Author: Mick Hartley

style=”font-size: 11pt”>It does not take a Kremlinologist to understand why Putin has come out in support of Trump’s annexation plan. As US power recedes in Europe, the Kremlin is seizing its chance to establish its long-awaited “multipolar world” in which it holds dominion over a sphere of influence, particularly in Ukraine and Belarus. Putin has railed against US hegemony since his Munich speech of 2007, and he finally has a US president who is just as derisive of the postwar order as he is.

Putin’s mantra that countries should mind their own business dovetails closely with Trump’s transactional view of the world, as well as his deep suspicion of transnational organisations and alliances set up after the second world war….

But as US power recedes abroad, the White House has declared ambitions throughout the western hemisphere in a turn that some commentators have compared to the Monroe doctrine of 1823, under which the US proclaimed itself the protector of the hemisphere. And with each soundbite declaring that the US should take back the Panama canal or that Canada should become the 51st state, Trump will find an enthusiastic ally in the Kremlin who will see his jaded vision of a new world order reflected in another.

ite a lengthy submission, answer questionnaires and open its practices up to Stonewall scrutiny. Thousands more salaried hours.

Then, to improve their ranking, bodies were told to eliminate “mother” from maternity policies and create an LGBT staff group whose views on gender matters — and punishment of heretics who disagreed with them — should be treated as holy writ. Stonewall instructed employers they must allow workers to shower and undress in facilities that aligned with their gender identity, not their sex. This falsehood, which breaches Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, is the wellspring of two ongoing cases where female nurses, five in Darlington and Sandie Peggie in Scotland, are fighting for their right to single-sex privacy. If both win, as is expected, that’s another £1 million in settlements and costs.

Civil servants whose primary duty is to uphold the rule of law were guided by activist groups whose “trainings” and “best practice” encourage them to “get ahead of the law”, ie to believe that the 2010 Equality Act, in which sex is a protected characteristic, is a dreary anachronism all righteous progressives ignore.

Yet these employment tribunals are small beer compared with the most egregious waste: the corruption of the Office for National Statistics. A loyal Stonewall diversity champions member until recently, the ONS ignored warnings that its 2021 census question that allowed people to self-identify their sex was confusing and unworkable. But the government’s chief statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, appeared to care less about data than that the question had an “overwhelmingly positive response from LGBTQ+ charities”. Now the ONS has been forced to admit that its sex and gender data is worthless.

What’s the bill here? The government paid the costs of Fair Play For Women who crowdfunded £110,000 for a judicial review; it used its top barrister Sir James Eadie and untold hours of ONS staff time; it commissioned a 200-page report by Professor Alice Sullivan (£200,000) to analyse the mess. But how do you put a price on ruining the integrity of a £900 million national census that feeds into every strand of policy?

Will these cases ever end? Even now, NHS trusts pay outside trainers £900 a session for staff “pronoun training”. The consequences of such brainwashing are evident in the case of Jennifer Melle, a Ugandan-born NHS nurse. Asked to deal with a catheter in the penis of a trans-identifying male paedophile under police guard, she referred to him as “mister” and he responded with vile racist abuse. Even so Melle was hauled in for the far worse crime of misgendering and is taking her case to an employment tribunal.

Yet a lawyer tells me that while previously senior managers preferred to lose a tribunal case than have a showdown with their vengeful LGBT staff network, times and the economy have changed. Gender ideology is creating big red numbers that show up on the bottom line.

It's surely the biggest con in modern history: mistaking a fetish for a civil rights movement. It's perverted not only institutions, but corrupted science itself. It's the new Lysenkoism.

Kim Jong Un posing for a commemorative photo with participants:

An unfortunate side-effect of being a semi-divine leader who can do no wrong is that no one will tell you about lapses in your personal hygiene. The women here, though they do their best to conceal their discomfort, are clearly affected by the inescapable odour.

Genevieve Gluck on the tale of Nonnie Marcella Lotusflower:

Reduxx has learned that a trans-identified male currently incarcerated at a women’s prison in Washington state has been charged with intimidating a public servant and malicious mischief in the first degree after he threatened and assaulted a female correctional officer. Nonnie Marcella Lotusflower, born Nathan Goninan, has a history of violence against women and is currently serving a 10-year sentence at the Washington Correctional Center for Women (WCCW) for the murder of a teen girl.

Because where else would you place a violent and unhinged misogynist who murdered a teenage girl? 

Lotusflower previously. Supported by the ACLU, of course.

ize: 11pt”>Also working against news coverage was a determined disinformation campaign. Youngsters were being taught at school and university that it’s impossible to define male and female objectively or to know which individuals are which. Older people were being convinced by lobby groups which wilfully misrepresent the law that if a man said he was a woman it was compulsory to play along.

Few people actively opposed the propaganda because those subjected to it mostly believed it and those spared it mostly didn’t know about it, and if they did, found it implausible that anyone could believe anything so dumb. Now that trans is everywhere, that mutual ignorance has ended. The two groups are increasingly clashing in workplaces, schools and everywhere else. And even if the new belief system doesn’t set editors’ news senses tingling, the clashes do….

More broadly, the narrative about trans issues is changing. Geoffrey Crowther, editor of the Economist from 1938 to 1956, used to tell young journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. That may sound like unnecessary advice in the era of churnalism and social media, but it expresses a timeless journalistic truth: a story can only ever be about one thing.

And for many years, every trans story stuck to a singular narrative: the struggle of the uniquely oppressed and suffering person born in the wrong body, with everyone else relegated to supporting roles if they were lucky and bigoted villains if they weren’t. Now the narrative is in flux: you can still easily find stories about celebrities’ brave trans kids but there’s room to point out that other people’s rights and interests matter too.

Once enough people got their heads around the story, it flipped like an optical illusion. The same facts and events that were once dismissed as too crazy to be happening became the sort of crazy that makes great copy.

Stop the machines at Manchester and Glasgow. Clear the line to Belfast and Paris. Pretending men can be women has been destroying institutions and women’s lives for years now. And finally, it’s news.

It's got very little to do with people's attitude in general. The majority always understood the insanity of this belief that men can become women just by saying so. It's just that now, at last, the media have started to do a little more honest reporting.

iance of their jihadi oppressors.

pan style=”font-size: 11pt”>Even evil exists on a spectrum. As Andrew Roberts argues, the IRA, for all its bloodshed, never committed the barbarism Hamas unleashed on October 7 or sought the destruction of Britain. It demanded territorial change, which made a political solution possible.

Hamas, by contrast, is explicit in its genocidal intentions. So what's the diplomatic solution–meet them halfway?

It's the same old story: the delusion that inspires such mind-bogglingly stupid comments about diplomacy is based on the cherished belief that this is another war about territory which can be resolved through getting round a table and talking. But Hamas aren't interested in diplomacy: they're an Islamist group bent on the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews – because for them this is all about Islam. They say it often enough. It's no great secret. But for the media and the political class, this goes against the story they're telling themselves and telling us. So they ignore it, and keep to the same old  blame-Israel line.

There isn’t a more misogynistic idea than Islam.
it crushes women, buries them in cloth. pic.twitter.com/ELOKa9DdPu

— Afghan Zoroastrian (@AfgZoroastrian) March 27, 2025

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EXCLUSIVE: Scouting Ireland, the body which oversees scouts and cub scouts in Ireland, is embroiled in a row after a new policy was announced at the weekend which would see biological men recognised as women for the purpose of supervising children:https://t.co/XOFCcmqSes

— gript (@griptmedia) March 27, 2025

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What could possibly go wrong?

f=”https://www.thetimes.com/article/f530b68b-c0fd-479c-bdee-933f5a92560c?shareToken=01d66990e720654b7df0744414e832bd”>Hadley Freeman interviews her for the Times:

If anyone wants to make a documentary about lesbians in Britain over the past half-century, they should get Julie Bindel to tell her life story. Bindel, 62, a writer and radical feminist, is like a lesbian Zelig, present at pretty much all the key events, from marching with radical feminists in 1970s Leeds to joining the anti-nuclear women-only protests at Greenham Common in 1981 and onwards….

From Bindel’s perspective, trans rights go against everything feminism and the gay rights movement represent. “It’s an ideology so wedded to gender stereotypes that its actual flag is pink and blue,” she writes. Yet in 2015, Ruth Hunt — then the CEO of Stonewall — added the “T” to the LGB acronym, mashing together very different groups with conflicting rights, given “LGB” is about sexuality and “T” is about gender identity. “I texted Ruth saying, ‘Why have you done this? This is in complete contradiction to everything Stonewall stands for,’ ” Bindel says. “She just wouldn’t engage at all.”

Bindel became a target for gender activists. “It’s had a profoundly life-changing effect. I went from thinking of myself as someone who fought for women and girls to wondering if I was a bigot, like they said. But I know a man can’t be a woman.”

Just like when she was a teenager, Bindel found solidarity among other lesbians (plus a few of us straight birds). Yet not all lesbians agree with her: Hunt, as well as a few other high-profile lesbians — including the Labour MP Angela Eagle and the broadcaster Sandi Toksvig — have insisted there is no conflict of rights between trans people and women. Why does she think that is? “Because they’re classic liberals, not feminists, who saw the writing on the wall and went along with it to be liked and be kind.”

Many gay men have also turned against her. “When gay men needed us, like during the Aids crisis in the Eighties, we were there. So the way they abused lesbians in the name of gender activism has been a terrible betrayal,” she says.

In 2020 the LGBT online newspaper PinkNews claimed that a prominent lesbian journalist and a “powerful network of international lesbians” had “groomed” young women to be sceptical of gender ideology. Everyone who read it knew that the article was referring to Bindel, she says, “mainly because there aren’t that many lesbian journalists who are publicly out in this country”. Rowling told Bindel she should sue the publication for libel. “Jo said, ‘If you want to take them to court I will help you.’ ” In 2021 they settled and PinkNews apologised. “I always said they were seething misogynists,” Bindel says.

Bindel has a plane to catch: she is going to visit Vancouver Rape Relief, the centre she wrote about back in 2004 — which, she says, has stayed firmly women-only. She is looking forward to talking to the young lesbians who work there now “because it can’t just be us old ’uns fighting the fight”. When she comes home there will be more women to protect, more fights to fight. “It never ends!” she says cheerfully. Where are the lesbian heroes? Here is the lesbian hero.

She's stuck to her guns throughout. Before all the gender nonsense I think it's fair to say that she was seen as something of a fringe figure on the radical feminist left. An unapologetic Andrea-Dworkin-quoting lesbian? Hmm, not so sure about that. Now though…well, the article comments are full of praise…brave, principled, a hero. The times have caught up with her.