Mick Hartley

From the Times:

A lawyer and the government department she works with are being sued after she made gender-critical statements at work, including expressing the belief that only women menstruate.

Elspeth Duemmer Wrigley works at an arm’s-length body affiliated to the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and is a chairwoman of a civil service network that represents staff with gender-critical views.

She is one of three key signatories of an explosive letter sent in October to the cabinet secretary warning the impartiality of the civil service was under threat because anyone with gender-critical views was “openly and unlawfully bullied and harassed”.

The confidential letter, seen by The Times, makes serious claims about a “small number of active gender ideologues” embedded in the civil service who brief against ministers and seek to alter official documents.

Duemmer Wrigley will appear at an employment tribunal next week accused of harassment for several comments and posts shared in the workplace. An employee of another body affiliated to Defra is suing the government department for allowing the network to exist and Duemmer Wrigley personally for her views.

These include a statement made during a seminar on female autism that “only women menstruate” and a link to My Body is Me!, a book that encourages young children to understand and accept their bodies.

The horror!

The claimant, who has not been named, has accused Defra bosses of creating a “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and/or offensive environment” and is calling for a disbanding of the departmental SEEN network and, potentially, the cross-governmental network as well.

Duemmer Wrigley warns that if successful, the case would have a “chilling effect” that could silence all gender criticism in the civil service.

Why can't the claimant be named then? And shamed. The whole business is a disgraceful attempt by trans activists to silence criticism of their ridiculous ideology.

It's not a belief that only women menstruate: it's a fact.

Joan Smith on the case of Amy Hamm and the ideologically captured polity of Canada:

Amy Hamm is a Canadian nurse. Yesterday was the final day of hearings into a disciplinary case against her, which has dragged on for 18 months. It’s been a nightmare for Hamm, but it’s also a test case of how far Canada is prepared to go to enforce an authoritarian ideology on women.

Hamm’s ordeal has nothing to do with how she does her job. The British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives opened an investigation after just two people complained that she was one of the sponsors of a billboard praising the author J.K. Rowling in 2020. This is heresy in Canada, where transgender ideology enjoys the status of holy writ and Rowling is regarded as chief witch.

The regulator swung into action, producing a 332-page report on Hamm’s activities, accusing her of making “discriminatory and derogatory statements regarding transgender people, while identifying yourself as a nurse or nurse educator”. With the zeal of inquisitors, they pored over tweets, podcast transcripts and articles, coming to the damning conclusion that Hamm believes there is a conflict between women’s rights and the demands of trans activists.

Of course there is. It’s a simple statement of fact. Yet the Canadian government is proposing legislation that includes a power to arrest someone who “might” commit a “hate crime” in future, forcing them to wear an electronic tag or remain at home. The prospect of a future Amy Hamm being placed under house arrest in Canada may seem outlandish. But trans activists in Scotland, who are salivating over the prospect of using the hate crime law that comes into effect on 1 April to target Rowling, must be looking on with envy.

The disciplinary action against Hamm has nevertheless exposed the reactionary project at the heart of trans ideology, which is to return to a situation where women’s right to exist in public is conditional. Hamm’s lawyer, Lisa Bildy, made exactly this point. “A key issue in this case is whether professionals can express criticism of gender identity ideology or other political issues in the public square without being subject to regulatory discipline,” she said as the hearings in Vancouver ended….

What’s happening in the UK and in Canada is nothing less than an attempt to impose conditions on women’s involvement in public life. You can keep your job, but only if you accept the prevailing ideology. You can use public buildings, but you mustn’t complain about men in the ladies’ toilets. And if you hold meetings in a public place, you should expect to be intimidated and harassed if you dare suggest that trans women are men.

Women fought for centuries for unconditional access to the public square, refusing to stay at home and be quiet. And Hamm is on the front line of a fight that matters to us all. “This process was hell,” she posted on X last night. “I […] endured it because the truth matters. Free speech matters. Women and children matter.”

An interesting article in Tablet by August Hanning, a former director of German intelligence. His main argument is what he calls an inconvenient truth – but surely an uncontroversial one by now – that it's the intersection of left-wing activists and Muslim migrants that's the primary source of antisemitism in Germany today, rather than neo-Nazis.

He gives a useful brief history of Jews and right-wing antisemitism as well as the current situation in Germany…and then there's the left:

In addition to Israel-related antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023, there has been an increasing number of statements on the left wing of the German political spectrum that represent forms of secondary, so-called guilt-deflecting antisemitism. The slogan heard on parts of the left, “Free Palestine from German guilt,” suggests that German guilt for the Holocaust blinds the German public and government to Palestinian suffering.

In the perspective of left-wing antisemitism, Israel is not seen as a refuge for Jews who survived the Holocaust. Rather, it is a criminal enterprise inspired by the demons of nationalism and ethnocentrism, which allegedly led German Nazis to perpetrate the Holocaust. The descendants of victims of Nazi persecution are therefore reinterpreted as perpetrators allegedly pursuing a “final solution to the Palestinian question.” Actual or perceived mistakes of Israeli policy are attributed to genocidal lusts on the part of “the Jews” worldwide, which can in turn be presented as the tragically misdirected consequences of the Nazi genocide.

It's difficult not to see this as a projection of German guilt over the Holocaust onto Israel. And what better target for this projection – what better cleansing of this burden of guilt – than to target the actual people who were the victims of the Nazi Holocaust? It's Holocaust Inversion with a German twist.

Such harsh criticisms of Israeli policy, sometimes shading into overt antisemitism, have become a fixture of leftist movements in Germany. While some of the leftist antisemitism now resurfacing in Germany has its roots in the leftist radicalism of 50 years ago, some of it has a more recent origin in the mainstream left’s electoral courtship of political Islamists and Muslim immigrants—leading to an acceptance of movements and discourse that would have formerly been unacceptable in both the cultural and the political spheres….

The prospective growth of a large population of young Muslims who may be religiously or politically inclined toward hatred of Jews and Israel poses a particular problem for Germany in light of the Holocaust. Since the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel wave of 2002 and the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, many young Muslims have been conspicuous in Germany as “antisemitic activists.” These activists have been at the forefront of mobbing attacks on Jewish students, displaying antisemitic symbols on university campuses, and even physical assaults on Jewish students in grade schools….

A Germany in which antisemitism is culturally and politically acceptable should be entirely unthinkable. Sadly, it is not.

There are some good points in this review of Judith Butler's latest, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, by Jane O'Grady in the Telegraph – "a muddled book that can’t even define its terms":

For millennia, humans boasted of being a ­special creation, above “the beasts” because endowed with reason and free will – until, in the 19th century, we realised that we were animals ourselves, on a continuum with apes. In the past 30 years, however, we have found a new way of disclaiming animality: apparently, unlike other mammals, humans do not come in two sexes, but range along a spectrum – and/or a human’s sex is simply “assigned at birth”, therefore can be changed.

Such claims have been given intellectual respectability, if not consistency, by exaggerated statistics of those born intersex, and by “queer theory”, one of the founding texts of which is Gender Trouble, written by Judith Butler, a professor at Berkeley, in 1990. Famously obscurantist, it seems to say that sex is purely a performance….

Butler categorically denies that “gender is to culture as sex is to nature”, or that “gender is produced through forms of patriarchal power”, neglecting to mention that this Terf-ish sex/gender distinction was, according to some interpretations, first proposed in The Second Sex (a key gender-studies text). “Biological categories are saturated with meanings,” Butler complains. Which was surely Simone de Beauvoir’s point – she was seeking to purge the sex category “woman” of the cultural accretions of gender that have long distorted it. Butler, however, treats linguistic bewitchment as ineluctable: “Sex has shifting historical meanings.” But biological language aims to reach up to the real thing. Why doesn’t Butler try to distinguish the usage of “sex” from what it is intended to refer to?

“If sex is legally assigned and registered and can be re-assigned and re-registered, can we not conclude that the reality of sex has changed, or that that change is now part of our historical reality?” Butler demands. As if, guided by linguistic usage, natural selection would dismantle the sexual dimorphism that has taken so long to evolve and has been so advantageous to the survival of the human species. 

Because we're a linguistic species, somehow language now supercedes biology. If a man says he's a woman, then he is a woman. See how far we've come now to restore our special status above the crude animal world.

Butler doesn’t touch on the ­crucial issue of puberty blockers and the removal of adolescents’ breasts and penises. Excluding trans women from women-only spaces is tantamount to treating them as rapists, apparently – the statutory argument. But an ­increasingly high proportion of trans women retain their penises, so isn’t excluding them a matter, as with ordinary men, of prudent ­pre-emptiveness? The human penis, like that of any other animal, has, because it is part of nature’s drive for life, a sort of life of its own. The inadvertency of erections is what manifests the authenticity of desire, thereby flattering both their owners and their observers (when not dismaying them).

“Nothing about the organ per se produces rape,” says Butler. Like a gun lobbyist insisting that it’s the person, not the gun, that kills, this ignores the fact that some tools are more dangerous and unpredictable than others.

I hadn't seen that argument before, but yes, the gun lobby argument fits perfectly. "It's the person, not the gun." But without the gun, you don't have to worry about the person. Likewise, without the penis a woman doesn't have to worry about the person sharing her intimate space. Or these vicious American Bully dogs. It's the owner, not the dog, they say. But if you have a bad owner (and what are the chances of a bad owner with a nasty macho dog bred for aggression?) then the results, instead of a nip on the ankles, could be serious injury or death. Why take the risk?

As O'Grady notes, this latest book is "less opaquely written" than Butler's hugely influential Gender Trouble. It takes a certain amount of youthful energy, not to say hubris, to come up with page after page of the elaborately impenetrable postmodern jargon of thirty years ago. She clearly can't keep it up – as it were. So, inevitably, it becomes much easier now to see how bad her arguments are.

Jack Delano, November 1942. "Chicago, Illinois. Train clerk working on his lists in the hump office at a Chicago and North Western railyard."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano]

The increasingly unScientific American. Nice Reader added context.

A study of more than 100 birthing parents showed that pregnancy and birth cause changes in brain circuits that may be involved in empathy and bonding with the child https://t.co/4mlQeCR5mm

— Scientific American (@sciam) March 16, 2024

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Wow.

Berkeley elementary school students were instructed to write "Stop bombing Babies" notes and attach them to the door of the only Jewish teacher at the school. pic.twitter.com/vHyMJ3tZW0

— Michal (@itsmichalll) March 18, 2024

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At Tablet Judith Miller learns from an Israeli who spent ‘hundreds of hours’ with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar:

The Palestinian in the clinic at one of Israel’s highest security prisons near Beersheba had a persistent pain in the back of his neck. He trembled and had trouble walking. Yuval Bitton, then a 28-year-old dentist just a year out of medical school, suspected that his patient might be suffering from a C.V.A., an ischemic cerebrovascular accident, resulting from a life-threatening brain tumor. “He needs to be hospitalized, immediately,” Bitton advised the prison doctors.

Dr. Bitton’s diagnosis was quickly confirmed at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. The surgery took hours. The prisoner survived. When he returned to the prison, he thanked Bitton and the rest of the prison medical staff for having saved his life—in excellent Hebrew.

The year was 2004. The patient was Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian who in 2017 would become the leader of Hamas in Gaza and subsequently the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel in which 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians died and 240 were taken hostage….

Sinwar studied his enemy assiduously. He read Israeli newspapers, took classes in Jewish history through the prison’s “open university,” and spoke to Bitton about Hamas’ goals—the expulsion of all Jews from Palestine, the duty to implement God’s laws as given to Muhammad on all sacred Muslim soil…. “The struggle continued inside the prison,” Bitton said. Sinwar was not married then, and he had few visitors. “Hamas and the struggle were his life.”  […].

The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 29 that Sinwar had sent a message to exiled leaders claiming that Hamas was winning the war in Gaza and that international pressure would soon force Israel to stop the fighting because of the high civilian death toll, which according to unverifiable Hamas and United Nations estimates, now stands at over 31,000 Palestinians. Israel estimates that it has killed approximately 13,000 Hamas fighters.

Safe in Qatar and Turkey, Hamas’ leadership outside Gaza took a different view: They concluded that Israel was crushing the group and seizing ever more ground, despite increasing pressure from the West for Israel to agree to a cease-fire. Yet according to the Journal, Sinwar assured his confederates that despite Israel’s tactical successes, Hamas’ four remaining battalions in Rafah were fully prepared to withstand a likely ground assault, and that Israel would ultimately yield to Hamas’ demands.

According to the Journal, Egyptian intelligence officials who have received Sinwar’s messages think he has “lost touch with reality.” Yet the success of Sinwar’s bloody Oct. 7 offensive and his presence on (or under) the ground in Gaza gives him credibility and authority that Hamas’ external leadership lacks. Practically speaking, the fighting will end when Sinwar says it does, so his assessment of Hamas’ strategic position and of Israeli psychology is the one that matters.

Whether Sinwar has become demented or merely diabolical, Bitton said, the Hamas leader’s hard-line stance does not surprise him. In his desire to rid Palestine of Jews for good, Sinwar has been nothing if not consistent.

If it's not Scotland, it's Wales. From the Telegraph:

Schools are allowing children to change gender without telling parents under Welsh Labour, The Telegraph can reveal.

Parents have raised the alarm about the “shocking” approach being taken to children who question their gender in schools in Wales, saying it’s taking place behind their backs.

The Welsh Government has promised to publish draft guidance for schools on how to respond to gender-questioning children in the spring, months after the first guidance of its kind was published in England that told schools to presume that a child cannot change gender.

But Merched Cymru, which describes itself as a grassroots group of ordinary women from across Wales, warned that children’s safety was being put at risk by an absence of guidance for schools on trans pupils.

All 68 schools in Wales that answered freedom of information requests submitted by the group said they would facilitate the gender transition of a pupil.

Only 28 per cent of the schools stated clearly that they would inform parents.

Some 38 per cent said they would not inform parents automatically, while a further 29 per cent said they would only inform parents with a child’s permission….

The report by Merched Cymru found that 76 per cent of schools instruct or encourage pupils to recognise their classmates’ preferred pronouns.

Some 70 per cent of schools offer a unisex option for toilets or have all unisex toilets.

More than one in five, or 22 per cent, of schools allow children to use toilets according to their gender identity.

The report also found that more than half of schools allow children to take part in sport according to the gender they identify by.

Where schools have had training on gender issues, the most commonly cited groups providing advice included LGBT charities Stonewall Cymru or Proud Trust.

Stonewall Cymru. Who would have guessed. 

The worry is that when Labour takes power here in England they'll be introducing the same Stonewall-inspired policies.

Jeremy Miles, the Labour education minister, has previously said he believes that “trans women are women, trans men are men”, while Vaughan Gething, the new Welsh leader, has vowed to make Wales “the most LGBTQ+ friendly nation in Europe”. 

Jack Delano, December 1942. "Chicago, Illinois. In the roundhouse at a Chicago and North Western railyard."

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