because biologically, psychologically and emotionally they will not yet have the capacity.”

LGBT Youth Scotland in 2022-23 received almost £450,000 in taxpayer funding from the SNP Government and a further £340,000 from local authorities. NHS organisations handed over a further £154,000.

It claims that more than 200 Scottish secondaries, more than half of the national total, and over 40 primary schools, have joined its LGBT charter for education. The fees it charges to join range from £850 to £2,000….

As part of membership, staff must be trained by the organisation, which provides an online guide and letter templates for children wishing to change their gender at school.

Each school joining the scheme is told it must appoint at least two pupils and two staff members as “LGBT Champions” and those hoping to obtain “gold” status are told to consider a survey of pupils to ask them if they are “part of the LGBT community in order to discern whether bullying affects those pupils proportionally within the school”.

Yep – straight out of the Stonewall playbook. Astonishing.

LGBT Youth Scotland states that it has trained more than 5,000 teachers since 2021 and that its scheme means it is “reaching a minimum of 30,000 young people” and successfully changing the “culture and ethos” of Scottish schools.

To achieve its gold award, schools are told they must “undertake at least one activity which specifically addresses the needs of transgender young people” such as “conducting a campaign that addresses trans rights”.

They are also told they must put up the organisation’s posters and rewrite school policies in areas such as transgender inclusion and school uniform to ensure they are “inclusive”.

While England, with the Cass Report, at least gives every indication of finally making a start to clearing up the trans mess, north of the border they're doubling down.

The retired IRGC general may be in a minority in believing that Israel grows hydroponic-style human robots, but then again spreading hatred of Israel – and enabling terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah – does seem to be the IRGC's main function. So why won't the government ban them?

Almost 140 MPs and peers including former cabinet ministers from all the main political parties have written to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to demand that his government finally takes action to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation.

The letter says that in the wake of the IRGC-led drone and missile attack on Israel last weekend, the need to proscribe the IRGC, which the government has been considering since the start of last year, is “more crucial and pertinent” than ever….

“The IRGC has never posed a greater threat within the UK,” says the letter, which was delivered on Thursday morning. “A range of their activities have been publicly disclosed, causing significant concern across our nation. These include assassination plots uncovered and foiled by MI5, intelligence gathering on British-Jewish targets by UK-based criminal networks, intimidation of journalists including Iranian journalists, and radicalisation in British Islamic centres.

“Additionally, the group has held British citizens as hostages and perpetrated numerous killings. Similar patterns of malicious behaviour have been observed by our European allies, including terror attacks in Germany and thwarted plots in Greece and France. Last month, IRGC thugs reportedly even carried out a stabbing against an Iran International journalist outside his home in Wimbledon” – a reference to the attack on the Iranian dissident TV presenter Pouria Zeraati.

The letter in the Times is here.

Jake Wallis Simons in the Spectator:

Lord Renwick, the Labour peer and former Foreign Office mandarin, used to say that young diplomats of a certain breeding suffered from the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’. This, he said, was the tendency to assume that even the most bloodthirsty despot had an inner civilised chap of the sort one might find at Winchester College. Treat him decently and the inner fair-minded fellow would come out. ‘Actually’, Renwick would point out, ‘they’re a bunch of thugs.’

Given Rishi Sunak’s own schooling, the Wykehamist fallacy came to mind when the prime minister’s spokesman made clear that the government would not be banning Iran’s terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Surely if the Iranians could just be persuaded to pull on some pads and play a round of cricket, we could sort this frightful mess out?

According to the PM, Britain will not blacklist the IRGC for fear that the regime would retaliate by breaking off diplomatic relations. Without diplomatic channels, Sunak’s spokesman said, we would be deprived of ‘one of our most effective channels for avoiding escalation.’ I get that. But you might be forgiven for thinking: so what? This is a regime bent on war, murder and the subjugation of the West. Surely it’s no time for more fruitless jaw-jaw?

Meanwhile they operate happily in the UK, targeting Iranian dissidents, stirring up Islamic extremists…

In 2022, the director general of MI5 revealed that the IRGC had attempted ten assassinations in Britain that year. In his annual speech on the threats facing Britain, Ken McCallum said Iran’s ‘aggressive intelligence services’ was actively planning terrorist attacks on British soil, labelling it as ‘the state actor which most frequently crosses into terrorism’. Tehran was a ‘sophisticated adversary’, he added. Last year, Matt Jukes, the head of counter-terrorism policing at the Met, disclosed that 15 Iranian plots to either kidnap or kill people in the UK had been foiled.

The stabbing of journalist Pouria Zeraati this month, believed to be at the hands of the IRGC, was a case in point (it goes without saying that he has called for the group to be banned). But this is far from the first time Iranian agents have threatened violence, or indeed carried it out.

Last year, Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, confirmed that Iranian agents were mapping prominent Jews in Britain for possible targeting in the event of a war with Israel. In 1992, dissident television presenter Fereydoun Farrokhzad was knifed to death in Bonn. In 2021, an Iranian diplomat was convicted of plotting to bomb an opposition rally in Paris. And in 2019, an Iranian ex-pat in Glasgow told the Times that he had been threatened by regime goons with a handgun.

But the chaps at the Foreign Office believe, at the end of the day, that they'll listen to reason and respond to sanctions like sensible fellows..

The conclusion is clear. The fanatics of Tehran are not good chaps at heart that just need to be placated. They are not like you and me, and certainly nothing like Winchester-educated Mr Sunak, or Eton’s Lord Cameron. They are gripped by a deeply malevolent ideology that lusts after an apocalyptic war. They have a threefold strategy to achieve this: overseas militia, ballistic missiles and nukes. They are serious. To think that British sanctions will contain the threat is like trying to stop a rampaging knifeman with a fine.

Former IRGC General Saeed Ghasemi on Tehran TV:

"Since this [Israel] regime is a regime of bastards – this is an expression our Leader has used when referring to them…This is a regime of bastards. We are not fighting human beings on the other side.

"Ten years ago, they began to manufacture human being inside artificial fetuses, like the hydroponic bushes where you grow plants. I saw that they take 10,000 fetuses, on which they perform fertilization.

"Well, they are clearly producing robots made of flesh. They do not know what massacring children and morality even mean. This collective must be annihilated."

He seems sane.

Janice Turner in the Times:

The moment the Cass report was published the Overton window lurched: everything Tavistock whistleblowers and journalists had been ostracised for saying was suddenly mainstream.

It’s tempting to list the cowards, fools, liberal sheep, airhead celebrities who shilled for Mermaids; atheists, humanists, blow-hard podcasters and “fearless” radio stars, right-on male comics who relished the chance to scream at women and spineless Labour politicians, all now claiming that Cass is what they believed all along.

I’ll allow myself the luxury of two names. First Ed Miliband, who in November 2017 devoted his Reasons to be Cheerful podcast to trans issues. Not only did he scorn all opponents of self-ID as “bonkers” but he invited on Dr Helen Webberley, the child hormone-prescribing doctor who ran a private clinic with her husband (who has been struck off the medical register).

I wrote to Miliband privately, linking to articles explaining the effect of her drug regime. “Of course I don’t believe in sterilising children!” thundered this condescending know-all.

The second is Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green, desperate to deep-clean her reputation post-Cass. “I’ve always been deeply concerned,” she said last week, “about the internalised homophobia that is going on for young women that means they think they can’t be a dyke, and they’ve got to be a boy.”

I met Hunt for lunch in 2019 just as she was leaving Stonewall, where she was chief executive. Hunt is slippery smart. At the end, I implored her as a butch lesbian who loves men’s tailoring to make a speech saying that you can look how you like and still be a woman. “It would be so powerful,” I said.

But she never did: because it would have enraged the trans lobby on whose campaign funds she depended. Hunt is a Christian who must know the ninth commandment, so I hope she’s squared her duplicity with God.

There's a Change petition to Strip Ruth Hunt of her peerage for her role in the gender medical scandal.

Stonewall’s irresponsible, deceitful and self-interested behaviour – it went on to offer ‘trans-inclusive courses’ for schools, at a fee – has caused untold havoc. We believe its chief executive at the time, Ruth Hunt, should take responsibility for her charity’s deeply damaging conduct, which played a key role in the scandal now unfolding. It is deeply insulting to the families she has harmed that, instead, Hunt was awarded a peerage and now sits in the House of Lords as Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green, a legislator-for-life.

See also Malcolm Clark at Spiked: How Ruth Hunt turned trans into a religious crusade – and is now trying to dodge responsibility for her role in the ‘trans kids’ scandal.

Jack Delano, January 1943. "Icing platform of the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad. Blue Island Yard south of Chicago."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

An alarming piece from Freddie Sayers at UnHerd on the government-sponsored agency that was set up to counter disinformation but – surprise surprise – is now busy censoring journalism:

“Our team re-reviewed the domain, the rating will not change as it continues to have anti-LGBTQI+ narratives… The site authors have been called out for being anti-trans. Kathleen Stock is acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist.”

This was part of an email sent to UnHerd at the start of January from an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index. It was their justification, handed down after a series of requests, for placing UnHerd on a so-called “dynamic exclusion list” of publications that supposedly promote “disinformation” and should therefore be boycotted by all advertisers.

They provided examples of the offending content: Kathleen Stock, whose columns are up for a National Press Award this week, Julie Bindel, a lifelong campaigner against violence against women, and Debbie Hayton, who is transgender. Apparently the GDI equates “gender-critical” beliefs, or maintaining that biological sex differences exist, with “disinformation” — despite the fact that those beliefs are specifically protected in British law and held by the majority of the population.

Other viewpoints targeted as disinformation include sites which dare to promote the Wuhan lab-leak theory. The targets are, in effect, what Global Disinformation Index co-founder Clare Melford finds personally offensive.

Sayers' conclusion:

At its heart, the disinformation panic is becoming a textbook example of how a “solution” can do more harm than the problem it is designed to address. Educated campaigners such as Clare Melford may think they are doing the world a service, but in fact they are acting as intensifying agents, lending legitimacy to a conspiratorial world view in which governments and corporations are in cahoots to censor political expression. Unless something is done to stop them, they will continue to sow paranoia and distrust — and hasten us towards an increasingly radicalised and divided society.