Mick Hartley

Appalling case of sexual assault of child patients in a hospital by a male nurse.

Strange that @theRCN represented this nurse – who has just been struck off – but not Jennifer Mellehttps://t.co/7e2uRJc79O pic.twitter.com/JKiUkVtfOm

— teresa smith (@treesey) January 22, 2026

The old conversion therapy lie is back again. Labour MP Kate Osborne has tabled a draft resolution at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe calling for a Europe-wide ban on ‘conversion practices’, which would include any attempts to dissuade a confused youngster from transitioning.

Jo Bartosch at Spiked:

Trans ideology is a persistent pest. Strike it down in one place with the sanity hammer and it simply pops up somewhere else, undented by evidence and immune to embarrassment. This game of whack-a-mole is playing out in Europe. After the public’s turn against this damaging ideology in the UK, Labour MP Kate Osborne is now attempting to export dangerous and discredited ideas about gender identity across the continent….

Osborne’s campaign relies heavily on misdirection. The days of gay people being subjected to electric shocks to ‘straighten’ them out are, thankfully, long gone. Yet the moral revulsion attached to those genuinely barbaric practices still carries enormous rhetorical power. It is why trans activists are trying so hard to redefine and reapply the idea of conversion therapy.

Of course transitioning is the real conversion therapy – mutilating children who are very likely to be gay into sad simulacra of the other sex. It’s what they do to gays in Iran, if they don’t hang them.

That a ban on conversion therapy risks becoming a vehicle for an actual form of conversion therapy should not come as a surprise. Trans ideology operates by inverting reality. It treats the biological categories that underpin the existence of every mammal as mere ideas, while elevating regressive sex stereotypes into identities that must be affirmed. It excludes in the name of inclusion, recasts falsehood as ‘authenticity’, and medicalises distress under the banner of kindness. This is how people who believe they are on ‘the right side of history’, including politicians like the terminally right-on Kate Osborne, become the agents of something profoundly harmful.

Here’s the LGB Alliance’s Bev Jackson:

If you care about the lives of lesbian, gay, and bisexual teens – or about any children distressed by the turbulence of puberty – please oppose all attempts to enact a “trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices.”

These proposals are deliberately phrased in language that evokes the cruel and outrageous medical abuse of decades ago that was inflicted on gay people in an attempt to turn them straight.

But the proposed ban has nothing to do with those practices – which have long been illegal. It is about stopping parents, teachers – even therapists – questioning a girl who says she is a boy. (Or vice versa). A ban would deter everyone from helping the child or young adult to explore what is going on. It would have the effect of intimidating people and enforcing the “affirmative” approach, for fear of prosecution. Yes – prosecution.

Instead of asking how she concluded she is a boy, what she has been following on social media, if someone at school has persuaded her she is a boy, everyone would be forced to say “Ok you’re a boy now”. Everyone!

I am furious that activists are manipulating politicians to nod through terrible, terrible legislation that will hurt so many lesbian, gay and bisexual – and other “gender non-conforming” – teens and young adults.

Ideologically obsessed MPs like Kate Osborne are trying to push through this pernicious legislation in the UK and now throughout the Council of Europe. So many people assume it’s about banning something awful. It’s quite the opposite.

Added: see also this letter to MPs from Marcus Evans.

Naomi Cunningham on Protect the Dolls:

So in plainer words, “dolls” refers to men who say they are women. And “protect the dolls” means “protect men who say they are women from being faced with the reality that they are men, and the consequences of that reality”.

What does that reality look like? Well, the thing about men is they’re not women. So if something is for women only, it’s not for men. That means that if you are a man who says he is a woman – one of the “dolls” needing this protection – one of the consequences of the reality that you are a man is that women are likely to object if you try to invade their single-sex spaces, take their scholarships or team places, “breast-feed” an infant (alas, I am not making this up), etc.

They’re either delusional, or predatory – or both. And women aren’t in a position to tell the difference.

Reality is disappointing sometimes. I get that, I really do. I’m quite disappointed that I’m not a brilliant musician. But I don’t get to manage my disappointment by giving toe-curlingly bad recitals at the Wigmore Hall which random members of the public are press-ganged into receiving with rapturous applause. I manage it by being a grown-up who knows that I don’t get everything I want.

So anyway: that’s the most benign subcategory of the class of men who say they are women: those genuinely upset and disappointed by the fact that they are men.

But there are other kinds of men who say they are women. There are men for whom dressing as women is a sexual fetish. There are men who are sexually aroused by invading supposedly women-only spaces. There are cross-dressing men who talk to each other on Reddit chats and other places about their “euphoria boners”. There are men who go into women’s toilets and changing rooms in order to masturbate, film themselves while they do so, and then post that footage online. It’s a porn category.

There are even men who take drugs to induce lactation, and either express the resulting milk or get infants to suck on their nipples. That’s a porn category too.

No doubt it will be thought indelicate of me to mention this. It’s a repulsive side of the world we’d all prefer to look away from. But these men exist. I don’t know what proportion of the men who say they are women and go to work dressed as women are fetishists, and what proportion are genuinely upset and disappointed by the fact of their male bodies; or indeed how much overlap there may be between those groups. I don’t even know the orders of magnitude involved: the fetishists may be 1% or 5% of the men who go to work dressed as women, or 50%, or more than 90%.

But you know what? I don’t really care. Whatever the proportions, there’s exactly one acceptable way for men to behave in relation to women-only spaces, and that is to stay out of them. That’s what decent men do. If a man doesn’t stay out, he’s not a decent man. Even if he’s genuinely distressed by his male body and invading women’s spaces with no more nefarious intent than to comfort himself for that distress by playing pretend, he’s showing a callous indifference to women’s privacy and boundaries by doing so. He’s behaving like a man who doesn’t think women have the right to privacy away from the male gaze. He’s behaving like a man who’s not good with the word “no”.…

My message to the men who like to cross dress at work is simple. Fine. You do you. Keep it tolerably businesslike, and no employer now will dare tell you to go home and come back properly dressed; you’ve won that one. Whatever your reasons for cross-dressing at work, you’re going to be allowed to do it.

Just stay out of women’s spaces. If you don’t want to be thought a creep and a predator, don’t behave like one.

The point about cross-dressing men – like Allana yesterday – is that they’re encouraged by this “Protect the Dolls” nonsense, and by the efforts of so many who’ve been duped into thinking that this is the latest civil rights movement and the T belongs next to the LGB, to believe that they really are women. Which means they’re encouraged to use women-only facilities. Toilets and changing rooms and the like. They shouldn’t – because they’re not women. Obviously.

From the JC:

Members of Britain’s biggest teachers’ union shared lessons plans days after October 7 asking pupils if they would “fight back” if they lived in Gaza, the JC can reveal.

The National Education Union (NEU) already faces accusations of alleged antisemitism within its ranks after a Jewish MP, Labour’s Damien Egan, was barred from visiting a school in Bristol because of his support for Israel.

Now it can be revealed that shortly after the massacre carried out by Hamas in 2023 NEU members in the city shared lesson plans which Jewish leaders claim appear to justify the attack.

The materials have been passed on to the JC by a whistleblower teacher in Bristol who had access to documents shared online in a Google Drive folder titled “Palestine4Educators”.

The document, entitled “How can educators teach about Palestine?” is emblazoned with both the NEU logo and the red, green and black Palestinian flag, bearing the words ‘Free Palestine’.

It begins with the notorious slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which is widely understood as invalidating the legitimacy of the entire state of Israel.…

No surprise. Like so many other unions, the NEU has been taken over by activists.

If schools say they “can’t be seen to be taking sides”, it asks: “Do they not want to be on the side that is against genocide?”

The presentation advises teachers that if they “get in trouble” with their school, they should point to the NEU’s stated position and union motions.

The “Palestine4Educators” pack includes a proposed union branch motion declaring “solidarity with the Palestinians” and asserting that “Palestinians have a right to resist settler colonialism and occupation under international law”.

“Armed struggle” is included as a legitimate means of liberation.

Maya Forstater in the Telegraph – The Civil Service’s call for a trans equality chief proves the Blob still hasn’t accepted reality.

So the confusion continues. The Civil Service is advertising for a senior official to “lead on trans equality”. The policy manager in the Office for Equality and Opportunity – part of the Cabinet Office – will focus on the “implications” of the Supreme Court judgment that ruled that the term “women” in the Equality Act referred to biological sex.

Effectively then, the Cabinet Office is saying it does not know how to follow the law. In a letter to my charity, the department’s permanent secretary said it will not withdraw its model policy on “gender identity” in the workplace while it is under review in the wake of last year’s ruling.

And Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, continues to sit on guidance written by the Equality and Human Rights Commission that would force the Civil Service and every other public body, as well as businesses, to protect women-only spaces. The practical answer of the Supreme Court’s conclusion is obvious: wherever facilities and services are provided separately for men and women, that means sex – not gender identity.

The new job advert points to a wholly flawed approach. Civil servants should not be insider-advocates for interest groups, but rather impartial professionals who deal with public affairs fairly, efficiently, with integrity and according to the law. That is, after all, what we pay them for.

Over the past 15 years the Civil Service has got itself mired in a scarcely believable muddle that has led to a shocking corruption of public service values. It all started with words. “Man” and “woman”, “male” and “female”, “she” and “he” were said to be offensive if used in the time-honoured fashion.

People were told to announce their pronouns at meetings. The NHS was to make an inventory of all patients’ intimate body parts and do away with accurate recording of anyone’s sex. People who declared themselves gender-fluid (crossdressers, in old money) were to be given two different security passes and allowed to use whichever facilities they liked. Everyone was to pretend they couldn’t tell whether someone was male or female.

This wasn’t just a bizarre and bewildering waste of time, effort and good sense. It caused real harm. Rapists were put in women’s prisons. Healthy children were put on sterilising medical pathways. And people with principles who refused to play along were bullied and harassed at work.

All of this should have come to an end on April 16 2025, when the Supreme Court made its elegant and robust ruling of the bleeding obvious. The law protects transsexuals from being harassed and discriminated out of public life – but doesn’t offer wish-fulfilment or perform magic. Legislation cannot change people’s sex. And laws that relate to the sexes rely on a coherent understanding of reality. Being a woman is not a matter of wearing women’s clothing or using she/her pronouns. Sex is real, and it matters.

Instead of taking the opportunity for a return to common sense, the Government has allowed the Civil Service to continue to run this circus through Whitehall.…

The Supreme Court judgment should have led to reflection about what went wrong. How did the entire state apparatus – the Civil Service, regulators, the Scottish and Welsh governments, police forces, NHS trusts and local authorities – get the law wrong and force public servants into this dangerous pantomime? Surely they should now apologise to the ordinary men, women and children whose rights they have trampled on? What happened to the principles of honesty, integrity and objectivity?

Instead, more people are being hired into partisan roles in the department that was the chief cheerleader for gender ideology in the Civil Service. This is no way to stop the wasteful, harmful madness. The harm, the costs and the court cases will keep coming until someone at the centre of government finds their integrity and the courage to say “no more”.

Are the government and Civil Service procrastinating because they’re scared of the trans lobby? Or do they really believe in gender ideology, but don’t have the courage to come out and say so? Either way it’s clear that those of us who celebrated the Supreme Court ruling last year were being way too optimistic.

To the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize 2025 at the National Portrait Gallery. Always worth a visit, this annual show, but often….well….problematic, shall we say, for us gender criticals. Yes, it’s the art world, folks.

First up, Allana, by Steve Reeves.

Lovely dress – and he knows the language:

“Allana appears strong and reflective standing in an ordinary suburban street. Her portrait forms part of Steve Reeves’s moving tribute to older members of the LGBTQ+ community who were living before the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK in 1967. Allana transitioned ten years ago, after suffering much of her adult life from depression and gender dysphoria, and only finding inner peace when under water as a Navy diver. “Becoming who I am has been, in short, nothing but hard, hard work”, she says.“

No reason to believe he’s gay, and if he is he certainly took a long time to come out. But to be a cross-dressing man now is to be a hero, even if the photo is nothing special – so here we are. A man in a dress in a suburban street.

More seriously – Freedom, by Pip Jay King.

“Pip Jay King has been photographing Danni over the past four years, following their personal journey as a transgender and non-binary person. Danni’s experience, undergoing top surgery and masculinising hormone therapy, is visualised in this moment of joy and serenity. Through this documentation Danni is able to see themselves as King does: “at home in their body, radiating gender euphoria on a spring day.” The bodily details we can see indicate a personal passage which is captured in this moment of liberation.“

This is a troubled young woman who’s been medically mutilated with a double mastectomy, and is taking masculinising hormones, in the deluded belief that she can become a man – never mind the confusion of being supposedly non-binary and changing sex. This is obscene. Did the photographer encourage the poor girl in all this? It certainly sounds like it.

And showing this here, in a public gallery. There was a party of young schoolgirls when I was there. Encouraged to be inspired by this “gender euphoria” – by the belief that this is a positive and wonderfully brave step towards a fabulous new world, when it’s just the beginning of this poor girl’s suffering. For shame.

Anything else I want to get off my chest? Well yes – the NPG toilets. They’re “inclusive”. Which means no Ladies and Gents, just a row of cubicles. Which means the toilet seats and floor are covered in piss because men – some men – can’t be bothered to raise the seat, already covered in piss, and are never as accurate as they hope. Lucky ladies once again.

There, I’m done.

The most heartbreaking war crime of the Islamic Republic against the Iranian people is this:
Iran’s brightest, most talented, and most beautiful children are being murdered by the most ignorant, uneducated, vicious, and dangerous criminals on Earth.
Raha was full of life and… https://t.co/OpTcQ7xXWI pic.twitter.com/ay0GIZ4wPK

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 20, 2026

More on the betrayal of the Darlington nurses by their union. Joanna Williams at Spiked:

This is clearly a victory for common sense. But it is worth asking why the eight women had to bring this case in the first place. The legal proceedings required time, effort and expense, as well as exacting a huge emotional toll from the nurses. Challenging their employer so directly posed a risk to their jobs. Yet shamefully, the nurses had to do all of this without the support of a trade union, despite some of them being paid-up members.

When Bethany Hutchison, one of the women who had raised concerns about the changing rooms, emailed her union representative at the start of the dispute, she did not get a reply. A month later, with a legal case underway, she discovered the truth: the union was representing the man they had complained about. Hutchison had been a fee-paying member of Unison for 35 years, but was abandoned at the very moment she needed its support.

Unison put defending one man – and the edifice of transgender ideology – above showing solidarity with female members. Indeed, Steve North, the then president of Unison, took to social media to describe the nurses’ campaign as ‘anti-trans bigotry’. This meant that, in between working and fighting a legal case, the Darlington nurses had to form their own trade union.

Sadly, the experience of the Darlington nurses is not unique. Many trade unions have put ideology above biology and betrayed female members. Sandie Peggie began legal proceedings against the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) after it failed to support her when she was suspended by NHS Fife in 2024, over claims she bullied and harassed Beth Upton, a male doctor who insisted he was trans and could use the women’s changing rooms. Peggie says that rather than defending her, the union ‘contributed to her mistreatment’. Her lawyer, Margaret Gribbon, damningly claims that if the RCN had ‘fulfilled the conventional role of a trade union, it is less likely that Sandie would have faced the ordeal of an 18-month disciplinary process’ and a lengthy employment tribunal.

Jennifer Melle too.

Incredibly, Melle was investigated and disciplined for ‘misgendering’ a patient. She was then referred to the Nursing and Midwifery Council for breaching its code that nurses should not express their personal beliefs. Despite being a predominantly female trade union, the RCN refused to intervene in Melle’s defence.…

But it’s not just in nursing that trade unions are sacrificing female members on the altar of transgender ideology. Back in 2021, the university lecturers’ union, UCU, refused to support Professor Kathleen Stock when she was targeted by transgender activists. It seems that unions prefer to brand women ‘bigots’, and defend racist paedophiles, rather than question the shibboleth that men can become women just on their word.

Indeed, Unison responded to last year’s Supreme Court ruling that ‘woman’ means a biological female in the Equality Act, by reaffirming ‘its commitment to the trans, gender-diverse and nonbinary communities’. And when Sandie Peggie’s employment tribunal began, Unison’s Camden branch put forward a motion at the union’s national women’s conference asserting that ‘trans women are women and trans men are men’ (sic).

Even now, with the Darlington nurses and Peggie having been vindicated in court, trade unions still refuse to defend women. Neither Unison nor the RCN have taken the opportunity to reflect on their actions or row back on their previous positions. Instead, following the Darlington nurses’ judgement, Unison issued a statement insisting its policy ‘remains the same’. The union, it said, ‘stands by its beliefs in the rights of our trans, nonbinary and gender-diverse members’.

So congratulations to the Darlington nurses and good luck to Jennifer Melle. Together, they have exposed not just the inhumanity and misogyny at the heart of the NHS’s diversity policies but the contempt trade unions have for their female members. In shamefully refusing to support women, both Unison and the Royal College of Nursing show themselves to be worse than irrelevant. They are stabbing female members in the back in their rush to meet the demands of a tiny number of trans activists.

Trade unions, once a dynamic force in the promotion of workers’ rights, are now dinosaurs heading for irrelevance. What’s their purpose now, If they don’t stand up for their members?

The managers at the Epsom and St Helier Hospitals NHS Trust have finally realised that it doesn’t look good, taking the side of a convicted trans paedophile who attacked and racially abused a nurse after she refused to use his precious female pronouns.

A nurse threatened with the sack after she “misgendered” a transgender paedophile prisoner has been reinstated to her NHS job.

Jennifer Melle, 40, was reported to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) after she referred to an inmate from a high-security men’s prison listed as male on their medical record, as “Mr” and “he”.

She was then hauled before a disciplinary hearing, accused of breaching patient confidentiality by speaking to the media, an allegation she denied.

It’s good news, coming so soon after the Darlington nurses victory – but how on earth did it ever come to this? What idiots decided this was a worthy fight? – taking the side of a violent paedophile against one of their own nurses. That staying true to gender ideology was more important than supporting a nurse who’d been assaulted and racially abused.

Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservatives, wrote on the social media site X: “I am delighted for Jennifer that common sense has prevailed. But it is not justice.

“Jennifer has been dragged through the mire for two long years. And for what? Radical gender ideology that makes a mockery of the law. The Government must act to end these absurd witch hunts.”

Added: the BBC report, meanwhile, omits any mention that the person “misgendered” was a paedophile serving time in prison – and indeed carefully uses the phrase “transgender patient”, never identifying him as a man. Though it does find room to mention Melle’s “evangelical Christian beliefs”.

Samuel J Hyde, a couple of months back:

The young people who chant for intifada and denounce Zionism with quasi-religious conviction do not believe themselves ignorant. They think themselves enlightened. The slogans that saturate social platforms – settler colonialism, decolonization, and the genocide libel – did not originate in the fevered minds of the naïve but in the quiet, tenured rooms of the university. They have become the moral grammar of our time and are now wielded to sanctify the murder of Israeli Jews on October 7.

Quoted by Cary Nelson in his Times of Israel blog – A Taxonomy of Antizionism.

Meanwhile, antizionism is itself being aggressively promoted by faculty members, campus groups, and NGOs that advocate for a cluster of historical and contemporary myths and falsehoods.

The first of these antizionist myths, one invoked for decades but not the main emphasis of contemporary antizionism, is the insistence that Palestinians are the only true indigenous residents of the area from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and beyond. It is based on the lie that the Jews have not had a substantial presence in the region either in the ancient world nor in the post-Roman era. This falsehood has been repeated for decades despite the substantial body of historical testimony and archeological evidence to the contrary. It remains a comforting story antizionists can tell themselves and use in persuading gullible new recruits to the movement that the antizionist cause has decisive historical validation. Given its historical claim, it can be considered antizionism’s foundation story.…

The second example is the myth that there is a direct line between several antizionisms that flourished in the early twentieth century and those that operate today. The study of antizionism should insist instead that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 created a complete break with the antizionism that existed beforehand. Contemporary antizionism, like that Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice in Palestine advocate, gains credibility and authenticity if people can believe it inherits the mantle of those who opposed the establishment of a Jewish state seventy-five or a hundred years ago. Efforts to eliminate an actual state with 7 million Jewish citizens bear no relationship,  post-Holocaust, with earlier arguments that assimilation into European societies represents a solution preferable to Jewish statehood. Antizionism was once a plausible political argument when the outcome of history was still being debated. No longer….

The third falsehood to be overcome is the insistence that contemporary antizionism is entirely distinct from and unrelated to antisemitism. Even relentlessly, often viciously antizionist groups like Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine persist on claiming they are not antisemitic. They routinely perform outrage at the suggestion that their practices actually erase the difference between antizionism and antisemitism. Among those seriously researching antizionism,  a consensus has evolved, in the wake of 10/7, that antisemitism and antizionism have fused. With the antisemitic murders on 10/7 itself, followed most recently by the carefully planned slaughter of 15 Jews on Australia’s Bondi Beach, along with the belated recognition that chanted antizionist slogans have antisemitic consequences, that conclusion has become fundamental. It alerts us to the ways rationalized antizionism can either sublimate or animate antisemitism, including antisemitic murder.

Nelson goes on to list twenty of the “flashpoints that highlight contemporary debate” on antizionism. For instance…

No. 2.  CORRUPTING THE ACADEMY. Antizionism now centers and defines the international left. It has entirely taken over the movement that purports to advocate for Palestinian rights. It is increasingly corrupting humanities and social science disciplines, making it nearly impossible to hire or grant tenure to faculty with research projects sympathetic to Zionism. It is increasingly dominating both Israel Studies and Jewish Studies, We need to be both frank and explicit in detailing these developments.