Author: Mick Hartley

, 19, who was part of the review's focus groups, said the positive lived experiences of trans children who had been able to access puberty blockers was not included in the report.

Not much change there, then. It's too ingrained.

t and energy” and misstating the scientific reason for the eclipse….

The solar eclipse was happening because the Earth was unusually close to the moon, she said — though, in fact, the eclipse was the result of the alignment of the sun and moon.

might as well be addressing an archaic people who have just emerged blinking from a time capsule, still convinced that disease is God’s punishment for insufficient acts of propitiation.

In a sense, though, this is indeed very like one group to whom the report is addressed: those clinicians, parents and patients immersed in bubbles of identity affirmation, and cognitively isolated from any reasoning or evidence that would confound their worldview. Perhaps unusually for a medical review, it is clear from Cass’s overtly respectful tone and at times still-euphemistic language that her aim is not just to inform these readers but also to deprogram them.

The very first sentence of her report begins with a weary disavowal of Stonewall-endorsed paranoias (“This Review is not about… undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves, or rolling back on people’s rights to healthcare”). Somewhat nonsensically, references to “birth-registered females” are scattered throughout the text, as if the author were somehow only concerned with those with birth certificates — presumably an attempt to build bridges with child-like souls still convinced sex is something coercively assigned to neonates at random. Generally, there is a sense of gingerly addressing a group of emotionally labile people who are not quite ready to face the whole truth….

One could be forgiven for thinking that medical culture should easily be able to condemn bizarre physical interventions performed upon children in the name of religion, without having to undertake a four-year clinical review first. Indeed, lawmakers have previously criminalised practices such as FGM without requiring any such tests. But one instructive thing we can learn from the wreckage of gender medicine is that, with the right kind of institutional and rhetorical scaffolding, doctors can become unsure about what their goals are supposed to be. It’s no good telling them to first do no harm, when they can’t work out how to reliably detect it.

the diapers will be less of a fetish, more of a necessity. He's also bi-polar and suffers from depression – which makes medical collusion with his delusions even more unforgiveable.

t is a little bit rich of the Labour Party to be lecturing the rest of us now, having been so forthright in their support for this ideology in the past.”

She's right. See Rosie Duffield. 

spite his conviction.

An immigration tribunal judge agreed with lawyers that his “risky behaviours” would expose him to “ill treatment” and even “mob violence” if he returned to Afghanistan.

Christopher Hanson, the tribunal judge, therefore ruled that the man should be granted refugee status, allowing him to remain in the UK.

As we know, in Afghanistan inappropriate behaviour towards women is practically unheard of. They come down very hard on offenders.

Or, more seriously, it's surely likely that the offender views women as sexual objects because that's the culture he was raised in, and seeing women here uncovered and, by Afghan standards undressed, is too provocative for him to resist. Back in Afghanistan the problem wouldn't arise as any woman who might venture out in public would be covered head to toe in a sack. So, send him back. Problem solved. But such thinking clearly didn't occur to our learned tribunal judge.

ls and anti-imperialism of fools depend on intellectual twisting and turning until somehow, no matter what, blame is ascribed to, respectively, Jews and Zionists. Ominously, that ascription is often there before the twisting and turning.

Opposition to imperialism and colonialism has always been part of any morally intelligent left-wing programs and should be. Decolonisation after World War II was of world historical importance. In many ways it culminated in Nelson Mandela’s heroic leadership of South Africa’s liberation from apartheid. But three decades later, the party he led is in miserable shape, as is South Africa as a whole, and it faces electoral decline. So, it seeks to make itself the moral leader of the ‘Global South’ and accuses Israel of genocide and apartheid but won’t condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is a species of scapegoating and has attracted great support in parts of the world including from the western left. But those supporters are reminiscent of what a New York literary critic, Harold Rosenberg, once called (referring to New York intellectuals) as a ‘herd of independent minds.’

Nobody can take a walk in Tel Aviv or Haifa and see apartheid. Using such words is a vulgar, opportunistic misapplication of political terms, corrupting their content. If you believe that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ then you can also believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 American elections and that Hamas with its Islamist supremacism is a force of liberation even if – well, sorry about that little slip by brave ‘resisters’ – they rape Jewish women.

Day of the Sun (Apr. 15, a holiday celebrating the birthday of Kim Il Sung), North Korea has ordered that the country’s youth be further indoctrinated with an anti-American and anti-imperialist class consciousness, Daily NK has learned.

“The Central Committee ordered the Socialist Patriotic Youth League at the end of March to hold a series of training sessions for the Day of the Sun, noting that it is more important than ever to inculcate anti-American and anti-imperialist class consciousness in young people in view of the current political situation,” a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Apr.  5, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Given the current political tensions, the North Korean authorities seem eager to stir up hostility toward South Korea and the U.S. in order to strengthen loyalty to the regime and prevent ideological laxity among the youth.

According to the source, the North Korean authorities have outlined the main problems hindering efforts to raise anti-American and anti-imperialist class consciousness among the youth.

First, young people are only interested in earning money and maintaining their own economic stability when they should be armed with socialist convictions and brimming with loyalty to the party and the state.

The authorities emphasized the need for the youth league to hold more training sessions on ideology and class consciousness so as not to disappoint the Workers’ Party in its desire for the loyalty of the youth on whom the country’s future depends.

In particular, these training sessions should mention that Ukraine, which has been dependent on the U.S., is losing its war against Russia, while impressing upon the youth that imperial fantasies have fatal consequences.

Imperial fantasies do indeed have fatal consequences – though not in the way they think.

To this end, the North Korean authorities ordered that model class-consciousness training sessions be held in every province and that instructors organize lectures and debates to instill in the youth a strong hostility toward the United States, Japan and South Korea (which North Korea calls a “puppet state”)….

North Korea’s government has also instructed various levels of the party hierarchy to help organize intensive class-consciousness training sessions that include performances by experts and artists such as orators and singers.

Yep, that should do the trick.

are, of course, secondary victims. And as for those who have played it safe? Inevitably, they will now stay silent or pretend that the evidence of harm contained in the Cass Report is a shocking revelation. The truth, of course, is that the evidence has been there all along. To those new converts now pretending otherwise: we see you.

From a Sun interview with Streeting yesterday:

Speaking to The Sun's politics show Never Mind the Ballots, Mr Streeting admitted the controversial LGBTQ-rights group Stonewall – where he once worked – had got it wrong.

Asked if he stood by the organisations’ claim that “trans women are women, get over it”, he admitted “no”.

He added: “To the extent that – and I say this with some self criticism and reflection – if you'd asked me a few years ago, on this topic, I would have said trans men are men, trans women are women. Some people are trans, get over it. Let's move on. This is all blown out of proportion.

“And now I sort of sit and reflect and think actually, there are lots of complexities.”

He went on: “I take the criticism on the chin. And at the same time, I also think that there's been some absolutely ugly rhetoric directed towards trans people who are at the wrong end of all of statistics on hate crime, on self harm, suicide, mental health.”

I didn't know he'd worked for Stonewall. 

So yes, it's a major U-turn, and credit to him for that, but he's still peddling the same old trans-as-victims myth – a position which has been central to the whole trans activist argument, but for which there's zero evidence. All the violence, all the angry abuse, has been coming from just one side in this debate – and it's not the gender criticals.

At New York's Rochester Institute of Technology:

NCAA male athlete, Sadie Rose named “Athlete of the Week” after he won two individual women’s events and was a member of a winning relay at the U of R Invitational, Sunday. https://t.co/FOyv3Wgooz pic.twitter.com/CWjkxy2vXl

— ICONS (@icons_women) April 11, 2024

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