Author: Mick Hartley

— nothing! — to lose yet never once tried to understand our plight. Rory Stewart, Alastair Campbell, David Lammy, James O’Brien, Billy Bragg, David Tennant, John Oliver, or those who, watching the Paris Olympics, thought a male boxer punching women was less hurtful than calling him a man.

It was always about male feelings. Women had to keep quiet, be kind, and make way for the men. That it was billed as a progressive movement, the next step on the great liberation march, was always a matter of grim irony.

Women aren’t expecting apologies, though many are deserved, or gratitude for saving basic rights for our granddaughters. Yes, we’ll be kind — we always were — but, cheers! We won — deal with it.

nted reports of a “woman” committing rape “with her penis” should now apologise for their cowardly debauching of language. So should senior publishers who bowed to pressure to suppress books deemed “transphobic” by callow junior colleagues. By the way, if ever you are puzzled when an otherwise sensible friend starts spouting uncharacteristic nonsense on the subject of “gender”, your first recourse should be, “Cherchez les enfants”.

Well yes, either those who've deferred to their children's loud clamour on the trans debate in the mistaken belief that this was the new "progressive" position or, more seriously, those who've actually presided over the transing of their children. 

Those men of mediocre athletic ability who have waltzed into women’s events and effortlessly carried off their medals and plaudits, can be absolved of cheating only if they plead inability to understand the unfairness of their advantage. Those sports-body officials who enabled them should apologise to the women deprived of rightful medals, medals which should now be stripped from the men who unfairly gained them. Rather than respecting the subjective “gender” of the usurper, we should instead sympathise with the women overpowered by “her” objective sex, “her” upper body strength, long boxing reach, or sheer domineering height.

Are you one of those doctors who abetted angst-beset children, prescribing hormones whose unnatural and irreversible effects warrant the label “poison”? Or worse, are you a surgeon who violated the first Hippocratic principle by cutting off the breasts of a girl (or the testes of a boy) too young to be entrusted with drastic, irrevocably life-changing decisions? Admittedly, a public apology from you could lay you open to a well-deserved malpractice suit, but may you in any case be long pursued by remorse.

An especially magnanimous feat of forgiveness is required for those on the political left who betrayed their enlightenment heritage.

Which, to be honest, appears to have been the vast majority.

The tragedy is that such obvious truths ever needed spelling out, or proclaiming in a high court of law. The biggest apology of all should come from those people of influence who fomented, or cravenly kowtowed to, the preposterous doctrine that something so fundamentally biological as the sexual binary is vulnerable to mere personal whim or legal documentation.

An important and extremely grim long read from Julie Bindel at UnHerd – The grooming gang scandal isn’t over, and Labour is looking the other way. An excerpt:

It is raining in Manchester when I arrive at the Crown Court, where eight Asian men from Rochdale stand accused of treating two girls as “sex slaves”. They are charged with 56 sexual offences, include grooming, sexually exploiting and raping two 13-year olds between 2001 and 2006. It is February 2025.

There are police outside, sent from Rochdale to make sure “there are no security issues, due to the sensitivity of the case”. But the case is 25 years old, I say. “It is old,” replies one of the officers, “but unfortunately it’s still happening today.”

There are eight men in the dock, all Pakistani Muslim, ranging in age from 39 to 66. They are accused of rape and other sexual offences against two girls between 2001 and 2006. Girl A and Girl B, both abused from the age of 13, were in court, surrounded by family and friends. The women are in their 30s now, but wear the look of deep trauma. Giving evidence, Girl A said that she had been abused by at least 100 men, but when she then mentioned the figure of 200, she was challenged by one of the defence barristers, implying she was lying. “There could’ve been more to be fair,” she replied. “There [were] that many it was hard to keep count.”

The abuse began when the girls, in local authority care, started hanging around the market, where Mohammed Zahid, one of the men on trial, had a lingerie stall. Both girls were casual workers on the stall, paid in clothes, cigarettes and alcohol. They were also expected to have degradingly sadistic sex with Zahid (known as “Boss” or the “Knickerman”) and his associates.

Though Girl A told local children’s services about “hanging around” with older men in 2004 — as well as drinking and using drugs, and having sex with men introduced to her by “Boss” — neither her school nor social services made any reports to the police. Instead, one of the girls was labelled a “prostitute” at the age of 10. Rowbotham was ignored when she reported it to police and social services. As she puts it: “I can only imagine how many other girls they went on to harm.”

Not only did the men – overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim – think the young girls were sluts who were asking for it. The police, the social services, the care homes: they all agreed. Or pretended to agree. It was easier that way. The media weren't interested – could be seen as racist, playing into the hands of the far right – and the politicians preferred to look the other way. Still do.

But read it all.

Letters to the Times today:

From Sir Peter Rubin, retired professor of medicine:

Sir, One of the most puzzling aspects of the Supreme Court’s judgment is that a scientifically illiterate ideology became so entrenched it needed our highest court to state the obvious. If you are born with a Y (male) chromosome you will carry it with you all your days. No amount of surgery, drug treatment, self-identification, wishful thinking or shutting down of reasoned argument will change that settled biological fact. To claim otherwise is flat-Earth territory, but many organisations went along with the fantasy all the same. How someone chooses to live their life and present themselves to the outside world is a personal decision that should be met with understanding, tolerance and respect, but not at the expense of common sense.

From Kathleen Stock, former professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex@

Sir, We told you so.

Manhattan ca. 1901. "Madison Square, New York". "Highlights of this panorama made from three 8×10 glass negatives include 23rd Street at left, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Fifth Avenue/​Broadway, Madison Square Park, Stanford White's Madison Square Garden campanile, Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and the Metropolitan Life building at the corner of Madison and 23rd Street."

[Photos: Shorpy/William Henry Jackson, Detroit Photographic Co.]

Click on image to see full size at Shorpy.

h a famous line of Scots poetry instead: a man’s a man for a’ that.

Thanks to the tenacity of grassroots organisation For Women Scotland in fighting several cases through the courts, judges at the highest level have now clarified that a man — with or without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) — does not belong in any woman-only prison, hospital ward, dormitory, rape crisis service, or changing room. If trans-identified, he is rightly shielded from discrimination and harassment under the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” but not those of “female” or “lesbian”. This classification also means that, if he’s a medical professional, he is not allowed to provide intimate care to unwilling women on the spurious grounds that he, too, is female. As a police or prison officer, he may not carry out strip searches of his “fellow women” either. His presence in the upper echelons of a workplace does not count towards feminist empowerment there. His athletic personal bests can no longer break female records, nor his football and rugby tackles break female bones….

A particularly pleasing vindication for her, I imagine, after the abuse she suffered at Sussex University for her support for the idea that, yes, sex matters. She was right, of course.

t-size: 11pt”>Sir, A two-state solution has been desirable for decades. Proposals for partition into two states in the 1938 Peel report have been offered in several guises many times since then but they have always been thwarted, largely because of a reluctance by Palestinians to recognise Israel as a Jewish state. The call (letter, Apr 14) for the UK to recognise Palestine would have to contend not only with that continuing reluctance: the lack of an obvious legitimate and functioning government that commands the support of its population and the murderous split between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority would make it hard to imagine how a Palestinian state could function.

The failure to agree to where its borders might lie is a serious concern. While a recognisable state may be highly desirable there is too much that should be settled before that can be achieved practically. This says nothing of the often repeated intention of Hamas to destroy Israel.

It's all very British – Lords responding to ex-ambassadors – but at least this bunch of upper-crusties know what they're talking about.

-styled progressives of Scotland’s nationalist government and the women who dared to defy them — is testament to a political and cultural establishment that lost touch with reality. It was always absurd that the SNP, much of the Labour Party, prominent Conservatives and countless public bodies and universities insisted that men were able to simply speak themselves into female-only spaces, some of which women fought for years to establish….

Hopefully, the ruling will bring an end to this bizarre culture war. Now is not the time for triumphalism or gloating but consensus around two truths: that trans people have the right to live their lives in dignity and that women’s rights are sacrosanct also. To that end ministers must now amend the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 which only perpetuates the misconception that a piece of paper can alter the facts of life. Public institutions and universities must now be held to account if they ignore the law. Women should never have had to fight this battle in defence of scientific truth. But at least it is now won. Sanity is restored.

The battle's not over, of course. Trans ideologues, notably the men claiming to be women, have been and will continue to be notably aggressive in their demands. At bottom, after all, this has always been an angry men's movement fuelled by misogyny. They're not about to shut up just yet.

It's lucky for women that they have men like Owen Jones to tell them what they really should have been doing.

The problem being, Owen, that every time we tried to talk about women's specific needs, we were told we were being exclusionary, that female people had no specific needs or rights, and to die in a grease fire.

So maybe fuck off? pic.twitter.com/sHc31hQrMI

— Harvey Jeni (@GappyTales) April 17, 2025

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

In New Hampshire, debating NH SB268 – "Permitting classification of individuals based on biological sex under certain limited circumstances". 

"It takes unrelenting coercion to make people pretend that a man is a woman." My testimony on NH SB268, restoring women's sports and spaces. pic.twitter.com/JiXVWfPZxW

— Sidewalk Steve (@Sidewalk_Steve) April 16, 2025

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