Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • Another champion athlete

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

    200 metres? He wins by about 50 metres. The girls don't look very motivated, mind. I mean, why bother?

    Update: video removed. Try this:

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

  • Maybe the spell of trans ideology has finally been broken

    their words, their dignity and their safety. Also, I saw that vulnerable children were being fast-tracked onto a medical pathway that carried severe long-term implications.”

    And then, further on, trying my best to ignore the glazed-over eyes of my hosts: “If you believe that JK Rowling is transphobic, a woman who has devoted her work and much of her fortune to the vulnerable, the bullied, the forgotten and the abused, then you are under a spell.

    “If you believe that men can fairly compete against women in their sports, then you are under a spell.

    “If you believe that men will not go to the most extreme lengths to gain access to women and children, then you are under a spell.

    “If you believe that children as young as three years old can agree to a procedure that puts them on a medical pathway for life, that arrests their natural puberty, and that has almost no scientific proof as to its efficacy as a treatment for dysphoria, then you are under a spell.”

    It did not have the effect I was expecting. “But … but … what can we DO?” was what I had expected to hear, but instead the assembled nobs looked amused and bored, and quickly changed the subject.

    This would be something to which I’d soon become accustomed – pointing at the approaching meteorite, only to have everyone stare at my finger. It turned out they were more interested in interrogating my conduct on social media.

    I don’t remember many questions about the issues I had raised, and certainly none about what was being done to children in gender clinics across the country.

    It was, in hindsight, a perfect microcosm of everything that was to follow. Afterwards, I sat at my desk, dazed, and realised that I might as well have been talking to myself.

    It would be three years later, in 2024, that the findings of the Cass Review would vindicate all those men and women, especially women, who had lost friends, family members, work and opportunities, for trying to get the word out about what is now known to be the greatest medical scandal in recent history.

    My optimism has taken a beating since then, so I’m reluctant to say this out loud, but maybe, just maybe, this time – the spell is finally broken.

  • The new anorexia

    , rather than a progressive triumph….

    No child and certainly no teenage girl should be told they were born in the wrong body, any more than they should be told that losing weight or having bigger breasts would make them happier. The only way to get girls through the physical discomfort of puberty is not to block it but to reassure them — repeatedly — that there isn’t one way to look, have sex and live as a woman, but many; and their body isn’t who they are, but it is what they are — female — and that will never change. Their feelings about it will, though, and one day they will see their body not as the enemy, but as a miracle.

  • Grain elevator and mill

    Jack Delano, January 1943. Riverdale, Illinois. "Freight operations of the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad. Grain elevator and mill at a siding of the Harbor Belt's Blue Island Yard south of Chicago."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

  • The cowardice of those in positions of influence

    titutions became captured by a minority of ideological activists. When ministers raise the alarm or intervene this is demonised by Labour MPs such as Yvette Cooper as engaging in “culture wars”….

    In the case of trans ideology, those who first publicly questioned its tenets were subjected to hysterical abuse and calumny. Brave people including Kathleen Stock and Graham Linehan were hounded out of their jobs. James Esses lost his role at Childline. The Labour MP Rosie Duffield was harassed by her own party members and fellow MPs while Starmer looked away.

    Worse than the ravings of the militants was the cowardice of those in positions of influence. How many university administrators, media editors, police officers and politicians preferred to keep quiet for fear of becoming the next target or in the hope of maintaining their progressive credentials?

    We need more bravery and less cancel culture.

    At the heart of the Cass review is a failure of institutions to self-regulate. Ministers have intervened time and again but it is now time for leaders to step up and recover impartiality. It is time that the clinicians who refused to co-operate with Cass were held to account.

    It is good to hear Labour politicians admit culpability in failing to challenge extreme gender ideology. But I don’t believe this change of heart is real….

    For those who ask how this happened under a Conservative government, they should look at the spread of extreme gender ideology across the western world from America and Canada through Europe to Australia and New Zealand. The reality is that Britain is leading the charge against it.

    The tendency to censor, shout down and punish unfashionable opinions offends the principles of a free society. It also ruins lives by stopping people raising the alarm. Had those who warned that gender services in the NHS had been hijacked by ideologues been listened to instead of gagged, children would not have been harmed and the Cass review would not have been required. Our responsibility is to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.

    Well yes. she's a politician – of course she's going to make political capital of this. But fair enough: she has been the one senior politician to speak out regularly on this.

    Elsewhere in the Times:

    Badenoch’s comments will be welcomed by right-wing Tory MPs but seen by critics as seeking to reignite the so-called culture wars that have dominated British politics since the last election.

    Is this really just a question of right-wing vs. left-wing? Is Rosie Duffield right wing for speaking out on gender issues? And, like it or not, this particular gender war is going to be around for a while yet. The more we talk about it the better.

     

     

  • Glasgow 1970s–1980s

    image_1758240472.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Corrance6″ />

    Corrance5

    Corrance10

    Corrance11

    Corrance12

    Corrance14

    Corrance15

    Corrance16

    Corrance17

    Corrance18

    Corrance19
    [Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Dougls Corrance]

  • The risible ‘liberation’ movement

    Julie Burchill on good form in the Spectator:

    Boyish girls, climb the nearest tree and give a Tarzan whoop of victory – girly boys, fashion a floral crown and caper copiously. Thanks to the Cass Report, failing to follow sexist stereotypes (which decree that girls play with dolls and boys play with themselves) will no longer get you marched off to the sex-correction clinic. You’ll no longer be stuffed like a five-bird roast with the best that Big Pharma can tout and later shuttled off to the abattoir to have your perfectly healthy sexual organs hacked off. For the Great Trans Con has been bust as wide open as the space between India Willoughby’s ears.

    Was ever a ‘liberation’ movement ever so risible from the start? Did any other allegedly oppressed group’s bid for equality include seeking to rob another oppressed group of their rights? Did any other oppressed group claim their freedom by dressing up as another oppressed group? And, crucially, did any allegedly oppressed group ever carry out such a comprehensive and conclusive capture of the most conservative and capitalist corporations and institutions? No, they didn’t – because previously, oppressed groups weren’t mostly composed of white middle-class men, as the trans-lobby are.

    Like the Mitchell and Webb Nazis, the signs that the trans-mob weren’t the good guys – though they were definitely guys – were there all along. The threats of violence, rape and death while calling women who sought to preserve women’s spaces the hateful ones. The snitching to the police – such rebels! – who reacted true to form by siding with the blokes and arresting women for being impolite to men, joined by the judges who made raped women call their attackers ‘she’ out of ‘respect’. They stand revealed as a bunch of liars, fantasists and bullies, the whole rotten lot of them.

    Now the reckoning has come. With it, the people who were previously vilified will be vindicated. The greatest winner will be JK Rowling, as she generally is – and she has handled her victory with characteristic wit and grace…

  • Amnesty joins in

    Predictably:

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

  • Gender ideologues

    .

    Yep, a cult. If you believe in innate gender identities no amount of evidence is going to sway you. Some transitioners were unhappy? Perhaps they weren't made of the right stuff. Perhaps a more radical approach was needed. Stronger drugs! Take off more bits! Whatever the problem, nothing is going to sway that belief. It's evidence-proof. 

  • Stopping for coal and water

    Jack Delano, January 1943. "Nelson, Illinois. Chicago and North Western Railroad freight en route from Clinton, Iowa, to Chicago. Stopping for coal and water to give passenger trains the right of way."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

Powered by