Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • A highly surprising judgement

    Baroness Falkner speaking out again. She oversaw the ECHR Supreme Court judgement that, for single-sex spaces, sex means biological sex, and now has to watch as the government does nothing.

    The former head of the equalities watchdog has said the judge in the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal was unlikely to have reached his “highly surprising” conclusion if the UK government had not been so slow in publishing new guidance on single-sex spaces.

    “Highly surprising”. That’s a tactful way of putting it.

    Baroness Falkner of Margravine, until last month chairwoman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), told Times Radio that Kemp had been unable to draw on the commission’s updated, but as yet officially unpublished, guidance on the use of single-sex spaces because of UK government delays….

    “On the face of it, it’s extremely surprising and unusual as a judgment, if you looked at the submissions, if you looked at the evidence that there was before it.” Falkner said. “It’s a highly surprising judgment.

    “I do wonder, as do other people in this space, if EHRC’s code of practice had been there, been published, been available for the courts and tribunals to use, I really do wonder if they could so likely have dismissed or seem to reinterpret the Supreme Court’s guidance.”

  • Fencing for women

    Telegraph headline – Trans fencers banned from women’s competitions. No, no, no – it’s men being banned. Men who claim to be women. Headlines like this just play into the hands of gender activists complaining about “transphobia”.

    Still, good news.

    British Fencing has joined many sporting bodies worldwide in prohibiting biological males from competing against biological women.

    It is the latest sport in the UK to take the step, after table tennis, football and cricket. The rule changes follow April’s Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman under the Equality Act is based on biological sex.

    The change to British Fencing’s rules, introduced in January, emerged during the International Fencing Federation Congress in Bahrain last month.

    The policy reads: “Only individuals whose sex at birth was female may compete in the female category.”

    Better, “only women may compete in the female category”. But yes, we get the point.

  • Hanukkah Australia

    You get a long way down the BBC report before you see any mention of Hanukkah or Jews: “We understand an event to mark the first day of the Jewish celebration Hanukkah was taking place on Bondi Beach.” And that’s it. Awfully bad luck for those Jews, happening to be on the beach just when people are getting shot.

    Added:

  • Trialling chemical castration

  • Daring to question gender theory

    Story here:

    University of Cambridge students allegedly carved the word “Terf” into a fellow undergraduate’s door after she showed interest in gender-critical books.

    Thea Sewell, 20, says she was ostracised by friends at Christ’s College and condemned as a “bigot” for possessing literature which disputed gender theory – the notion that gender is changeable.

    The second-year philosophy undergraduate, who is a survivor of childhood sexual assault, says she continues to be shouted at in the street for allegedly holding “reprehensible” beliefs on gender.

    Ms Sewell has now co-founded the Cambridge University Society of Women (CUSW) with other gender-critical students to fight for the right to express their views.

  • This crime against humanity

    Wes Streeting is “deeply uncomfortable” with the puberty blockers trial. Dennis Noel Kavanagh:

    I don’t wish to be rude, but I’m not bloody interested in an actual member of the cabinet whining about “discomfort”. Gay teenagers are not sick and they don’t need their puberty blocked. I am less interested in the emotional state of an actual secretary of state than defenceless kids with Munchausen parents/autism issues/co-morbidities/BBC and internet indoctrinated problems with their “gender identity” which may as well be problems with their star signs for all the scientific proof thereof there actually is.

    Children and teenagers will be harmed by this crime against humanity the Secretary of State is going to permit because he is more scared of trans activists in the PLP than he if of the fact a bunch of lesbians and gays end up with osteoporosis, dropped IQs and the more fundamental statement that they were so wrong as human beings the state needed to chemically castrate them instead of the state understand that gay/lesbian autistic kids/teenagers are just different.

    Spare me your fucking faux anguish and discomfort Secretary of State. You will walk around with unlocked puberty on strong leg bones. Your victims, and they are the victims of the Streeting experiment, will have a walking stick age 25 because you were too cowardly to do actual gay rights.

    I’m really not in the mood for your “getting your excuses in early” discomfort routine. This crime against humanity will end your political ambitions.

    Rightly so.

  • Riddled with errors

    And there’s more:

    The judge who presided over the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal has been urged to withdraw his findings and consider his position after it emerged that his ruling was “riddled with numerous errors and inaccuracies”.

    First one error, then two….now it turns out it’s riddled with ’em. Oh dear.

    The Times has now learnt that the document continues to contain a host of other errors, prompting suggestions that artificial intelligence (AI) may have been used to assist compilation of the ruling.

    The gender-critical group Not All Gays Ireland was referred to as “Not for Gays” in Kemp’s ruling, prompting them to formally demand a correction and an apology.

    Whoops.

    It also emerged that Kemp included a direct “quote” from the Games v University of Kent ruling, a 2017 case centred on claims of age discrimination, which does not appear in the actual judgment.

    The Times previously established the Peggie ruling included a quote from Lee v Ashers Baking Company from 2018, which does not feature in the written findings.

    Kemp also misquotes the Supreme Court’s ruling in April in the For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers case, which found the definition of a woman for the purposes of the Equality Act was based on biological sex.

    Kemp’s judgment states: “The decision states that ‘such women may in practice choose to use female only facilities in a way which does not in fact compromise the privacy and dignity of other women users’.”

    The actual ruling says: “Although such transwomen may in practice choose to use female only facilities in a way which does not in fact compromise the privacy and dignity of other women users, the Scottish Ministers do not suggest that a trans woman with a GRC is legally entitled to do so.”

    Anya Palmer, a barrister who specialises in employment law, claimed it was a “significant error in a crucial part of the judgment, explaining why [Peggie] loses on a central part of her case.”

    It gets worse.

    Kemp’s ruling also features numerous American spellings of words including “victimization” and “minimization”.

    One senior legal figure said: “Sandy Kemp is an employment and discrimination lawyer by trade. The idea that he would spell victimisation with a z is unthinkable. That strongly suggests to me that it was written by AI.”

    He claimed: “Judge Kemp’s judgment is riddled with numerous errors, inaccuracies and omissions. As such, I feel certain it will be chewed up and spat out when the appeal takes place.”

    Craig Smith, a law lecturer at the University of Salford who specialises in legal technology, said features of the judgment appeared to be “consistent with the kinds of errors that generative AI systems are known to produce”.…

    In June Dame Victoria Sharp, president of the King’s Bench Division of the High Court of England and Wales, claimed there were “serious implications for the administration of justice and public confidence in the justice system if artificial intelligence is misused” and that lawyers misusing AI could face contempt of court proceedings and referral to the police.

    This could get messy.

    Added:

    The nurse Sandie Peggie’s employment tribunal judgment incorrectly defined trans men.

    The employment judge mistakenly classified both trans women and trans men as biological males in his ruling on the case.

    In outlining how the judgment would define transgender people, Alexander Kemp wrote: “The Tribunal will use the terms ‘trans woman’ being a person assigned male by sex at birth […] and ‘trans man’ being a person assigned as male by sex at birth”.

    It’s like an advent calendar of errors – a new one revealed every day.

  • Antisemitism is out of control

    Dave Rich on this week in antisemitism:

    Nick Fuentes, the new star of the American far (and not so far) right, went on Piers Morgan’s show and insisted that “Hitler was very fucking cool”. Their interview has had over 4 million views on YouTube. Morgan clipped that part of the video and put it on X where it has 373,000 views.

    Candace Owens was interviewed by Russell Brand and told him that Jews use incest to brutalise their children and normalise evil, so that Jewish children grow up to be evil psychopaths. This explains Israel, she said. Brand nodded along, then clipped that extract and put it on X where it has 364,000 views.

    Primal Scream played at the Roundhouse, one of London’s best-known concert venues, and put on a show that included images of swastikas entwined with Stars of David. In other words, Jews are Nazis.

    Sometimes antisemitism is coded, hidden behind ambiguous language and esoteric imagery. Not here. There’s nothing ambiguous about “Hitler was cool”. Nothing coded about saying Jews are evil psychopaths. As for combining the best-known Jewish symbol with a swastika: it’s as if a Jewish woman wearing a Star of David necklace is no different from a neo-Nazi skinhead with a swastika tattoo. Like I said, it isn’t subtle.

    It goes on and on. Week after week.

    This is just one week, and not an especially unusual one. And this is happening now, not decades ago. Antisemitism is out of control and not enough – nowhere near enough – is being done about it.

  • Deeply uncomfortable

    “This gut feeling that we all have should take precedence over the opinions of other humans with a fancy degree. “Follow clinical advice” they say, as they take away the fertility, sexual and cognitive function of children.

    “Earlier in the show Wes refused to deny that the BMA is more of a political organisation than a health organisation.

    “WHAT THE FUCK. STOP THE TRIAL.”

    Clinical advice? It’s not as if “gender-affirming” doctors have clean hands here.

  • The institutional repetition of a mistake we already made

    Jo Bartosch at UnHerd on the puberty blocker trial:

    This week, three claimants — detransitioner Keira Bell, psychotherapist James Esses, and the Bayswater Support Group — launched a High Court challenge to stop the £10.7 million study. They argue that far from being a scientific inquiry, Pathways is a fresh round of experimentation on vulnerable children, without the evidence required to justify the risks.

    Barely a year after puberty blockers were withdrawn from routine NHS use, ministers have authorised a trial that will give them to children as young as 10. Around 230 participants will be assigned either to receive blockers immediately or to wait a year. There is no placebo group. The primary outcome is a 10-question wellbeing form that asks children whether they felt energetic or sad in the previous week.

    The Cass Review, which exposed the failures of the Tavistock model of gender-affirming care, could not have been clearer. The evidence base for blockers is “remarkably weak”; the long-term outcomes and the rationale for early suppression remain “unclear”. Cass also noted that the vast majority of children who start on blockers proceed straight to cross-sex hormones. By her own admission, the claim that blockers “buy time to think” is unsupported by evidence. If anything, they appear to strap children onto the medical conveyer belt.

    And yet Cass has lent her support to Pathways. The charitable explanation is pragmatism: the NHS wants to keep distressed young people away from private prescribers and black-market hormones, and believes it must be seen to be offering something.

    The uncharitable explanation is that she put in that but about needing further study without giving too much thought to the matter, as a sop perhaps to trans activists. Now she’s had enough, and doesn’t want to stick her head above the parapet for a second time.

    But to understand why this is a feeble basis for a paediatric drug trial, we must confront the real appeal of blockers. Early suppression of male puberty makes it easier for boys to look more like women in adulthood. Without the testosterone surge, they grow into adults with narrower shoulders, softer faces, no Adam’s apple and voices that never fully break.

    These are aesthetic effects, and of course a person’s psychological self-perception is deeply intertwined with how they look. But they are not solely aesthetic — they are biological and not without hormonal and functional complications. This approach concerns the future adult, not how to rectify the child’s distress. As Cass herself noted, one rationale offered by proponents of early suppression is to prevent pubertal changes that might later make it harder for a young person to “pass” in their intended gender role.

    This is part of the fiction sold to vulnerable teenagers: that altering their bodies early will guarantee a future identity which “passes” under the gaze of others. It is a strange logic, according to which appearance eclipses wellbeing and the cosmetic is prized above any holistic concern for the child’s development.

    Once this is acknowledged, the structure of the trial becomes easier to understand and harder to defend. The focus of the trial is short-term self-reported feelings in a group already convinced that blockers will help. Those who receive the drugs immediately will feel affirmed; those who must wait are likely to feel rejected. Any difference between the groups risks measuring expectation, not efficacy.

    What the trial avoids is even more revealing. Around 2,000 under-16s were referred for blockers at the Tavistock Clinic. A national data linkage study to track their adult outcomes was approved and ready to proceed, then stalled when adult gender services refused to release the necessary information. Instead of insisting on that essential evidence, the NHS has pressed ahead with a new cohort of children.…

    The High Court claimants are right. The Pathways trial is the institutional repetition of a mistake we already made. If the health service refuses to learn from the children it has already harmed, the courts may have to ensure it does not harm thousands more.