Author: Mick Hartley

have acquiesced. Yet teachers are not clinicians, nor are they there to diagnose children. Do they understand what they are doing? The entire narrative around trans children has been imported from America but it is breaking apart.

Breaking apart here, maybe. In America, I think, not so much. And we still don't know how the next Labour government will deal with this. Starmer is already under huge pressure from the left – notably at the moment over Gaza. Can he afford to battle them on gender stuff as well? It's clear enough that he doesn't have any firm personal beliefs here: he'll just do what he thinks will make life easier. All the more reason then to establish firm principles on protecting children from the gender cult before Labour comes to power.

Now is the time to step back and ask ourselves how we got here. The trans child is a manifestation of a recent story that the culture has told itself. This is a story of social contagion combined with the genuine distress of mostly young girls.

Children cannot be blamed for acting out but the adults who have encouraged this, while patting themselves on the back for their progressive views, still need to be challenged. Cass is but the start. 

ow transgender children are supported and the medical treatment they receive.

It comes amid concern that children are being allowed to change gender in school without their parents’ knowledge or consent, and after the routine prescription of puberty blockers was banned by NHS England.

The Telegraph understands that the report will find that children who think they are trans disproportionately have mental health issues stemming from a difficult family situation or having suffered from abuse. They are also more likely to be neurodiverse.

We know all this, of course, but it's good to see it laid out clearly in an official review.

It is expected to suggest that these children need counselling to tackle these issues holistically, rather than them automatically being put on a path to change gender.

The report is expected to warn that it is wrong to assume it is in the best interest of children who think they are trans to change gender, and urge extreme caution over the use of drugs such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to facilitate this, even once someone is over 18 years old.

"Children who think they are trans", not "trans children": that's important. No children are trans – "born in the wrong body" – but plenty of vulnerable children have been persuaded to believe it, through social media and the pernicious influence of groups like Mermaids and Stonewall. Let's hope this marks a turning point.

en to seize the kids at their most vulnerable and mutilate them – has been noticeable. Jo Bartosch at Spiked:

The Dutch study demands more attention than this. Although the findings simply confirm what anyone with a brain already knew, they are nonetheless significant. As Oxford sociology professor Michael Biggs tells me:

‘It provides additional evidence for what we already know. First, a significant minority of children – 11 per cent – sometimes wish they were the opposite sex. Second, that children who wish to be the opposite sex are more likely to end up as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Third, most kids who wish to be the opposite sex eventually grow into adults who don’t have any desire to change sex.’

These facts have been in the public domain for a long time now. Whistleblowing clinicians, academics and detransitioners have been warning for the best part of a decade about the dangers of blindly affirming children in their faddish identities. Figures from the now-closed gender-identity development services (GIDS) at the Tavistock clinic in London show that the kids most at risk of being put on a medical pathway towards ‘transition’ are overwhelmingly same-sex attracted. If left to figure things out, these kids would likely grow up to simply be gay, lesbian or bisexual, rather than transgender.

The children fed into the gender-medicine machine are among the most vulnerable. A hugely disproportionate number are also autistic and many come from care backgrounds. These kids are more likely than most to struggle with coming to terms with their identities through adolescence. They need compassion and support. Instead, they have been used as pawns….

Adults who should know better have abdicated their responsibility to the most vulnerable in society. They have allowed themselves to be taken in by a trendy ideology. And they have hidden their ignorance behind glitter, rainbows and catchy slogans. A simple ‘sorry’ won’t give the children experimented upon their fertility, health or self-esteem back. But it would be a start.

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[Photos © Bluecoat Press/Janine Weidel]

, only 24 per cent of British Muslims said they had, compared to 62 per cent of the wider public.

The report found that younger and well-educated Muslims were the most likely to think Hamas carried out no atrocities on October 7, with 47 per cent of 18–24-year-olds and 40 per cent of the university-educated.

The survey also found that over half of British Muslims, 52 per cent, want to make it illegal to show a picture of the Prophet Mohammed, and about a third, 32 per cent, wish to see Shariah law implemented in the UK.

We have a problem.

ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKcpNkx2b8E”>which can be watched on YouTube – beggared belief: “So they [Israel] have gone beyond the right to defend themselves?”

Supplied with this interrogatory underarm lob, Kelin replied: “They’ve gone far beyond the right to defend themselves. Everybody, including the UK and the others are calling them to immediate cessation of fire and also proceeding to the peace plan.”…

Meanwhile, Guardian columnist Owen Jones said on Sky TV – also on Thursday – that Germany was supporting Israel because this enabled it to overcome its Holocaust guilt, and it had “decided to force the Palestinian people to pay for its own heinous crimes”. (Jones was strongly criticised for this, but insisted there “nothing offensive” about it.)

Before October 7, the kind of discourse outlined above wasn’t much in evidence, at least not on mainstream outlets, but was confined to the online chatrooms of the extreme right and left. It is now becoming normalised, and in so doing it  reflects and fosters the deepening chill towards Israel in the chancelleries of the democratic West.

The past week has arguably been Israel’s worst since this conflict started. My fear is that the outlook is still more bleak.

Korean authorities have ordered that the word “reunification” be removed from students’ textbooks, Daily NK has learned.

“The education authorities were ordered to review all textbooks from the beginning of March to the end of the month. The plan is to prepare a new batch of textbooks,” a source in North Korea told Daily NK on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In the wake of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s policy speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly in January, in which he ordered the complete elimination of “such terms as ‘reunification,’ ‘reconciliation,’ and ‘fellow countrymen’ from the national history of our republic,” North Korean education officials are now updating the country’s textbooks.

“For this year, schools have been ordered to use pens or pencils to cross out words banned by the state in textbooks. The orders were sent from the Ministry of Education to the provincial education offices and from there to the administration of each school, where they were carried out by the teaching staff,” the source said.

Since there is not enough time to produce and distribute revised textbooks this school year, as a stopgap measure, teachers at each school are expected to go through each textbook with their students to cross out the banned words so that they are no longer visible.

“Teachers have explained to their students that the orders must be followed because they are in line with the party’s efforts to establish a correct view of history,” the source said….

“Teachers attended emergency lectures – one in February and one in March – organized by provincial, city, and county education authorities. In these lectures, teachers were told to revise their lesson plans and to avoid using unnecessary words [such as “reunification”] with their students. The same lectures stressed that teachers are revolutionaries charged with preparing the next generation to lead the future of the fatherland and that they should be ideologically equipped as only such revolutionaries should be,” the source said.

a country the size of Wales, is surrounded by hostile nations and facing an almost constant insurgency. Israelis cannot afford the luxury of believing that they can survive without a fight.

JanuaryYuriy Belousov, the head of investigations for Ukraine’s prosecutor general, referred to one of the deaths as being caused by an “unknown gas”.

There have also been reports of the use of chlorine and chloropicrin – a substance typically used as a pesticide that was deployed by the Germans as a chemical weapon in the First World War.

Officially the Ukrainian military has claimed that 626 gas attacks have been carried out by Russian forces since the start of the full-scale invasion.

But Ms Maciorowski believes this is almost certainly a gross underestimate, saying: “Sadly, as it stands right now, the causes of deaths of many Ukrainian soldiers are not properly investigated. There are just so many of them.”…

The Russians have made little effort to conceal their use of chemical attacks. The Black Sea Fleet’s 810th Naval Infantry Brigade boasted about the deployment of chemical weapons in a post on Telegram in December, posting a video of what it claimed were K-51 gas grenades being dropped on Ukrainian positions.

“Thanks to the head of the radiation, chemical and biological defence troops… for the weapons provided and their timely delivery,” the caption read.

Similarly, a news report aired on the Russian state television station Channel One in May 2023 contained explicit discussion of the issue. One Russian soldier said: “The enemy decided that using gas masks would help. The gas masks don’t help.”

Once upon a time this might have been something that the UN would have had issues with, but, with Putin and his friends in China ready to use their vetoes, that's not going to happen. Anyway…Israel. That's all that matters.

Carl McDow, summer 1950. "Heart of downtown Cleveland, Ohio, and Union Terminal Group (Terminal Tower and Hotel Cleveland)."

[Photo: Shorpy/Carl McDow]