Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Ignoring critically important risks

    Hannah Barnes in the New Statesman on the puberty blocker trial:

    Patient information sheets given to parents and children who are considering participating in an NHS-backed puberty blocker trial do not provide a clear or accurate account of the balance of risks and benefits of puberty suppression, a group of healthcare professionals argue.

    The Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender (CAN-SG) – a coalition of more than 100 clinicians and medics committed to open discussion and evidence-based care in youth gender medicine – contend that without this information, parents cannot provide truly informed consent. Nor can children and young people assent to participation….

    More than 380 clinicians, including some who specialise in evidence-based medicine and have helped write national clinical guidelines, have written to the Health Secretary Wes Streeting expressing their disagreement that the trial should take place in its current guise, or before other less invasive research avenues have been pursued first. The signatories, which include 220 doctors and surgeons, expressed “grave disquiet”.

    Some are experts in trial design who are critical of this particular trial’s approach. Others believe no trial could be ethical, among them clinicians who worked with children at Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), which closed in March 2024.

    Now, some of these professionals are raising alarm over the patient information sheets given to parents and children. The sheets are meant to provide detailed information about the potential risks and benefits to participants in any medical trial.

    Speaking in committee room 3 of the House of Lords on 15 January, Dr Louise Irvine, co-chair of CAN-SG, told gathered journalists: “Parents have not been told the true likelihood or the full scope of the harms involved.”

    Nowhere are parents told of the possibility that their children might feel differently about their gender identity in the future, that there is no reliable predictor of which children might benefit from pubertal suppression, or that they could possibly regret medical steps taken when they were younger. Irvine argued that risks to bone health, sexual function, brain maturation, identity development and fertility were also not adequately reflected in the information sheets.

    “The Pathways Patient Information Sheets treat puberty blockers as though they were a standalone, reversible pause,” Irvine argued. This characterisation was “misleading”, she added. “In reality, more than 90 per cent of children who start puberty blockers go on to cross sex hormones.” She urged the press to read them for themselves.

    The whole thing, in other words, is deeply dishonest and unethical.

    The trial information sheets say that puberty blockers may provide young people with gender incongruence “time to explore their gender identity without worrying about their body starting to change”. Parents and children are not told how speculative this hypothesis is, nor that it was rejected by the Cass Review. “Given that the vast majority of young people started on puberty blockers proceed from puberty blockers to masculinising [or] feminising hormones, there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think, and some concern that they may change the trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development,” Cass wrote in the 2024 review.

    One study, started by the Tavistock Gids and University College London Hospitals in 2011, found that 98 per cent (43 out of 44) of children aged 12-15 taking part progressed from puberty blockers to start cross-sex hormones (testosterone for females wishing to masculinise and oestrogen for males wanting to feminise). Gids staff working with gender-distressed children were presented with similar statistics in 2016. One, Dr Anna Hutchinson, described it as her “holy fuck” moment. And a wake-up call for many of her colleagues too.

    Back then, clinicians saw that this data had profound implications for consent. It wasn’t just that families and young people needed to be told about blockers: they also needed more information on what transition might entail. “You couldn’t do it after you put them on the blockers,” Dr Natasha Prescott told me while I wrote Time to Think, “you had to do it before.” Because “once they’re on the blocker, they’ve started along a path”.

    It was described as “transing away the gay”. And it’s simply a lie to say that this provides “a breathing space”. These are powerful irreversible drugs – which will now be supplied to young vulnerable children as a test – which will in the end tell us nothing.

    It’s a disgrace.

  • Ran Gvili

    The last hostage has been returned.

  • Normative babies

    “….it’s somehow too “normative” to desire a child whose development you haven’t fucked up.”

    Here’s the 2023 paper – co-authored by Sally Hines. We shouldn’t be so concerned about the “normative” development of babies when the all-important issue of the validation of pregnant woman who take testosterone is concerned. Yes really. It’s over-hyped, this business of healthy babies.

    Sally Hines was an early promoter of gender ideology with Is Gender Fluid?

    JK Rowling:

    .@sally_hines, I’ve given your book ‘Is Gender Fluid?’ to several people who want a short primer on what gender identity ideology’s all about. So far, 100% of readers have rated it self-contradictory, unevidenced bollocks. You have my permission to use that quote on the cover.

  • Mountain of dead

  • German birds

    Portraits – closer than your average bird photos – from photographer Marvin Heinzel:

    [All images © Marvin Heinzel]

  • “Horrible views on vulnerable trans people”

    Meanwhile, in Clapham:

    The founder of a women’s society at the University of Cambridge is threatening legal action against a pub in what campaigners say may become a test case on the rights of gender-critical customers.

    Thea Sewell, a philosophy student, is one of three female students who last October set up the Cambridge University Society of Women, which admits only biological women as members. She has spoken publicly about the personal attacks she has faced from fellow students after it was discovered that she had bought books by gender-critical authors.

    This week Sewell, 20, sent a “letter before claim” — formal notice of an intended legal action — to the Prince of Wales pub in Clapham, south London, alleging that bar staff had refused to serve her because of her views on transgender issues. The letter warns the pub that court proceedings may be brought.

    Sewell is demanding an apology and £2,500 in compensation. She said in the correspondence that, when she went to the pub near her family home in London in January, she was told: “You’re not welcome here.”

    When she asked why, Sewell said she was given an explanation to the effect that it was because of her “horrible” views on “vulnerable trans people”.

    She said she had been “deeply embarrassed” by the rejection and had agreed to leave to save her companion from any further distress. Sewell said that when she returned later that evening to seek “further clarification” from bar staff, she was told: “You’re not allowed in here.”

    Sewell said that when she protested, saying that it was unlawful under equality laws to refuse to serve someone on the basis that they held gender-critical views, the same staff member said she was barring Sewell because the bartenders “did not feel comfortable” serving her.

    Good luck to her.

    Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at the sex-based rights charity Sex Matters, said that Sewell’s legal action could have implications for service providers across the country: “Trans activist groups’ longstanding misrepresentation of the law has led to the widespread misconception that it is legal for service providers to discriminate against people with gender-critical beliefs.

    “Thea’s case will be an important test for upholding the rights of people who reject gender ideology. It should ring alarm bells for pub owners, shopkeepers and anyone else who provides services to the public that it is not lawful to behave in this bigoted manner towards people who hold perfectly ordinary, factual beliefs.”

    Absolutely. Factual beliefs.

  • All holocausts

    Not just the BBC, then….

  • Intellectuals and Marxism

    Steven Pinker:

    I spoke with @LaulPatricia [Dr P Arora} about Marxism:

    One is: What’s remarkable is that Marxism has been tried. Now, of course, defenders of Marxism say it hasn’t really been tried anywhere, but certainly the people who implemented it claimed they were implementing Marxism.

    And this is a massive experiment—a global experiment—with a very clear outcome. Namely, the Soviet Union was a disaster. The imposition of communism on Eastern Europe was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Venezuela was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Maoist China was a disaster. Disaster in terms of both poverty and oppression and genocide and stupid wars. So the world has told us what happens under communism, and it’s a sign of how out of touch intellectuals can be that there are still people who defend it despite the entire world giving a very clear-cut answer.

    One more is: would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany? We have an experimental group and a matched control group in terms of culture, language, and geography, and the answer is crystal clear. So this is a sign of, I think, the pathology of intellectual life—that Marxism can persist.

    The other is, you did call attention to one of the appeals of Marxism, though, and more generally of heavy, strong influence of government guided by intellectuals, which is that there are certain kinds of reforms that you can state as principles. You can articulate them verbally as propositions—like equality, human rights, democracy—but there’s other kinds of progress that take place in massive distributed networks of millions of people, none of whom implements some policy. But collectively, there is an order, an organization that’s beneficial.

    So that can happen organically through, for example, the development of a language. No one designed the English language. It’s just hundreds of millions of English speakers. They coin new words. They forget old words. They try to make themselves clear. And we get the English language and the other 5,000 languages spoken on earth.

    Likewise, a market economy is something where knowledge is distributed. You don’t have a central planner deciding how many shoes of size 8 will be needed in a particular city, but rather information is conveyed by prices, which are adjusted according to supply and demand. And you’ve got a distributed network of exchange of information that can result in an emergent benefit.

    Now, intellectuals tend to hate that. They like rules of language—of correct grammar. They like top-down economic planning. They like cultural change that satisfies particular ideals described by intellectuals. And so rival sources of organization, like commerce, like culture—traditional culture—tend to be downplayed by intellectuals.

    And this can be magnified by the fact that many dictatorships give a privileged role to intellectuals, which may be why, over the course of the 20th century, and probably continuing to the present, there has not been a dictator that has not had fans among intellectuals—including the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, but also the communist dictators: Mao and Castro, even Stalin in his day. And every other dictator has had, actually, often fawning praise from Western intellectuals.

    And Hitler? What about Hitler? Surely no intellectual would go there.

    Well, the one name that tends to be forgotten in this roll-call of intellectual folly is Heidegger – widely cited as the most important and influential philosopher of the 20th century. He was a Nazi. Not just, as his apologists like to claim, a member of the party by necessity, but a member by conviction. Richard Wolin’s book Heidegger in Ruins sets out the case for the prosecution. I posted on this, and Jeffrey Herf’s Quillette review, here.

    In the sixth and final chapter of Heidegger in Ruins, Wolin concludes by examining the enthusiasm for Heidegger among the Nouvelle Droit in France, the Neue Rechte in Germany, Alexander Dugin and the Putinist nationalists in Russia, the activists of the American far-Right, and right-wing terrorists denouncing the “great replacement” in Norway and New Zealand. Dugin, who has made the case for a Russian national socialism and for a “neo-Eurasian” policy of Russian territorial expansion, has published several volumes on Heidegger’s importance to Russia and the attack on Western liberalism. Wolin detects echoes of the moods and language of the conservative revolution of Germany’s 1920s in the nationalism and reactionary identity politics that have flourished in the West in recent years.

    Also in Iran.

    Heidegger in particular is central to the Iranian story. Beginning in the 1960s, during the rule of the American-aligned and dictatorial Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and continuing through the 1979 Islamic Revolution until today, the German thinker has been one of the dominant philosophical figures in Iran. His critique of Enlightenment liberalism, and his emphasis on the need to “remember” an authentic way of being that modernity has forgotten, resonated particularly strongly. Heidegger’s thought owes continuing prominence in Iran to a single figure, Ahmad Fardid. Born in 1910, Fardid left Iran to study in France and Germany in the years after the Second World War and returned a committed Heideggerian, espousing a doctrine of “Westoxification,” the idea that Iran had been infected by and must rid itself of Western culture and ideas. Writers and thinkers like Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati, who shaped the intellectual climate that led to the revolution, adopted Fardid’s views and terminology—“Westoxification” was popularized by Al-e Ahmad in a book by that same name—casting Heidegger a famous Western philosopher who legitimized their already existing anti-modernism.

    And, of course, our very own radical philosophers:

    Jonathan Rée, co-founder, and one-time frequent contributor to the LRB, explained that Heidegger was so important because of his critique of the “imperious dehumanising movement of western modernity”. 

    Ah yes. The Nazis were quite dehumanising in their own little way, but clearly can’t compare to the evils of western modernity.

  • BBC silence

    “…are exterminating their citizens by the thousands mostly shooting them in the head at point blank range for peaceful protest when in Britain you can’t get the police to come out if you’ve had your car stolen.”

    Though they’ll come out in the thousands, our police, to escort Free Palestine mobs through our cities, and protect them from unwelcome attention – like that Iranian demonstrator with his “Hamas are terrorists” placard, who was arrested and led away.

  • Antisemitism on the couch

    Sally Satel at Commentary on the antisemitic corrosion that’s eating away at psychotherapy in the US.

    A therapist in Chicago named Heba Ibrahim-Joudeh felt that patients, too, needed to be protected from Zionist therapists. In winter 2024, Ibrahim-Joudeh, a member of the Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists Facebook group, organized a “blacklist” of local Zionist therapists. “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to,” she wrote to colleagues, who responded with thanks.

    In 2025, a young Jewish woman had her first appointment with a psychotherapist in Washington, D.C. During the session, she mentioned a recent months-long stay in Israel. The therapist, who was part of a group practice, smiled and said, “It’s lucky you were assigned to me. None of my colleagues will treat a Zionist.”  

    The intolerance is not confined to isolated examples. It’s roiling the American Psychological Association (APA), the nation’s foremost accreditor for psychological training and continuing education programs. Tensions reached a new level last winter when more than 3,500 mental health professionals calling themselves Psychologists Against Antisemitism sent a letter to the APA’s president and board. The signers called upon the association to “address the serious and systemic problem of antisemitism/anti-Jewish hate.” The letter told of APA-hosted conferences for educational credits in which speakers made “official statements and presentations [including] rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis; antisemitic tropes; Holocaust distortion; minimization of Jewish victimization, fear, and grief.”

    Singled out by name was the former president of the APA Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology from 2023 to 2025, Lara Sheehi. In addition to diagnosing Zionism as a “settler psychosis,”  Sheehi had posted expletive-laced messages on social media, including one stating “destroy Zionism” and another describing Israelis as “genocidal f—ks.” Her sentiments infiltrated the annual meeting of the APA in Denver last summer, where, according to psychologist Dean McKay of Fordham University, professional Listserv postings urged attendees to wear keffiyehs at the convention and read a “land and genocide statement” before giving their presentations, some of which contained Hamas propaganda. McKay has also documented cases of therapists urging their clients to go to anti-Israel protests as part of what they see as their role in promoting activism.

    Lara Sheehi previously – and Cary Nelson at Fathom.

    The new psychotherapy is all about social justice. Critical Social Justice Therapy, it’s been called.

    Untested as a form of therapy, it views patients as either perpetrators or victims of oppression and understands this simple dynamic as the root of their problems.

    Social justice therapists—who see themselves as activists first, healers second—usurp the goals of therapy. They override patients’ needs and preferences in favor of their own politicized aims, such as “dismantling racism.” 

    It’s an echo of what’s happening in American universities, where the role of education is often secondary now to the activists’ aims of fighting what they see as social injustice. Which, in the current climate, regularly comes with a serving of antisemitism.