Mick Hartley

Rosie Duffield in the Mail – Where was Keir Starmer when I was being bullied and threatened by the trans lobby – and, worse, by my colleagues in the Labour Party?

On X, I noticed my colleague Wes Streeting, the Shadow Health and Social Care Secretary, was taking the report very seriously. 'The Cass Review must be a watershed moment for the NHS's gender identity services,' he wrote.

'Children's healthcare should always be led by evidence and children's welfare, free from culture wars. Clinicians and parents alike want the best for children at this crucial development stage.

'This report provides an evidence-based framework to deliver that.'

He went on to urge the Government to act and thanked Dr Hilary Cass and her team for their work, adding: 'I am committed to working constructively with the Health Secretary to put children's health and wellbeing above the political fray.'

It was a mature, sober response and I felt relieved that members of my own party were starting to wake up to the damage being done by this insidious ideology.

But there was also another emotion: anger. Because where had the Labour Party been?

At the forefront of my mind was the old cartoon of the lone woman sitting in a boardroom surrounded by men and one of them says: 'That's an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.' The fact is, many women have been shouting from the rooftops about what is happening to gender-confused children and we have been ignored.

Worse, we have been abused by strangers and colleagues for simply expressing the view that children need safeguarding when it comes to life-changing medication.

Usually, my policy is to never tweet anything in anger. But as I scrolled through X to see that another man — this time a political editor — was describing Wes as 'the only politician to say anything sensible about this issue', the dam burst. I typed out a series of incandescent tweets.

'To the many women, blanked, sidelined, dismissed by male leaders when exposing this for years… As male leaders take applause, praise and credit for simply listening to an expert and finally reading the room… Perhaps less moral cowardice now? No apologies to those 'investigated', reprimanded, passed over, bullied, deselected…'

Earlier this week when we had the debate in the Commons on Cass, we heard new lines from the Labour front bench, who now appear willing to accept the report's recommendations.

But not one senior Shadow Cabinet member has yet approached me. I believe the Labour Party thinks 'the gender issue' doesn't matter to the voting public. For them it's a 'culture war'.

At the heart of this attitude is, I believe, a deep-seated misogyny within the party.

I joined politics to put the needs of my constituents first. When Keir became leader, he promised we would always be able to approach him.

But nothing could be further from the truth. The leader of the Labour Party has almost no personal contact with his backbenchers. The last message I sent to Keir, practically begging for support, was ignored.

Keir is bundled in and out of meetings before you even have a chance to say: 'Have you heard about this major medical scandal at the Tavistock clinic?' The truth is I have as much access to the Leader of the Opposition as any of you.

Of course, it's not only male colleagues who have been hostile. There's a group of female MPs, some of whom have behaved appallingly.

Some have 'whispered' loudly about 'f****** terfs' as I walk past. Then, as our official policy appears to change, I'll see them on television saying: 'It's terribly concerning that women haven't been able to talk about this issue.' Their hypocrisy is monumental.

They finally get it. Well, some of them. No wonder they don't want reminding of their past behaviour. And no wonder Rosie Duffield is angry.

John Vachon, May 1943. "Beaumont, Texas. Wartime occupational replacement by women in men's traditional jobs. Lady in signal tower who operates block signals for railroad crossing."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]

From the Telegraph:

The BBC has been accused of allowing trans activists to peddle propaganda in its Scottish coverage of the landmark Cass Review into child gender services.

The campaign group For Women Scotland has made a formal complaint to the broadcaster, accusing it of a lack of balance and allowing partisan commentators to make unfounded claims unchallenged about puberty blockers.

While south of the border the BBC has covered the Cass Review in depth, the day after the report was published BBC Scotland chose instead to focus on an NHS England decision about migraine tablets, already available in Scotland, on its flagship morning radio phone-in.

Meanwhile, on the day the report was released, it convened a panel made up exclusively of critics of the Cass Review on its nightly news programme The Nine.

Ellie Gomersall, a transgender woman and activist, was invited to react to the Cass Review alongside Dr Aidan Kelly, who runs a private gender clinic and has also been publicly critical of the report.

Ms Gomersall also criticised the Cass Review on BBC Scotland’s Drivetime radio show that day and claimed, unchallenged by the host, that the effects of puberty blockers were “perfectly reversible”.

No surprise there.

Homage to Orwell from Matti Friedman in the Jewish Review of Books. Orwell's experience in the Spanish Civil War made him realise how the reported news was not so much about what really happened, more what ought to have happened according to various “party lines”. And it's the same now:

It is obvious that the story in the Middle East and North Africa in our times is the rise of violent and conflicting strains of Islam and the move of these ideologies and their adherents into the West. A great deal of effort goes into obscuring this, even though the phenomenon is visible from Algeria through Syria and Yemen and Iraq to Afghanistan, and from the Twin Towers to the Bataclan theater to the Nice promenade and the Manchester Arena. For a reporter in Israel, the main local incarnations of the phenomenon are the Islamic Resistance Movement (known by the Arabic acronym Hamas) and Islamic Jihad among Palestinians and the more formidable Party of God militia (Hezbollah) in Lebanon, all allied to some extent with the Islamic Republic of Iran, all working to forge a new Islamic order, and all explicitly dedicated to erasing the unbearable pocket of Jewish sovereignty on 0.2 percent of the land of the Arab world.

This is depressing but not very complicated. However, during my time in the press, we were expected to tiptoe politely around Islam’s two billion adherents and pretend the region’s key story was a group of six million Jews oppressing a minority, the Palestinians, who only wanted a peaceful state beside Israel. Because this was mostly fictional, my colleagues and I were forced into increasingly ludicrous contortions as we “built emotional superstructures over events that had never happened,” in Orwell’s words, and buried much of what was actually happening—like Israel’s rejected peace offer of late 2008, for example, which we were instructed not to cover, or like the way Hamas followed Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza by methodically wiring the territory like a suicide bomber, building a system of tunnels under the entire civilian landscape and quite clearly condemning vast numbers to death in the holy war they promised was coming.

This all fits what Orwell understood about the way Western observers are guided chiefly by their own politics and imaginations. Atrocities in war, he wrote, “are to be believed in or disbelieved in according to political predilection, with utter non-interest in the facts and with complete unwillingness to alter one’s beliefs as soon as the political scene alters.” He would have understood the refusal by many observers in our times to believe the details of the Hamas murders, rapes, and kidnappings of October 7, while being eager to believe a few weeks later that Israel had purposely bombed a hospital—and also the unwillingness of some on my own side to admit any civilian suffering in Gaza, and the desire to dismiss anything that makes us feel bad as “Pallywood.”…

An important article from Kyle Orton in Fathom on Iran's "ring of fire" round Israel, and "the West’s ongoing appeasement of Tehran and refusal to see plain the IRGCs transnational Jihad":

Synopsis:

Soleimani’s ‘ring of fire’ strategic concept envisioned surrounding Israel with IRGC units—in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, and Yemen—that are steadily equipped with better and better missiles to threaten Jewish population centres and the Israeli economy, making Israeli life unliveable as part of a grinding war of attrition that ends in Israel’s destruction. Analyst Kyle Orton argues that although this Iranian attack was ‘essentialy a symbolic episode’ choreographed with the US not to be military significant, the pressure on Israel from the West not to retaliate has shifted the Overton window yet again. The view that Israel was supposed to just live with rocket fire on her civilians from Gaza was long ago normalised, and the idea has now entered the mainstream of respectable Western opinion that an enemy State can openly fire hundreds of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles at Israel and Israel should absorb this without response. This will have lasting effects whether or not Israel defies this pressure.

But do read it all.

This is good news:

One of the country’s best-known state schools has won a High Court challenge over a ban on “prayer rituals” brought by one of its students in a victory for Britain’s “strictest headmistress”.

A pupil, who cannot be named, took legal action against Michaela Community School in Brent, northwest London, claiming that the policy was discriminatory and “uniquely” affected her faith due to its ritualised nature.

The pupil alleged that the school’s stance on prayer, one of the five pillars of Islam, was “the kind of discrimination which makes religious minorities feel alienated from society”, a judge was told.

The case against the free school was heard at the High Court in London in January.

In an 83-page judgment dismissing the student’s case on Tuesday, Mr Justice Linden said: “It seems to me that this is a case … where the claimant at the very least impliedly accepted, when she enrolled at the school, that she would be subject to restrictions on her ability to manifest her religion.

“She knew that the school is secular and her own evidence is that her mother wished her to go there because it was known to be strict.

“She herself says that, long before the prayer ritual policy was introduced, she and her friends believed that prayer was not permitted at school and she therefore made up for missed prayers when she got home.”…

Katharine Birbalsingh, headmistress and founder of Michaela, said that the family that brought the court case had decided to send their younger child to the school in September but was already threatening to sue over another matter.

She questioned whether it was right that the student had received £150,000 in legal aid to bring the case.

“The judge is clear that the child’s statements were not written by her alone. Indeed this mum intends to send her second child to Michaela, starting in September. At the same time, this mum has sent a letter to our lawyers suggesting that she may take us to court yet again over another issue at the school she doesn’t like, presumably once again at the taxpayer’s expense….

“Last year, we watched our Muslim pupils put under pressure by a tiny number of others to fast, to pray, to drop out of the choir, to wear a hijab.

“I watched one of my black teachers racially abused and intimidated, another teacher who had her personal home nearly broken into, and another with a brick thrown through her window. I have a duty of care to protect all of our pupils but also to my staff.

“There is a false narrative that some try to paint about Muslims being an oppressed minority at our school. They are, in fact, the largest group. Those who are most at risk are other minorities and Muslim children who are less observant.”

You have to wonder what group was behind this – another clearly orchestrated attempt to impose Islamic standards on a secular institution, and funded by the taxpayer.

The BBC reports on that latest Sydney knife attack:

Australian police have declared Monday's stabbing at a Sydney church a religiously motivated "terrorist act".

A 16-year-old boy was arrested after a bishop, a priest and churchgoers were attacked during mass at the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church.

At least four people suffered "non-life-threatening" injuries, police say. The attacker was also hurt.

The incident was captured on a church livestream and quickly triggered unrest in the suburb of Wakeley.

Australian police define terror offences as being ideologically motivated. Investigations are still under way, but they say they are satisfied this is a case of religious extremism.

We're left to fill in the gaps. What religion inspired this young man? No one can say.

The Spectator helps out with information the BBC felt unable to share:

An arch-conservative in a conservative church, Bishop Emmanuel is known for attracting controversy. His views on social issues, notably homosexuality, are biblically hardline and, while having been supportive of Palestinians in the war in Gaza, he is on the record as having questioned the validity of Islam as a faith. During the pandemic, the bishop expressed scepticism about vaccines and lockdown restrictions.

Whether any of these views motivated the still-unidentified 16-year-old boy to attack Bishop Emmanuel remains unclear. But a video of the alleged attacker appears to show him calling out, in Arabic, ‘if he (the bishop) didn’t swear at my prophet I wouldn’t be here.’

We're beginning to get the picture.

The Science dept at Australia's most prestigious university, is now offering a course in "Indigenous Mathematics," in an effort to "decolonise maths."

"Numbers and arithmetic and accounting often are of secondary importance in Indigenous mathematics."https://t.co/hw4DLFy0nt

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) April 16, 2024

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From the article:

What constitutes mathematical knowledge? What is included in mathematics? Who gets to decide? These are some of the questions being asked in a growing decolonisation movement.

“Mathematics is a universal human phenomenon, and students of under-represented and minority groups and colonised peoples are starting to be more critical about accepting unquestioningly the cultural hegemony of mainstream European-based mathematics,” says Professor Rowena Ball from the ANU Mathematical Sciences Institute.

Professor Ball leads a research and teaching initiative called Mathematics Without Borders, aimed at broadening and diversifying the cultural base and content of mathematics.

“Mathematics has been gatekept by the West and defined to exclude entire cultures. Almost all mathematics that students have ever come across is European-based,” she explains. “We would like to enrich the discipline through the inclusion of cross-cultural mathematics.”

“Indigenous and First Nations peoples around the world are standing up and saying: ‘Our knowledge is just as good as anybody else's − why can't we teach it to our children in our schools, and in our own way?’

Answers on a postcard please.

Numbers and arithmetic and accounting often are of secondary importance in Indigenous mathematics.

“In fact, as most mathematicians know, mathematics is primarily the science of patterns and periodicities and symmetries − and recognising and classifying those patterns.”

Indigenous societies often excel at non-numerical mathematics, she says.

Aka, non-mathematical mathematics.

Letter in the Times from Maya Forstater, Stephanie Davies-Arai, Kate Barker, et al:

Sir, Following the release of the Cass review, Stonewall now says it supports Dr Hilary Cass’s recommendations of a cautious, evidence-based non-medicalised approach to children with gender distress. This is a stark contrast to its previous stance that children can identify an alternative gender identity from as young as two, that puberty blockers should be prescribed to teenagers and that warnings about the lack of clinical evidence to support paediatric transition should be ignored.

In your report “Debate on trans rights ‘shut down by bullying’ ” (news, Apr 10), Dr Cass said: “There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views.” Stonewall has played a significant role in creating this culture of fear. If it is going to try to fix the toxicity of the debate the first thing it should do is withdraw the allegations it has made about Baroness Falkner of Margravine, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. She is under investigation by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions because Stonewall reported that she took a “determinedly anti-trans stance” when she, just like Dr Cass, urged caution in legislating to ban “conversion therapy”. Stonewall should withdraw its complaint, apologise to Baroness Falkner and let the EHRC get on with its job.

Here's two minutes of @VictoriaAtkins tearing @wesstreeting a new one. You're welcome pic.twitter.com/SatyQNG1zR

— Simon Edge (@simonjedge) April 15, 2024

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Also:

The Cass Review should concern us all.

This report strikes hard and strikes sure in an area of public policy where fashionable cultural values have overtaken evidence, safety and biological reality.

This must now stop. pic.twitter.com/ljwQkXqu1O

— Victoria Atkins (@VictoriaAtkins) April 15, 2024

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