Mick Hartley

Matt Ridley at The Critic reviews Dali Lang's new book Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiralled Out of Control, which argues that the pandemic could probably have been prevented had the Wuhan authorities acted differently in the last days of 2019 and the first week of 2020.

The authorities, as well as punishing and silencing the whistle-blowers, took the line that this mysterious outbreak was the result of zoonosis – humans infected from an animal source – from the Wuhan seafood market. The market was closed down, while concerns that people with no connection to the market were getting infected were ignored.

The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued guidelines on how to diagnose the new disease. In addition to clinical symptoms, under the “inclusion-exclusion criteria”, a patient had to have had a link or proximity to the Huanan Seafood Market to be treated as having Covid.

As a result, cases with no link to the market were ignored. “They only transferred those [patients] with an exposure history to the Seafood Market, including those we had almost cured,” complained one doctor at the hospital designated for receiving Covid patients. “But they didn’t want any [patient] without a history of contact with [the] Seafood Market.”

After the market was closed the number of patients seemed to stabilise and fall, reassuring the authorities. But inside the hospitals of Wuhan, more and more people were presenting with symptoms and more and more doctors and nurses were falling ill, only for their cases to be deleted from the data by provincial bureaucrats in thrall to the seafood-market dogma.

This problem of “ascertainment bias” was also to fool western scientists for years as they continued to argue that because early cases were associated with, or lived near, the market, the virus must have started there. This was and is a circular argument.

The authorities, in other words, decided that the seafood market was the cause of the outbreak, and then dismissed data that didn't tie in with their theory.

Ridley – co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 – notes that Dali Yang confines his criticism to the local authorities, not Beijing, and barely touches on the issue of a lab-leak. 

But the author, Dali Yang, is a professor at the University of Chicago and between 2010 and 2016, was the founding faculty director of the University of Chicago Center in Beijing. He is also a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and a member of the China committee of the Chicago Sister Cities International program. His ready access to Chinese sources must require at the very least some caution about saying things that go against Xi Jinping Thought. Hence, perhaps, the decision not even to discuss a laboratory leak, the ultimate no-no in Beijing.

Photographer Barry Lewis at Café Royal Books:

[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Barry Lewis]

Barry Lewis previously – Butlins 1982.

A conference on child healthcare ambushed by violent protestors, shouting and letting off smoke bombs. London, today:

Doctors at a gender-critical conference were ambushed by “aggressive” masked protesters who let off a smoke bomb and had to be held back by police.

Dozens of officers were required to prevent the demonstrators gaining entrance to the first conference of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender conference held on Saturday in London.

Video footage showed the protesters, dressed mainly in black and waving flags, blocking the entrance and jostling with police.

Held at the headquarters of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), the conference brought together doctors, academics and parents “to discuss current controversies in the care of children and young people with gender-related distress…”

One attendee said on X, formerly Twitter, that the protesters had been violent.

Another, Elaine Miller, a physiotherapist, said: “Met Police were great outside RCGP when a crowd of very aggressive, masked and mistaken people were cross that a bunch of HCPs [health care professionals] want to talk about excellence in healthcare.”

Jane Symons, vice-chair of the Medical Journalists’ Association, said: “It’s the first time I have ever attended a medical conference requiring police protection. Healthcare should be driven by evidence not ideology.”

One banner appeared to read “trans power”.

No science please, we're trans activists. 

And in Wales:

Women’s rights charity FiLiA had booked a stand at Plaid Cymru Conference, hoping to use the opportunity to talk to delegates and Plaid Cymru politicians about a range of grass roots campaigns they support.

With less than 48 hours to go, the charity was told that they would not be welcome, and their stall booking was revoked.

The Plaid Cymru message:

“While there are many issues and campaigns on which I expect we would agree, it has come to my attention that some of FiLiA’s positions are potentially contrary to the party’s values – for instance on trans rights. We welcome robust debate, but must balance this with the need for our delegates from all backgrounds to feel as though the party conference is a safe space for them to express their identity comfortably.

I regret therefore that we will be unable to welcome you to Caernarfon this week. I’m sorry for the late notice.”

No terfs, in other words. No debate. Sensitive trans identities must be respected.

Honestly, what's going on with these Celts?

At least that obscene Police Scotland event, where the assembled McPlods were confronted with the scenario of an activist called "Jo" who thought trans people should be sent to the gas chambers, is getting some attention. From the Telegraph:

A fictional trans-hating character called “Jo”, who women’s groups claim is an offensive parody of JK Rowling, was invented by Police Scotland officers, it has emerged.

The national force faced scrutiny this week over a “scenario” presented at an official hate crime event in which “Jo”, a gender-critical campaigner who, like Rowling, has a large social media following, states that trans people should be sent to gas chambers.

The Time for Inclusive Education (TIE) campaign group, which ran the hate crime event in collaboration with police, revealed the Jo character had been “written by officers at Police Scotland based on their expertise”

Their expertise?? Their complete capture by trans activists more like. The level of sheer misogynist aggression aimed at Rowling is getting scary – and now with official sanction.

Women’s groups said the revelation raised new doubts over the ability of police to impartially enforce new hate crime laws, which come into force on April 1.

That's putting it mildly.

Violent domestic abusers exploiting Spain's "progressive" gender identity laws – a familiar tale:

Spain’s Minister of Family, Youth, and Social Affairs in Madrid is raising alarm bells after locating multiple cases in which men convicted of domestic violence changed their legal gender identity. In a letter issued to the Minister of Equality, Ana Dávila-Ponce de León Municio detailed her concerns that the safety of female victims of violence was at risk due to Spain’s “progressive” approach towards gender identity.

In her letter, issued March 18, Minister Dávila-Ponce de León noted that she had become aware of six cases in the autonomous region of Madrid where men charged with violence against women had changed their legal gender identity — a process that was streamlined and made significantly easier following the enactment of Spain’s “Trans Law” in 2023.

In addition to updating their registered sex, three of the men made requests to stay in women’s shelters with the wives and children who had been escaping from them. So far, concerned staff at the shelters have blocked their access but may be violating the nation’s gender discrimination laws as a result.

But perhaps most disturbingly, an abuser changing his legal sex has a tremendous impact on the resources the victims are able to access. In one of the cases recently highlighted by El Mundo, a female victim of sexual assault was stripped of the special protection provided for victims of physical and sexual abuse because officials told her that her aggressor, who drugged and raped her in front of her young daughter, “was no longer registered as a man, but as a woman.”

In Spain, special gender-based violence charges exist, providing female victims of male violence specific protections and resolutions which can impact divorce or separation proceedings, custody, and other important factors. Victims of gender-based violence can also access special protections intended to ensure they are safe from their male abuser.

Because a female cannot be convicted of gender-based violence, male abusers who change their legal sex can avoid this charge and deny their female victims of those legal protections.

A simple as that.

In which the discussion on Lebanese TV reaches new levels of idiocy:

"The [Israeli] army has been depleted, and they need [new] active forces. Would you believe it that in the year 2000…  A friend who used to live in Brazil has told me that in Brazil, as you know, there are three phenomena the country is based on – football, drugs, and illicit sexual relations.

"As a result of all those illicit relations, many babies would be born, and they would dump them at the beach in Rio de Janeiro. My friend told me that the Jewish Agency would collect those children, and once a month, a plane would take off from Brazil to Tel Aviv… That was in 2000. These planes would carry on board children aged between five days and a year….

"They take them and raise them as Jews, even though they are not Jews. So the rabbis went up in arms, and said one cannot turn a non-Jew into a Jew. But the military establishment told them: 'Shut up! Israel’s security trumps any other consideration. We need soldiers!'"

 

Why, asks Patrick West at Spiked, did it take so long to ban puberty blockers? The trick, from groups like Stonewall and Mermaids, was to persuade people that trans liberation was the next step in a narrative of liberation:

The thinking among many has been that, ever since the Enlightenment, we have been on an emancipatory trajectory in the West. It began with religious toleration, then came the campaign for racial equality, moving on to women’s liberation and then, by the 1960s, gay liberation. With these goals achieved, the next step was surely liberation for the trans community. As [Helen] Joyce explains: ‘During the past decade, the trans lobby has been stunningly successful in selling false analogies… [such as] that separate toilets for men and women are like racial segregation and that insisting people can change sex is “gay rights 2.0”.’

The insinuation made by radical trans activists is that if you deny the validity of someone’s preferred gender, you also belong to the oppressive hegemony of white, heterosexual males (and, more recently, mainstream feminists). Indeed, this is precisely the argument made by the godmother of trans, Judith Butler, in her latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?. Here she writes that critics of gender ideology seek ‘the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as “born female at birth”, resume their natural and “moral” positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy.’ This is mendacious sophistry. It suggests that anyone questioning trans must be a racist homophobe….

The trans movement’s treatment of children has done nothing to advance freedom or equality. It is primarily a tale of disfigurement, experimentation and exploitation. Hopefully, this dark chapter can soon be consigned to the past.

But, before we get too excited about the NHS puberty-blocker ban:

NEW: NHS England has announced that new youth gender services will provide masculinising and feminising hormones to children from ‘around their 16th birthday.’ This goes further than GIDS ever did: YPs cld only access hormones at 16 if they’d been on puberty blockers for 1 year🧵

— Hannah Barnes (@hannahsbee) March 21, 2024

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

"Just last week, it seemed that the new services would have no medical pathway, with NHSE ending the routine prescription of puberty blockers. Today’s announcement, which was not put out to consultation, appears to signal a move in the opposite direction."

 

From the Telegraph:

A teenage mental health service funded by the NHS is being investigated by health officials, amid accusations it is promoting the trans agenda and allowing the spread of dangerous anorexia advice.

The Kooth website, which is aimed at children aged 11 to 18, describes itself as an “online mental wellbeing community”.

But officials are examining safeguarding concerns, with accusations that those working for the site have directed schoolchildren to sites that promote the use of hormones and breast binding.

There are also concerns that the site’s moderators have allowed dangerous advice about anorexia to be shared, and failed to prevent young people bullying each other.

The website, which receives more than £3 million a year from the NHS, describes gender transition as “unique and beautiful”.

Unique and beautiful?? Yes, that could be something of a warning sign.

Critics have raised concerns that the service, used by more than 145,000 schoolchildren last year, has an agenda which affirms those who believe they are born in the wrong body.

Transgender Trend reported on this in July last year – Kooth: the online mental health platform spreading gender ideology. At last someone's listening.

The fuss over Justin Webb rumbles on. Last year the Today presenter, talking about trans players in chess, said "trans women, in other words males”. You might think it was a useful clarification since a lot of people are never quite sure which way round it is – are trans women men presenting as women, or women presenting as men? Anyway, predictably enough, a complaint was made which the BBC upheld, and Webb was duly censured for appearing to take sides in a controversial debate – rather than stating an obvious truth. The BBC's complaints unit took another look last month, and upheld the complaint. Webb had "breached impartiality rules". His comment "could only be understood by listeners as meaning that trans women remain male, without qualification as to gender or biological sex, and that, even if unintentional, it gave the impression of endorsing one viewpoint in a highly controversial area". Phew. 

Tim Davie, the BBC Director General, speaking to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of MPs yesterday, denied that the Beeb was in any way biased in the trans debate. Webb should have said "biological males": that's the approved terminology. But, “we have to be kind and caring in this and listen to people and be nice.”

Former BBC journalist Cath Walton in The Critic:

Thanks to the final straining filaments of the public remit, we now know that BBC News has an Editor-in-Chief who believes his duty is to be nice to middle-aged men who imagine themselves to be women. 

It’s not to tell the truth about them — that they’re men. Heaven forfend anyone tries to tell certain people what they do not want to hear. “We have to be kind, and caring, and nice,” says Tim. His emphasis….

“I don’t think we suffer from bias”, he insisted, immediately before confirming that Today presenter Justin Webb breached BBC rules by telling the truth, in describing a trans-identified man as male. “This is all being whipped up in a way that’s deeply damaging to civilised debate.” 

This was served with the claim that the BBC doesn’t have editorial “no go areas”. Yet it is out of bounds to call men “male”? The lack of critical thinking here is stunning. 

Tim’s problem is that he’s being played. He’s not an activist — and neither is David Jordan, Head of Editorial Policy, who was sitting next to him — but they obviously swim in a sea of activism, and do not possess the acuity to understand the game. The BBC’s job is first, to tell us the truth, and then to add evidence and context. That’s pretty much it. Tim has fallen victim to a narrative that the truth is hurtful, so it’s better to disguise it, or leave it out altogether….

Tim really needs to start meeting groups of women again who might be able to enhance his understanding of impartiality and activism. He doesn’t understand, for example, that once you have decided that it’s not harmful to pretend that men are women, you have already picked a side. He doesn’t understand what a breach of journalistic principle it is to describe a lie as impartial, and the truth as biased.  

He also doesn’t understand — and would probably scoff at — the level of linguistic activism to which the BBC is relentlessly subject. It’s invisible to him.  

The BBC had already handed over the words “woman” and “man” to trans activists. Now it has gifted them the words “male” and “female”. We are reduced to “biological male” and “biological female”.   I’m sure Tim thinks he’s found a nice middle ground, where everyone will be content.

Not so. Activists will certainly come for “biological”. Some already are. Activists like India Willoughby say they are “biological females”, and some BBC journalists have been warned in conversations that the use of the phrase is itself transphobic.

Davie ought also to think that perhaps the reason he received only a handful of internal complaints about Justin Webb’s reprimand is that he runs a cowed organisation, where women are afraid to raise the issue for fear of bullying or career repercussions. 

It’s clear now, however, that gender theory capture has crept up to the top of the BBC.  We have an Editor-in-Chief who thinks that telling the truth isn’t nice. There’s no greater failure.