Mick Hartley

More non-socialist behaviour. What is it this time?

North Korea’s government is accusing people with pet dogs of committing “non-socialist behavior,” Daily NK has learned.

“In view of the growing number of families with pet dogs at home, the Socialist Women’s Union of Korea recently informed its members that treating a dog as a family member who eats and sleeps with the family is incompatible with the socialist lifestyle and should be strictly avoided,” a source in South Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Mar. 8, speaking on condition of anonymity.

According to the source, the practice of keeping pet dogs began in North Korea in the early 2000s. At that time, the government did not consider it a problem because it was mostly officials and donju who needed guard dogs to protect themselves and their property from thieves.

“There have always been families who had cats to catch mice, but there weren’t many families with dogs. But that number has gradually increased, and recently there’s been a noticeable rise in foreign breeds of dogs such as Pomeranians and Shih Tzus, which used to be a rare sight in North Korea,” the source said.

North Korean authorities responded by condemning pet dog ownership as an non-socialist behavior, but that had little effect. More recently, however, the authorities have taken more proactive steps to control the practice, which they describe as having “the stench of the bourgeoisie.”…

“Dogs are basically meat that’s raised outside in accordance with their nature and then eaten when they die. Therefore, such behavior is totally unsocialist and must be strictly eliminated,” women’s union authorities stressed in the message.

A link to Victoria Smith's latest on Judith Butler, plus a pithy take-down:

Butler is one of the main tailors of the Emperor's new clothes.

If you don't agree with her, you're a very stupid fascist.

If you do agree with her, then you are very clever and enlightened and so much better than the stupid fascists.

She has nothing else, except a thesaurus.

— Billy Bragg (@Serena_Partrick) March 13, 2024

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

More from the Times on that puberty blocker ban:

Whistleblowers, campaigners and former patients welcomed the NHS ban as a vindication of their warnings for the best part of a decade.

As far back as 2015, staff from the clinic, also known as the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), told a select committee hearing that its treatment protocols were safe, regulated and based on guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, “which are almost universally observed in Europe”.

In fact, the guidelines of that US-based organisation were not based on medical evidence, and there was little evidence about what the off-label use of these drugs really did to the brains and bodies of young patients.

We now know quite a bit more about the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) after the recent leaks – basically a trans activist group masquerading as a serious professional medical organisation.

Keira Bell, who started taking puberty blockers aged 16 and went on to a medical transition she now regrets, said the ban was “a step in the right direction”.

She added: “However, it is insane that these drugs were ever offered on a national, publicly funded health service, which is supposed to be entirely evidence-based and … provides assured safety and care.

“I am glad that the NHS seems to be regaining its feet, but great damage has already been done. Puberty isn’t caused by a mechanical switch you can just turn on or off. You’re blocking all hormones that would otherwise cause a natural process critical to not only your physical development but your cognitive development too. You can’t just start the process again. These are chemical castration drugs used on sex offenders and those with prostate cancer.”

She said she was worried that young people will “migrate over to the private market. It is still important to stay vigilant, as children are still very much at danger.”

Jacob, 21, a transgender man, called taking puberty blockers “the worst decision I’ve ever made”.

He said: “I cringe when I think that for four years, from the age of 12 to 16, I had that thick sludge injected into my thigh every month, and I still don’t really know what it was or what it did. It made me feel like a lab rat. Coming off those drugs was the best thing I ever did.”

Born female, Jacob still identifies as male, but said he felt pressured to take puberty blockers “to prove how trans I was.” He added: “It’s awful that [the NHS] put so many young people through it, without actually knowing if it was safe. It’s genuinely scary.”

Dr David Bell, a senior psychiatrist and former staff governor at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, wrote to the leaders of Gids in 2018 urging them to suspend hormone treatment for children who wished to change gender until there was better evidence of the outcomes. He was ignored.

“It’s not the first time in medicine that treatments have been celebrated without any real evidence. [But] it’s extraordinary how a completely un-evidence-based so-called treatment very quickly became the dominant paradigm to treat children who presented with gender distress. Yet those who had their eyes open, who were worried about the psychological and physical consequences for these children, had their concerns shut down.

“Children and young people should have never been put on that pathway. It’s done a lot of damage. So I’m very relieved. Hopefully other countries in the world will look to this ban and see we have made a very important step to continuing to separate ourselves from what has been a tragic mistake.” Dr Anna Hutchinson, a clinical psychologist who left Gids over her concerns about puberty blockers, said: “It’s good to see the NHS returning to an evidence-based approach for helping these distressed children. The evidence for the benefits and risks of puberty blockers is missing. Attention must now turn to any proposed research trial to ensure that this too is ethical and robust.”

Stephanie Davies-Arai, director of the campaign group Transgender Trend, said: “The risks of sterility and bone damage are well known, and there is increasing concern that children’s cognitive development is impaired irreversibly. Since 2014 the Tavistock Gids has been prescribing blockers to children in the absence of any evidence that this treatment is safe. We hope this signals the end of what has been a medical experiment on the bodies and minds of a generation of vulnerable children.”

“Many have been calling on the NHS for years now to return to an evidence-based approach. This is a definite step in the right direction. The significance of NHS England’s statement that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty blockers cannot be overstated, given the success that activist lobby groups have had in portraying them as a harmless and reversible treatment.” Maya Forstater, executive director of Sex Matters, a human rights organisation that campaigns for clarity in the law, said: “This a momentous development in the course correction of NHS England’s approach to treating childhood gender distress.

This is very good news:

Children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics, NHS England has confirmed.

The ban was welcomed by the government as a “landmark decision” that would help ensure care was based on evidence and was in the “best interests of the child”….

Fewer than 100 young people are presently on puberty blockers. They will be able to continue their treatment and are being seen by specialist endocrine services at Leeds and University College London Hospital.

NHS England is understood to be hoping to have a study into the use of puberty blockers ready by December.

The health minister, Maria Caulfield, said: “We have always been clear that children’s safety and wellbeing is paramount, so we welcome this landmark decision by the NHS.

“Ending the routine prescription of puberty blockers will help ensure that care is based on evidence, expert clinical opinion and is in the best interests of the child.”

Rather than the best interests of trans activists, or Stonewall, or Mermaids…

And the leading comment:

Well done all the brave women, and some men, who have spoken out at genuine personal risk to bring this about

There's been quite a reaction to Jonathan Glazer's Oscar acceptance speech. The passage in question: 

‘Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza.’

A Holocaust survivor has penned an open letter denouncing the “factually inaccurate and morally indefensible” comments.

Written by Holocaust Survivor’s Foundation (HSF) president David Schaecter and signed by 18 members of the organisation’s US executive committee, the letter attacks Glazer’s use of his platform “to equate Hamas’s maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defence in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity”.

Also:

In a statement posted Monday morning on X (formerly Twitter), the Anti-Defamation League wrote: “Israel is not hijacking Judaism or the Holocaust by defending itself against genocidal terrorists. Glazer’s comments at the Oscars are both factually incorrect & morally reprehensible. They minimize the Shoah & excuse terrorism of the most heinous kind.”

A spokesperson for the World Jewish Congress called Glazer’s comments “an affront to the memory of those who endured the horrors of the Holocaust. There is no comparison between the Nazis’ attempt to annihilate the Jewish people and the defensive war that Israel is waging in response to the October 7th attacks carried out by Hamas.”

It's so badly expressed. Whatever he was trying to say, "refute" doesn't work. "Refute their Jewishness"? What does that mean? Deny their Jewishness? Withdraw their Jewishness? I suppose it's something like: object (in strong terms) to the support their Jewishness implies to the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation etc. etc… But then, what occupation? Gaza, now? Or the whole Israel project? And in what way is the Holocaust being hijacked? By whom? Again it's unclear, but the implication has to be: Israel – the state of Israel. Whereas from any sane perspective, surely, the only way the Holocaust is being hijacked at the moment is the constant obscene Free Palestine insistence that Israel is now carrying out its own Holocaust, its own genocide, against the Palestinians.

But Glazer chose not to go that way.

It's hard to disagree with Nicole Lampert: he couldn't resist playing the good Jew in front of the Hollywood crowd:

I understand why he would want to perhaps use this moment of success to talk about war. I empathise with why he would want to point out how each side in every war dehumanises the other. But by linking the Holocaust and Gaza he has trampled on the six million dead and the particular pernicious way in which they were slaughtered.

And by doing it As A Jew he wins double plaudits from Jew haters while leaving the rest of us – already labouring under a tsunami of antisemitism – feeling like we have been punched in the stomach. Betrayal is so much harder when it is one of your own. It really hurts.

Photographer Sean Plunkett at Café Royal Books:

[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Sean Plunkett]

Sean Plunkett, previously, in Hull.

Fabulous. After Sarah Ditum's brutal Sunday Times review of Judith Butler's new book, we now have Kathleen Stock at UnHerd:

Not for her the pedestrian business of going through critics’ arguments, providing non-partisan evidence, and patiently exposing internal contradictions and gaps in an understated but cumulatively devastating manner. In the book’s lengthy introduction, she tells us that “of course” she could “provide good arguments as to why looking at gender this way is wrong, which would be useful for educators and policymakers”; indeed, “as an educator” herself, it is “tempting to try and expose and puncture this inflammatory caricature of gender through an intellectual exercise”. Tempted as she might be, however, it turns out that she’s not going to bother with that stuff much. Instead, she wants to give the people what nobody was really asking for: a deconstruction of the “syntactical elements” of the “anti-gender movement”, understood as a “phantasmic scene” according to the “theoretical formulation of Jean Laplanche”.

Translated into ordinary English, Butler is going to put the anti-gender people on the shrink’s couch. She seems unruffled by the fact that, in prosecuting her case, she can’t define “gender” clearly — her most definite pronouncement is that it is “a felt sense of the body, in its surfaces and depths, a lived sense of being a body in the world in this way”. But never mind the pesky details: if you are anti-gender (whatever that amounts to, exactly), then you are very probably a patriarchal racist Christian nationalist nutjob, and also secretly gay. She is probing your unconscious, remember, and understands you better than you do yourself….

Though at times the author feigns charitable curiosity about some of her argumentative targets, the attitude never lasts. A sentence about gender-critical feminists that starts with “To be fair” ends up, a mere clause or two later, talking about their supposed affinities with “fascist politics”. There isn’t a single objection lodged against opponents that does not come freighted with the implication of moral taint and/or stupidity. Of course, painting one’s intellectual enemies as cartoon characters is a known tactic of modern transactivism; still, it is shocking to see it done so crudely by someone who retains a high reputation in many quarters.

It is also striking how hackneyed some of the thought is. Butler’s writing in her heyday at least displayed a bit of panache and originality, assuming you could parse it successfully. In contrast, here she comes over as in thrall to established activist tropes, and with all the depth of a TikTok video in places. She even cites Pink News as a source of data….

The chapter on British so-called TERFs is a compendium of smears culled from online teenagers about their gender-critical mums: they are not real feminists; they are effectively racists focusing on a white ideal of womanhood, on the side of “colonialism and empire”; they spread “baseless fears” about vulnerable transwomen; and so on.

Her evidence is carefully cherry-picked and often from partisan sources. There is no real attempt to take seriously the mounting evidence from hospitals and whistle-blowers of medical malpractice against children and teens in the name of “affirmation”; the rising numbers of assaults against women and girls as a result of self-ID; the demoralisation of displaced women athletes; or the physical and psychological pain of detransitioners. (On the latter, she claims that “the regret rates for people of all ages is very small”, based on a single 2021 study that has been heavily criticised since.) Also familiar from arguments with anime avatars on Twitter, we find fatuous whatabouttery: you say you are interested in stopping violence against female prisoners, but why don’t you care about male prison guards raping them? (Er… we do?) As usual, the message seems to be that these things aren’t really happening; and even if they were, they wouldn’t really matter….

Still, there is something correct in Butler’s observation that critics of transactivism are getting increasingly intolerant and illiberal. The dominant emotion she attributes to them is fear, but a more accurate description would be fury. It is obvious that many across the world have become angered by the grandiose, narcissistic overreach of academics like her: thinkers indifferent to the real-world havoc wrought by their barmy ideas and impenetrable speech codes, and who pillory all objectors as badly intentioned or deeply confused, no matter what the background reasoning. Butler is right to fear increasing threats towards LGBT people and women across the globe but fails to notice her own significant responsibility in the aetiology of the problem. Speaking personally, I’m not remotely afraid of gender, understood blandly as sexual and bodily expression; but I am very afraid of what Judith Butler has done with it.

Reading the book so we don't have to.

More Chicago streamliner locomotives from Jack Delano. "December 1942. "Chicago, Illinois. Chicago & North Western Railroad switching and classification freight yards. Locomotives at the coaling station."

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

Liz Truss has a private member's bill that will seek to change the legal definition of sex to “biological” this week, in a move that could bar trans women from female-only spaces. It's absolutely the right idea, of course, but then, well….it's Liz Truss. Joan Smith at UnHerd:

Labour was traditionally the party that advanced women’s rights. Not anymore. Now it’s seen, even by loyal supporters, as in thrall to authoritarian zealots who promote gender ideology. The Labour front bench is promising frankly alarming “reforms”, including making it easier to change legal gender, when the party comes to power.

Few of us on the Left want the former prime minister as an ally. Yet Truss’s proposals, which include a change in the law to make it clear that “sex” means biological sex, are welcome at a moment when language in long-established legislation is being manipulated to mean something that was never intended.

No one believed, when the Equality Act was passed in 2010, that sex referred to anything other than observable physical characteristics. But trans activists have deliberately confused sex and gender, pushing the idea that women have to give up essential protections to placate men who think they were “born in the wrong body”. And leading Labour figures have gone along with it.

We now live in a world where traditional dividing lines between the two main parties, such as levels of tax and public spending, have been blurred. Where there is a clear distinction, however, is on the question of biology. Shadow ministers, Labour MPs and an alarming number of parliamentary candidates spout gibberish about sex being “assigned” at birth.

If a prominent Labour figure proposed similar legislation to Truss, thousands of women would be cheering. And it’s a measure of how the Labour Party has let us down, remaining silent as MPs like Rosie Duffield are smeared with accusations of transphobia, that even sensible proposals are dismissed as “Right-wing”….

Truss may well be freelancing, seeking to retrieve her reputation, but this is Sir Keir Starmer’s weak spot. Voters say they don’t know what he stands for, but we know exactly what he thinks on this issue. And for many women on the Left, he’s firmly on the wrong side.

Andrew Doyle at UnHerd on The ugly return of homophobia:

Whereas we have always been accustomed to this kind of thing from the far-Right — one recalls Nick Griffin’s remark on Question Time about how he finds the sight of two men kissing “really creepy” — but now the most objectionable anti-gay comments arise in online spheres occupied by gender ideologues, from those who claim to be progressive, Left-wing and “on the right side of history”. The significant difference is that the word “cis” has been added to the homophobe’s lexicon. Some examples:

“Cis gay men are a disease.”
“Cis gay men are truly some of the most grotesque creatures to burden this earth.”
“I hate cis gay people with a burning passion.”
“If you’re a cis gay man and your sexuality revolves around you not liking female genitalia I hope you die and I will spit on your grave.”
“Cis gays don’t deserve rights.”
“There’s so many reasons to hate gay people, most specifically white gays, but there’s never a reason to be a transphobe.”
“It’s time to normalise homophobia.”

…If such ideas were restricted to the demented world of internet activism, we might be justified in simply ignoring it. But we now know that the overwhelming majority of adolescents referred to the Tavistock paediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. Whistleblowers have spoken out about the endemic homophobia, not simply among clinicians but also parents who were keen to “fix” their gay offspring. And of course there was the running joke among staff that soon “there would be no gay people left”.

And now a series of leaked internal messages and videos from WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), has revealed that clinicians in the leading global organisation for transgender healthcare have openly admitted in private that some teenagers mistake being same-sex attracted for gender dysphoria. The result of the “gender-affirming” approach has amounted to what one former Tavistock clinician recently described as “conversion therapy for gay kids”. Homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organisation’s list of psychiatric disorders in 1993, and yet here we are medicalising it all over again.

So how did we reach the point where gay conversion therapy is being practised in plain sight by the NHS? Much of the responsibility has to lie with Stonewall, a group that once promoted equal rights for gay people but now actively works against their interests. It has even gone so far as to redefine “homosexual” on its website and resource materials as “same-gender attracted”. It should go without saying that gay men are not attracted to women who identify as men, any more than lesbians should be denounced for excluding those with penises from their dating pools. What trans activists call discrimination, most of us call homosexuality.

Indeed, activists often claim that “genital preferences are transphobic”, or that sexual orientation based on biological sex is a form of “trauma”. The idea that homosexuality is a sickness was one of the first homophobic tropes I encountered as a child. Now it is being rebranded as progressive….

The widespread homophobia of the Eighties, epitomised by Section 28, was based on the notion that homosexuality was unnatural, dangerous and ought to be corrected. Present-day gender identity ideology perceives homosexuality as evidence of misalignment between soul and body. In other words, it seeks to “fix” gay people so that they fit into a heterosexual framework. It is no coincidence that so many detransitioners are gay people who were simply struggling with their sexuality. Gender identity ideology is the true successor to Section 28.

The proponents of this revamped gay conversion therapy dismiss our concerns as “transphobia” and “bigotry”, or as part of a manufactured “culture war”. Worse still, the new homophobia is being cheered on by those it will hurt most. While prominent gay figures continue to feed the beast that wishes to devour them, we are unlikely to see this dire situation improve any time soon. It was bad enough in the Eighties, when gay people were demonised and harassed by the establishment. Who thought we would have to fight these battles all over again?

Along with Stonewall let's not forget Mermaids as the other major trans campaign group, and let's not forget how Mermaids former CEO Susie Green dragged her son off to Thailand on his sixteenth birthday to be surgically remodelled as a "girl" (she noted jokingly that penile inversion had been difficult because “there wasn’t much there to work with” as her child’s genitals had never developed due to puberty blocking medication) because his father thought he was too effeminate for a boy.