Mick Hartley

British photographer Marc Alcock, now based in San Francisco – featured in the new Hoxton Mini Press book Looking at Trees:

[Photos © Marc Alcock]

On Instagram.

A plea from Jean Hatchet at The Critic – come on, by now we all know about the gender debate: enough of the prevarications and the plain cowardice. Plenty of (mostly) women have spoken out, suffered, and come out victorious, whether it's the latest case of Jo Phoenix, or Rachel Meade, or Maya Forstater – so why not you?  Everyone knows it's bollocks, all this stuff about changing sex and hundreds of different genders and "non-binary" and  "inclusivity". Speak up!

It is infuriating to be told by other women, “It’s different for you though. You’re so brave, but I can’t risk saying anything out loud.” It is no longer okay to leave it up to other women to risk their livelihoods, friends and even safety. You have information, you have legal precedent, you have examples and evidence to back up everything you really believe but don’t have the courage to say. Academics, lawyers, journalists, doctors, teachers, artists, writers, dancers, nurses, girl guide leaders and women from many walks of life, have all paved the way for you to acceptably (if slightly uncomfortably) say what you have always known is the truth. So, when you say it’s different for us, why is it? Why do you get to hide while another woman takes lashes from the ideological whip? Why is it painful for you but not for her? 

And there are degrees of resistance. You might only take small steps, like refusing to put the pronouns in your email at work. Or tackling the family member over the wedding buffet shouting “trans women are women and you’re a bigot”. This still matters. This is a brave step too….

Imagine if you did something? Imagine if you stopped pretending. The noise would be deafening if we collectively rose up to speak truth to power about women’s rights and our need to defend them — to protect the word “woman”, and protect our children from irreversible medical harm, and protect the vulnerable women forced to share space with men in prison, rape crisis centres etc, and ensure fair competition in sport for women and girls, and ensure we have clear knowledge around medical issues affecting only female people, and secure accurate statistical reporting of crimes of men’s violence against women and girls. Because you know all these things are happening. I know you do and you know you do. It must make you squirm to read this piece where I call you a coward.  

To be clear I do not call traumatised women cowards. I do not expect women at risk from male violence to place themselves at risk of harm. Those women, however, are relying on those of you living your lives in relative comfort and safety to stand up for them….

The arts, for example, are different in many ways as there is so little formal employment for many creatives. But some women are still brave enough to take on discrimination cases so that other, less protected women, who follow them can begin to be honest about their views. It comes at great cost nevertheless. Claudia Clare is a successful ceramicist. Her career was affected by the gender issue even though she already had a rebellious feminist reputation for her work. She says:

The art world started policing female artists, especially feminists, about our views on gender, mostly via social media. I had exhibitions, displays and lectures cancelled from 2019 and got listed as “forbidden” after I’d given a lecture on freedom of expression at Oxford Brookes University in 2018. So, with this history it would have been pointless keeping quiet. Maya Forstater changed everything.

I deliberately sought press coverage because above all other things we need to TALK in the artworld. The persistent silence is doing enormous harm, not least because it exacerbates the fear. The trans issue is hitting young and new artists very hard indeed. They are in no position to take reputational risks before they’ve even got started.

Which is why successful and established, and therefore somewhat protected, writers, artists, singers must not stay quiet. Those celebrities, bolstered by reputation and wealth, know exactly what is happening and need to stop pretending they don’t.

Let’s not forget JK Rowling who told FiLiA: 

I’ve looked around and realised that it has to be someone who can take the hit. And it has to be me. I can afford it. 

Well, now it has to be you too. Your days of pretending are over. 

This has been rumbling along for a while now. The Mail had a report last month, with a lovely Mail-style headline – Outrage as transgender woman Melody Wiseheart, 50, competes against TEENAGERS in Canadian swim meet 'and shares changing room with terrified girls'. This is Canada though: the more people complain, the more the authorities self-righteously trot out the "inclusivity" line. 

Lauren Smith at Spiked:

First they let men compete in women’s sports. Now they’re letting adult men compete against teenage girls – and wander into their changing rooms.

As hard as it might be to believe, in Canada a 50-year-old man really is being allowed to compete in swimming competitions alongside 13- and 14-year-old girls. Melody Wiseheart, formerly Nicholas Cepeda, is a professor of psychology and behavioural science at York University in Toronto, specialising in children and young people.

Hmm.

Concerned parents tipped off Rebel News, a right-wing website, about Wiseheart in October last year. He was spotted swimming in a competition at the Markham Pan Am recreation centre, representing the Orangeville Otters swimming club.

The next week, to try to stand up the story, Rebel News reporter Davide Menzies confronted several staff members at the recreation centre. Its competition coordinator initially said he could not recall seeing ‘a 50-year-old man’ competing alongside teenage girls. Menzies then presented him with the competition schedule, which showed Wiseheart’s name and age alongside those of nine teenage girls. Only then did the coordinator admit that Wiseheart had indeed been allowed to take part. The Daily Mail alleges that Wiseheart has been competing against teenage girls since 2019.

According to the competition coordinator, Wiseheart has the right to compete in girls’ competitions under Swimming Canada’s ‘trans inclusion’ rules. He has registered himself as female and is thus treated as female. And although the competitions he swims in consist almost exclusively of teenage girls, this is simply a matter of convention. It seems that, since no adult had ever tried to enter a teenagers’ race before, there had been no need to draw up explicit rules. In other words, Wiseheart did not even need to ‘identify’ as a 13-year-old girl to assert his ‘right’ to enter the girls’ competition.

Even as the controversy has flared up, Wiseheart has continued to enter girls’ swimming events. In December last year, parents again raised the alarm when Wiseheart competed in the Trojan Cup event in Ontario. This time, he was seen using the girls’ changing rooms. Reportedly, parents had to construct a makeshift tent out of towels to hide the girls from view as they changed.

Incredibly, Swimming Canada and Swim Ontario have since stepped in to defend Wiseheart’s participation in the teenage girls’ events. In a joint statement, they said:

‘Swimming is for everyone… people of all shapes, sizes, genders, beliefs and backgrounds should have the opportunity to swim to the best of their ability… with the expectation that our registrants treat each other with respect and dignity, and keep our sport environment free from harassment and abuse.’

They're chanting the magic words while looking the other way and sticking their fingers in their ears. Clearly Wiseheart does not treat the other swimmers with respect and dignity, but, as a trans woman, he gets special treatment. The girls – well…who cares, really?

Before and after. John Vachon, November 1942:

"Sunray, Texas. Workers at a carbon black plant."

"Sunray, Texas. Carbon black plant workers washing up at the end of the day."
[Photos: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]

The trailer for a new Egyptian film in which the grandsons of Adolf Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin Al-Husseini unite to fulfil Hitler’s promise to liberate Palestine from the Jews:

From MEMRI:

A new Egyptian short film, "A Century and Six Years," depicts the grandsons of Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler as they unite in order to fulfil Hitler's alleged promise to the Arabs to liberate Palestine from the Jews. The film's director, Nassef, posted the trailer to the movie on his Instagram account on January 22, 2024.

According to the Instagram account of Pierre-Luc Brassard, a Canadian actor and model living in Egypt, who plays the grandson of Hitler in the movie, the film won awards in the Alsharqiyah Film Festival in Oman, and was selected to appear in film festivals in Dubai and Tunisia this February of Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler unite in order to fulfil Hitler's promise to the Arabs to liberate Palestine from the Jews.

Grandson of Adolf Hitler: "What do you expect from me, Sir?"

Grandson of Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini: "I think you'll need to fulfill your grandfather promise. Are you sure you are a grandson of Hitler?"

More here:

Apparently, there is a new Egyptian independent film, "A Century and Six Years," that tells the fictitious story of a Sheik Hareth, the Egyptian grandson of Mufti Amin al-Husseini, traveling Germany to demand the Germans to honor Hitler's promise to the Arabs, through his grandfather the Mufti, of liberating Palestine from the Jews. Apparently, in the film, Hareth succeeds in locating Hitler's surviving family members and convinces them to renew the Arab German covenant.

The Egyptian Film Industry Syndicate just celebrated that the film received an award from Oman and is looking forward to nominating it in an upcoming movie awards festival in Tunisia.

You just can't, no matter how hard you try, make this stuff up. Entire societies stuck in Europe's most pathological delusions.

The Grand Mufti spent much of WW2 in Berlin, and was a key player in the ideological and political fusion between Nazism and Islamism.

This video did the rounds at the weekend – Sky News presenter Belle Donati, in an extremely hostile interview with Israeli politician Danny Danon, comparing Gaza to the Holocaust.

Well…

Sky News has issued an apology after a presenter compared Israel’s war against Hamas with the Holocaust.

In a heated interview with Danny Danon, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, presenter Belle Donati drew comparisons between calls for the voluntary migration of Palestinians from Gaza and the plight of Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Mr Danon described the comments as a “shameful, anti-Semitic equation”.

He added: “This is pure anti-Semitism what you just said, comparing the Holocaust to what’s happening today in Gaza. Shame on you for this behaviour.”

In a statement broadcast on air later this afternoon, Sky News said: “Sky News recognises the complete inappropriateness of this comparison and the offensive nature of those comments.

“Sky News would like to apologise unreservedly for the comparison and to Mr Danon personally for making the comparison.”

A spokesman for Sky News declined to comment on whether any disciplinary action would be taken against Ms Donati.

More on the Jo Phoenix employment tribunal ruling last week, from Sonia Sodha in the Observer – Vindictive, cowardly leaders bowed to the gender bullies and failed Jo Phoenix:

The judgment is scathing about the way in which 368 academics signed an open letter wrongly implying that the gender-critical academic network that Phoenix helped set up was transphobic; about the academic who said watching back a speech Phoenix gave elsewhere made her “cry at work” despite the court finding it contained no upsetting content; about the colleague who groundlessly likened Phoenix to “the racist uncle at the Christmas dinner table”; and the childish hyperbole some academics deployed in their statement suggesting that to establish a gender critical research network was to put lives at risk.

Not only did the Open University allow this harassment campaign to proceed unaddressed, it put out one-sided statements that implied there was a legitimate basis for concern. It is clear from this judgment that, if employers take their lead from organisations like Stonewall, whose chief lobbying tactic is to depict gender-critical belief as inherently hateful, they risk finding themselves on the wrong side of the law, and if activist employees fling around baseless insults like “transphobic” and “terf”, that could amount to unlawful workplace discrimination….

How on earth did a university set up to democratise access to learning and the exchange of ideas get captured in this way? It is partly a tale of how the bullying of women speaking about their sex-based rights is given an acceptable gloss through a self-described “progressive” cause that would be better described as authoritarian in its threat to get with its beliefs, or else. But it is also a story of the cowardice of leaders, of bystanders looking the other way when a lesbian – who survived a school shooting, the experience of being raped at 15 then living on the streets, and profound societal homophobia to become an accomplished senior academic – experiences workplace harassment so bad that it left her with PTSD.

You would expect a grown-up institution like a university to mediate the polarising effects of social media on a contentious debate; instead, what is happening right across society is that institutions as diverse as legal and arts organisations and the police are amplifying what is going on social media into women’s professional lives with awful consequences, not just for the direct targets of the persecution, but for the many women who are chilled into self-censoring their views as a result. Leaders have left a vacuum in organisational culture that gets filled in by a small number of domineering bullies; institutional cowardice morphs into institutional childishness that morphs into institutional vindictiveness.

Yes – exactly that.

The qualities that enable a certain type of person to rise to the top in these bureaucracies – enthusiastic agreement with whatever the agenda of the day happens to be, a notable lack of willingness to think for themselves, a dogged determination to punish wrong-thinkers – are precisely the qualities that allow this kind of situation to develop. Add a dollop of smugness for being progressive and  "doing the right thing", and it's irresistible.

The type of people, then, who are keen to see their organisation getting into Stonewall's Top 100 Employers list.

A policy document on domestic abuse that doesn't mention women? Well, it's Stonewall-friendly.

NHS England has come under fire after it revealed that its domestic abuse policy for staff had “gender-neutral language” and did not include the words “woman” or “women”.

Health chiefs — in an application to be included in the LGBT lobby group Stonewall’s Top 100 Employers list — highlighted that its policy said domestic abuse happens “regardless of gender”.

NHS England also revealed that its menopause policy is “LGBT inclusive” and has undergone “significant improvements” to “better support trans, non-binary and intersex employees”.

Stonewall had reviewed NHS ­England’s maternity policy to help ­“improve our language to be gender­inclusive”, it added, including using “pregnant employee” rather than “pregnant woman”.

What is it about trying to get into Stonewall's Top 100 Employers list that makes health chiefs go weak at the knees? And shouldn't health professionals, of all people, be aware of the importance of sex? It's basic biology.

Karen Ingala Smith, chief executive of Nia, a domestic and sexual violence charity working to end violence against women and girls, criticised Stonewall’s influence with NHS England.

She said: “If the NHS is content to let Stonewall reframe policies, especially those which have a disproportionate impact on women, then it’s creating conditions where sex discrimination can at best go unchecked and, at worst, put women at risk.”

This month it was revealed that more than 300 schools had been told to stop calling pupils “boys and girls” after signing up to another Stonewall scheme.

Steve Barclay, the former health secretary, wrote to ten leading national health organisations, including NHS England, last year, ordering them to review their membership of Stonewall. The Times obtained three of NHS England’s applications, from 2019, 2021 and 2022, to be included in Stonewall’s annual top 100 employers list. To get on the list — for which organisations are publicly celebrated as progressive — employers have to submit applications showing off their inclusive credentials. In its applications, NHS England said its domestic abuse policy included “gender-neutral language”, while a copy of the policy showed it did not include the words “woman” or “women”. It said it also had gender-neutral language in its parental policy and special leave policy. NHS England revealed that its menopause policy said: “It is important to acknowledge that transgender, non-binary and intersex workers may also experience the menopause.”

Oh fuck off. No it isn't.

Stonewall reviewed NHS England’s maternity, adoption and related parental support policy in 2017 to “ensure gender-inclusive language”. Examples of its gender-inclusive language included: “Every pregnant employee has the right to 52 weeks maternity leave.” NHS England said that colleagues could “add their personal pronouns on their email signature if they would like to” and that senior leaders had been doing so.

So-called LGBT allies at NHS ­England are asked to make pledges such as “committing to educating themselves further, to undergo or deliver training, to stand up for those around them”, the applications revealed. NHS rainbow lanyards are issued to members who make a pledge and staff are also given training on being a bi+ ally.

Brendan O'Neill on the rise of Holocaust envy, as more and more groups want a piece of what they see as the gold standard for victimhood:

In part, the use of words like ‘Shoah’, ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Never Again’ against Israel is just Jew-baiting. There are some people out there who relish the pain it inflicts on the descendants of the Jews who were gassed by the Nazis to imply that they are guilty of similar crimes today. To say ‘Never Again’ about Israel’s war on the army of anti-Semites that butchered more than a thousand Jews on 7 October is not a considered political critique – it’s racist gloating, Jew-taunting. Yet there is more at play, too. That the Holocaust can be weaponised against the Jews themselves is a testament to its wholesale extraction from historical reality and its transformation into a general tool of political posturing….

We’ve seen a stubborn insistence on the ‘sharing’ of the Holocaust time and again in recent years. Who can forget when the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day on the basis that it was ‘too narrowly focussed on Jewish suffering’? It needs to be more inclusive of ‘recent genocides such as that in Rwanda and of Muslims in Srebrenica’, the MCB insisted. In short, share your victim status, Jews. Give us a taste. Pool your historic suffering….

Today, humanity’s memory of the Holocaust is assaulted less by the noisy denialism of racist scum than by the jealous claims of victim groups who want some of that glow of victimhood that they think the Jews have been keeping to themselves. How else to explain the MCB’s tantrum over society’s ‘narrow focus’ on Jewish pain? So the Holocaust is not denied, at least not by respectable people, but it is shared, which is to say diluted. Every time a modern event is inserted into the moral universe of the Holocaust – whether it be a horrible war, factory farming or whatever – the Holocaust itself is diminished, dismantled, rendered ordinary rather than extraordinary….

The motor of today’s dismantling of the specificity of the Holocaust – which is to say, the truth of the Holocaust – is not fascism or racism. It’s victim politics. Ours is an era that validates victimhood above all else. Which grants moral authority to those who ‘suffer’. Where you can accrue both social standing and state resources through advertising your wounds, through bigging up your experiences of hate speech, oppression, etc. And so it just won’t do for the Jews to have a singular claim to the greatest, vilest act of victimisation in human history.

From photographer John Benton-Harris at Café Royal Books:

[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/John Bentlon-Harris]