I remember when Republicans were the Law n Order party. Seems like forever ago.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical of a charge federal prosecutors have lodged against hundreds of people who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

While the court’s three-justice liberal wing signaled support for the charge, the conservative majority raised a series of skeptical questions about its potential scope and whether it would criminalize other conduct, such as protests.

A decision against the government could reopen some 350 cases in which defendants have been charged with “obstructing” an official proceeding by pushing their way into the Capitol in 2021. The charge can tack up to 20 years onto a prison sentence.

I mean honestly. If people physically violently bashing their way into the Capitol is okie doke then what would be obstructing an official proceeding? Dropping nukes?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The Three Anti-imperialists.

I’ve never understood people who worship Marx like a god and treat his writings like holy text. The philosophers and thinkers of the past had good ideas and bad ones. As I see it, the general rule is, the further back you go in time, the more surprising it is to find good ideas that hold up today — and the more credit is due to those who came up with them — and the more apt you are to find bad ones that didn’t hold up so well. Because that’s how knowledge is built: over time. So it seems weird to me that anyone would revere thinkers from centuries past beyond merely admiring them for what they did in the context of their time.

Like, say, Freud: amazing that he got people thinking about the human mind like that. Credit where it’s due in the context of his time and place. But the “Freudians” who take his nonsense literally today? Ridiculous!

Kant? Hume? Adam Smith? Great stuff! For their time. Even Darwin — even Einstein — they didn’t get everything right. Evolutionary biologists and quantum physicists get this. They take delight in showing where their fields have moved beyond their great founders’ texts. It’s a sign of how much those fields have grown.

Not so much with the Marxists, with their worldview seemingly set in amber. Is it just me who feels like they take his extremely out-of-date prescriptions for how the world should be organized far too literally? We tried applying a lot of Marx’s theories in the real world over the last one hundred years. Tens of millions of dead bodies later, it’s safe to say the ideas, radical as they were, and influential they have been, they needed a little finessing. They shouldn’t be taken at face value today.

It feels very religion-y, the Marx worship. The way even moderate Christians talk like the Bible is this great source of moral knowledge. In its day, two thousand years ago, the New Testament was radical, sure. Nowadays, we’ve built up a body of knowledge that cancels out a good three quarters or so of Jesus’s moral ideas.

I used to have lunch with a Muslim colleague every day, and one of the things that really surprised me was his inverse view of progress: that the world was perfect in Mohammed’s time, and the further we get from it as we move forward in time, the more corrupt the world becomes. His idea of progress was literally my idea of regress.

I sense the Marxists pine for a glorious past in the same vein.

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on Looking fixedly in the other direction.

In the James Rieger edition (1974/1982) of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), Rieger’s introduction says this about Shelley’s father William Godwin:

Of all the tracts published by the Johnson circle, none had so great or enduring an impact as Godwin’s Enquiry considering Political Justice (1793).

Godwin argued that once the mind has been cleansed of superstition, emotionalism, and respect for custom, the free and rational man will necessarily perform virtuous actions, which will be socially useful and, at the same time, personally pleasurable.

Legislatures, courts of law, monarchy, marriage, and all other forms of “positive institution” with wither away, and the wise world will enter upon an era of benevolent, self-sustaining anarchy.

This passage is my bar for humanism. For humanism to be “Good Without a God” it should be self-aware of such naïveté, and do better than things like this.

Hamza Yousef says men will be protected under new misogyny laws.

Scotland’s first minister has said transgender women will be protected under any new misogyny laws. Humza Yousaf insisted that “anyone affected” by misogyny would be covered, whatever their biological sex.

That is moronic. Anyone can be “affected” by anything; it’s meaningless. Hatred of women is bad for women. There’s no “anyone” here; the word is quite specific.

Women were not included in the recent Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 that was introduced on 1 April – a decision that Mr Yousaf said had followed discussions with a number of women’s groups.

What kind of discussions? The kind where Mr Yousaf says “You bitches don’t need protection” and the bitches agree with him? Or what?

When asked whether fresh legislation would cover transgender women, Mr Yousaf said that it would, as whoever was directing misogynistic abuse would be unaware if a woman was trans or not.

What a disgusting liar he is. Of course people are “aware” if and when a man is claiming to be a woman.

The Alba Party MSP Ash Regan said the first minister’s reference to cis women was “offensive”. She added “Women are not a subclass of our sex. Trans-identifying people are protected under the Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021, yet despite crime against women being a scourge in our society, women are not.”

The author JK Rowling, who has been an outspoken critic of the Hate Crime Act, said the first minister’s remarks showed “absolute contempt” for women. On X, formerly known as Twitter, she said: “Women were excluded from his nonsensical hate crime law, now he introduces a ‘misogyny law’ designed to also protect men.”

It’s not enough for him to take great care to insult women once; he needs to do it twice.

Originally a comment by Sonderval on And a crime in Germany?

Actually, the situation is more complicated than described in the article by Tagesspiegel.

A biology PhD student (who is the focus of a lot of TRA criticism and hate since she dared trying to give a talk about the biology of sex) said that the Nazis did not pursue trans people. TRA activists then accused her on Twitter of being a holocaust denier.

The court clearly said that she is not a holocaust denier in the normal sense or anything like that, but that if you are a trans activist focused on this topic only (and only then), your opinion that the Nazis did pursue trans people is an opinion you are entitled to, even if it is not factually correct.

The court also stated that trans activists are trying to re-frame the holocaust to center trans people (“Deutungshoheit” is the wonderful German word for this). And because they do this, they are free to call you a holocaust denier if you say that trans people were not targeted by the holocaust.

And as Lady Mondegreen said, being a transvestite was not a problem in Nazi Germany (as you can see by the fact that you could even get a certificate for that), there are also lots of pictures of Wehrmacht soldiers dressing as women for fun and giggles. Being homosexual (especially gay) was what the Nazis persecuted as Lady Mondegreen also said.

Attempt to force secular school to stop being secular fails:

A Muslim student at a London school has lost a High Court challenge against its ban on prayer rituals. Michaela School in Wembley was taken to court by the girl over the policy, which she argued was discriminatory. The non-faith state secondary school previously told the High Court that allowing prayer rituals risked “undermining inclusion” among pupils.

Theocrats will of course retort that secularism undermines inclusion of theocrats, which is true enough, but secularism has the advantage of neutrality. If the school allowed prayers for one religion then it would risk “undermining inclusion” for all the other religions and for secular neutrality. That, of course, is the goal.

In an 83-page written judgment dismissing the student’s case, Mr Justice Linden said: “The claimant at the very least impliedly accepted, when she enrolled at the school, that she would be subject to restrictions on her ability to manifest her religion.”

Why? Because it’s a secular school. That’s the whole point.

About half the school’s roughly 700 pupils are Muslim, the court previously heard. Students are expected to adhere to strict rules including focusing on teachers extensively during lessons and remaining silent in corridors, as well as observing restrictions on uniforms.

In March 2023, up to 30 students began praying in the school’s yard, using blazers to kneel on, the High Court heard. Pupils are not allowed to gather in groups of more than four, including in the school yard. The school introduced the ban in the same month due to concerns about a “culture shift” towards “segregation between religious groups and intimidation within the group of Muslim pupils”, the court was told.

Which is the goal of all this praying in public routine. It’s meant to be a firm shove in the direction of religious conformity.

There is no legal requirement for schools to allow pupils a time or a place to pray, although most schools are still required to provide “broadly Christian” collective worship.

Yeah there’s your problem right there. Get rid of that requirement. Schools are not churches and should not be providing any kind of “collective worship.” It’s not “providing”; it’s coercing.

Lawyers for the pupil told the judge at a hearing in January that she was making a “modest” request to be allowed to pray for about five minutes at lunchtime, on dates when faith rules required it, but not during lessons. Representing the student, Sarah Hannett KC told the court that the school’s policy had the “practical effect of only preventing Muslims from praying, because their prayer by nature has a ritualised nature rather than being internal”.

Or to put it another way, because Muslim prayer is set up to coerce bystanders into religious conformity.

The case has led to renewed discussion about the broader role of faith within England’s education system. The National Secular Society, Humanists UK and others have long campaigned for reform, saying faith has no place in school.

Quite right.

The glorious future.

I’m pretty sure Willoughby is lying about this.

Smithsonian Magazine did an article on the Nazis and “trans people” last September, except that it admits up front that it’s not exactly about “trans people” for the simple reason that they weren’t a thing at the time.

In the fall of 2022, a German court heard an unusual case. It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted by the Nazis, there’s been very little scholarship on trans people during this period.

The court took expert statements from historians before issuing an opinion that essentially acknowledges that trans people were victimized by the Nazi regime.

“Essentially” – that is, if you pretend that the Nazi regime meant X when it said Y.

In 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler took power, the police in Essen, Germany, revoked [Toni] Simon’s permit to dress as a woman in public. Simon, who was in her mid-40s, had been living as a woman for many years.

The Weimar Republic, the more tolerant democratic government that existed before Hitler, recognized the rights of trans people, though in a begrudging, limited way. Under the republic, police granted trans people permits like the one Simon had.

In the 1930s, transgender people were called “transvestites,” which is rarely a preferred term for trans people today, but at the time approximated what’s now meant by “transgender.” 

Oh really?

What if it’s the other way around? What if people have taken what used to be called “transvestism” and magnified it into a whole bonkers ideology? What if femme men were then just one way of being a gay man and butch women were just one way of being a lesbian? What if both were just one way of living as a same-sex attracted person, without any grandiose ontological claims, let alone threats?

In Berlin, transgender people published several magazines and had a political club. Some glamorous trans women worked at the internationally famous Eldorado cabaret. The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who ran Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, advocated for the rights of transgender people.

But we don’t know that they were transgender people. We have zero reason to think that butch lesbians and femme men thought of themselves in the terms that people who now claim to be transgender do. It’s not something Smithsonian Magazine should just assume.

Simon was a brave person. I first came across her police file when I was researching trans people at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Essen police knew Simon as the sassy proprietor of an underground club where LGBTQ people gathered. 

No they didn’t. They didn’t call themselves that. No one did. Not least, it’s not even German.

At the Hamburg State Archive, I read about H. Bode, who often went out in public dressed as a woman and dated men. Under the Weimar Republic, she held a transvestite certificate. Nazi police went after her for “cross-dressing” and for having sex with men. They considered her male, so her relationships were homosexual and illegal. They sent her to the concentration camp Buchenwald, where she was murdered.

Liddy Bacroff of Hamburg also had a transvestite pass under the republic. She made her living selling sex to male clients. After 1933, the police went after her. They wrote that she was “fundamentally a transvestite” and a “morals criminal of the worst sort.” She too was sent to a camp, Mauthausen, and murdered.

None of which magically makes them what the people of 2024 mean by “trans people.” They couldn’t be that kind of trans people, because the meanings of that label did not exist 90 years ago.

For a long time, the public didn’t know the stories of trans people in Nazi Germany.

Earlier histories tended to misgender trans women, labeling them as men. This is odd given that when you read the records of their police interrogations, they are often remarkably clear about their gender identity, even though they were not helping their cases at all by doing so. Bacroff, for example, told the police, “My sense of my sex is fully and completely that of a woman.”

No, it’s not “odd.” There was no such thing as “gender identity” in Nazi Germany. Men who said they felt like women were just men who said they felt like women. They didn’t spark a new vocabulary and ideology.

So, no, Willoughby is wrong to say the Nazis targeted people “purely for being trans.” For flouting gender norms and even laws against cross-dressing, yes, but for being trans in the contemporary sense, no.

I’m also skeptical that there’s a law that says “Denying trans persecution by the Nazis is Holocaust revisionism and a crime in Germany.” Frontline has a long article on laws restricting Holocaust speech and it says nothing about “trans persecution” – it says nothing about “trans” at all.

It’s in The Sun, so I don’t feel like reading it, but I gotta say, that banner would make me feel the very opposite of welcome.

If all that gender chopped salad is welcome then gender skeptics are not welcome. Just for one thing, we don’t have a colorful stripey flag. We are aflagual.

Guy goes to a shopping mall to kill people.

I say “people” but of course that’s wrong. Sheer habit; sorry.

He went there to kill women. A man tried to stop him so he killed that one man too, but the rest were all women. Women are shit; women need killing.

The man who went on a stabbing rampage in a Sydney shopping centre appears to have targeted women, police say.

Appears?

What would it take for the BBC to omit that “appears to have” part?

The New South Wales police commissioner told Australia’s ABC News that it was “obvious” Mr Cauchi focused on women.

The only man killed in the attack was security guard Faraz Tahir, 30, who tried to intervene.

…

“The videos speak for themselves, don’t they?” commissioner Karen Webb said. “It’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to detectives… that the offender focused on women and avoided the men.”

But the BBC doesn’t consider it obvious.

Am I wrong to say that no one wants to make trans people less equal?

I get that there are plenty of malevolent people who dislike trans people along with gay people, feminists, lefties, atheists, you name it, but are there people who want to make trans people less equal? What would that even look like?

That question is related to one I ask a lot, which is “what do we mean by ‘trans rights’?” What exactly are trans rights? Trans people should have human rights, obviously, but what are specifically trans rights, and how do we know that anyone should have them?

There’s a lot of sloppy rhetoric about equality and rights all through the trans ControVersy, and I spend a lot of time trying to pin down what is meant.

How about Ron DeSantis? Does he want to make trans people less equal? I’m told he does, but I’m skeptical. What would that look like? What has he said that looks like that? I’m not disagreeing that DeSantis is a malevolent right-winger, but I continue to think making trans people “less equal” is just not on the right-wing agenda, not because they’re better than that but because it’s just not a thing.

With race, now, it’s a thing. With race we have a very clear very explicit history of less equal. See the Dred Scott ruling for example. With sex it’s also a thing: women weren’t allowed to vote.

But trans people? Is anyone saying they shouldn’t have voting rights, or that they have no rights which the cis people are bound to respect? Not that I know of. Maybe I’ve missed something.

Here’s the AP back in December:

A federal judge hearing a challenge to a transgender health care ban for minors and restrictions for adults noted Thursday that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly spread false information about doctors mutilating children’s genitals even though there’s been no such documented cases.

The law was sold as defending children from mutilation when it is actually about preventing trans children from getting health care, Judge Robert Hinkle said to Mohammad Jazil, a lawyer for the state.

But what is called “trans health care” can and does include altering the genitals. Is that health care as opposed to mutilation, or vice versa? Depends on who is talking.

At least 22 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, and many of those states face lawsuits. Courts have issued mixed rulings, with the nation’s first law, in Arkansas, struck down by a federal judge who said the ban on care violated the due process rights of transgender youth and their families.

But it’s a choice to call it “medical care.” If it weren’t labeled as “gender-affirming” then it would be mutilation, so that “gender-affirming” is carrying a lot of weight.

Anyway I couldn’t find anything in that article that indicates DeSantis is trying to make trans people less equal. It’s not a form of equality to have your genital mutilation called “medical care” even if you yourself want the genital mutilation or alteration. The whole thing is about something other than equality.

President of Humanists UK refuses to step up.

They don’t want the tsuris.

Neale Hanvey MP on Ruth Hunt:

Ruth Hunt’s claim that she was “absolutely someone who has always been working in the middle ground, trying to build consensus” is most egregious insult imaginable.

@stonewalluk attacked anyone occupying a position beyond their pious queer theory doctrine. Any LGB person who raised so much as a ‘heretical’ whisper was targeted and demonised. The agenda they have been pushing has seen emboldened extremist positions find their way on to the floor of the House of Commons where straight women tell gay men to get back in the closet. That’s what you achieved Ruth Hunt, but it’s never going to happen. Now we stand with @AllianceLGB.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Often contending with other difficulties.

You’d think they’d make sure there actually was such a thing as a “gender identity” before offering to “develop” it, “treat” it, or follow its dictates with regard to the bodies it allegedly inhabits. Why do some people claim to have such an identity, while others do not? Why are most people’s identities “aligned” with their sex, while others are not? What causes this supposed “misalignment”? How is the identity’s presence and nature determined, apart from patient self-diagnosis? How do you screen out people who don’t require your services, and/or those who will not benefit from them? Surely clinicians dealing with this phenomenon would want fundamental questions like this answered before taking any steps, drastic or otherwise, that involve any kind of medical intervention, hormonal, pharmaceutical, or surgical.

Quite apart from practical considerations like those outlined above, what about questions around the origin and evolution of “gender identities”? This is specifically about gender, not sex, so clown fish are not what we’re asking about. We’ve been told that such identities have nothing to do with gametes, so let’s take them at their word, and rule them out from the start. What is your evidence of gender identity outside of the genus Homo? What other species exhibit such an entity, and how does one tell? What adaptive advantages might it confer? These and a host of other interesting questions would make the concept of “gender identity” a potentially fruitful field of study, if such a thing actually existed. But the “knowledge” which its adherents claim to possess smacks more of fan fiction, literary criticism, or theology than anything real or tangible. Belief and obedience are held in higher esteem than curiosity and critical thinking. Like astrology’s unquestioningly confident acceptance of the existence and import of the supposedly contending influence and power of inherently meaningless alignments of planets against the backdrop of completely incidental “constellations” (ascribed to them by ancients who had no idea at all that “planets” were worlds like the Earth, and that “stars” were distant Suns like our own), gender ideology takes the existence and primacy of “gender identities” as foundational and axiomatic, an unreasoned, unjustified, and unquestioned faith position, rather than the end result of hard work and research to confirm an hypothesis.

I’ve never understood the power of this ridiculous ideology. I’ve never understood why so many formerly intelligent people rushed to sign up to it and demonize their friends who said no.

Neither do I. Not only its power to attract and maintain followers (given the manifest lunacy and contradictions it accepts with a straight face), but also the power and influence it has managed to acquire and wield. This unprecedented level of unaccountable, behind the scenes machinations have allowed it to enact huge parts of its agenda without review or oversight, as well given it the ability to shield itself from criticism, as well as recruit others to isolate, circumvent, and punish anyone it judges to be a critics or opponents. It might pass itself off as scientific, but with regards to power, it certainly behaves much more like religion, from the time when religion had more leverage than it does now. That supposed sceptics, secularists, humanists, progressives, and scientists, all of whom seem to know better in other areas, can fall prey to this unevidenced patchwork of bullshit continues to astound and dismay. For a field in which there’s no there there, genderism has a disturbingly large population of supporters, and an unfortunately well-equipped and active standing army.

Dreaming the impossible dream again:

Euphoria actress Hunter Schafer has said she no longer wants to play transgender roles. The 25-year-old transgender star shot to fame playing a trans character, Jules Vaughn, in HBO’s hit teen drama.

So he’s an actor and a he, and the BBC is lying to its readers in the usual way by calling him “she.”

Anyway. Trans actor Hunter doesn’t want to play trans characters any more. Ok; there are other jobs. Have a nice life, Hunter.

But Schafer said she felt she could go further as an actress by “not making it the centrepiece to what I’m doing”. She said: “I worked so hard to get to where I am, past these really hard points in my transition, and now I just want to be a girl and finally move on.”

He “just” wants to get jobs playing a woman when there are thousands upon thousands of actual women who want those jobs. The movie business is there to make money, not to validate guys like Hunter. He just wants to be a girl but he’s not a girl, so he wants the impossible. He just wants to “move on” from being trans, but the only place to move on to, for him, is being a man.

Speaking to GQ magazine, Schafer said being known simply as a “trans actress” was “ultimately demeaning to me and what I want to do”. She continued: “I’ve been offered tons of trans roles, and I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to talk about it.

Well tough shit, kid. You can’t have it both ways. If you find it “demeaning” to be known as a trans actress, you could always stop being a trans actress. Tragic reality: more people want to be famous rich movie stars than actually are famous rich movie starts. Lots more.

In other news…

This is exactly the escalation in the simmering conflict between Iran, its proxies and Israel that everyone feared: a direct attack by one nation against another.

For nearly two weeks Iran’s security establishment has been mulling its response to the 1 April airstrike on its consulate in Damascus, widely assumed to be the work of Israel, that killed several top Iranian commanders. Clearly, a decision was reached that such a major escalation – an attack that flattened a diplomatic building and therefore sovereign Iranian territory – called for an escalatory response.

Israel has several layers of air defences and it has vowed to respond to any attack on its soil and it will. The risk now is that this tit-for-tat continues to escalate into a full-blown regional war, something most governments in the region have been trying hard to avoid ever since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October.

And that the regional war continues to escalate into a global war and before long there is nothing left of Planet Earth.

Ruth Hunt’s “Who, me?? Never!!” is not going down very well.

Hannah Barnes in The New Statesman:

[Hannah Barnes is associate editor of the New Statesman and author of “Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children” (Swift)]

The report confirms that the majority of children referred to Gids had complex needs, and alongside their gender-related distress were often contending with other difficulties: anxiety, depression, eating disorder and autism were all over-represented when compared with what you would see in the general children’s population.

It also vindicates what so many former Gids staff have been saying for years: that there was no consistency in its clinical approach; that some assessments – prior to referral for puberty blockers – could be just one or two sessions long; that there was wide variation between clinicians; that “sexuality was not consistently discussed”; that assessments lacked structure; and that “there was a lack of evidence of professional curiosity” as to how a child’s specific circumstances may impact on their gender identity and decisions.

…

Cass describes how several staff in adult gender clinics have “contacted the Review in confidence with concerns about their experiences working in adult gender services”. These clinicians, from NHS gender clinics across the country, describe how a large proportion of patients have “various combinations of confusion about sexuality, psychosis, neurodevelopmental disorders, trauma and deprivation… and a range of other undiagnosed conditions”, yet there was an expectation that they would be started on hormones by their second appointment.

It’s very odd, isn’t it. Wouldn’t you think all these other issues would prompt the medics to be very cautious about prescribing puberty blockers as opposed to prompting them to rush to do so?

Perhaps the most shameful thing detailed in the final Cass review is the revelation that NHS adult gender services – paid for by the tax-payer – have refused to cooperate in sharing data that would improve the evidence base for this group of people. The review had aimed to track what happened to the 9,000 young people who had gone through Gids, with the government even changing the law to help researchers do this. But the gender clinics refused to help. Follow-up is standard practice in the NHS, Cass explains, but “has not been the case for gender-questioning children and young people”. Finding out how thousands of young people had fared after receiving different help represented “a unique opportunity” to provide more evidence to help gender-questioning young people and their families make informed decisions about what might be the right treatment pathway for them.

It is baffling that those working in services purportedly aiming to help these same people have refused to help make their care better, safer and more evidence-based. “I don’t understand the reasons why they wouldn’t cooperate,” Cass told me. Some of the clinics raised issues about ethics – yet the research design had been granted official ethical approval; others raised issues about it requiring extra resources, but NHS England said it would pay for it. “So, it is mystifying to me,” Cass said. “Particularly when you would expect that they would be curious about outcomes for the patient cohort going through, and if they are confident in the management approach, they would want to be able to demonstrate that.”

It has a kind of Jonestown feel to it – that they were all addled by the same bizarre atmosphere as each other, and all bumbled over the same cliff.

Staff from Gids have been making these points for almost a decade. Two decades if you go back to the very first whistle-blower who raised concerns before puberty blockers were given to under 16s. Some in the media have amplified those concerns, too, as have women’s rights activists, former Gids service users, and parents. Those who have spoken out should be applauded. But, we should be asking the question: where has everyone else been?

What about all the others who have not spoken out? Those who were told what was going on, who saw what was going on, and did nothing. The NHS, the government and political classes, the media.

Jonestown is everywhere?

I don’t have anything more intelligent to offer. I’ve never understood the power of this ridiculous ideology. I’ve never understood why so many formerly intelligent people rushed to sign up to it and demonize their friends who said no.

Again with the re-wording.

Doc Stock asked for examples of Stonewall doing its thing, which has made for a highly useful thread full of sources. One item gives us yet another lie about what the trans ideology is about:

Second paragraph under “We stand up for people”:

“We do draw a line with regard to questioning whether trans people deserve the same level of equality as any other group.”

NOBODY SAYS trans people don’t deserve the same level of equality as any other group. NOBODY. There is no campaign to Make Trans People Less Equal. That’s not the issue, that’s not what it’s about, that’s not what anyone says.

What does it tell us, that they do this so relentlessly?

It tells us that they can’t defend their actual demands, so they translate them into ones that sound familiar and reasonable.

Forcing everyone to play along with people’s fantasies about themselves has nothing whatsoever to do with equality. NOTHING. It also has nothing to do with human rights except when it cancels them for other people. If you think women have a right to exclude men in some circumstances then trans ideology cancels that right.

It’s very very very telling that Stonewall and others consistently do this, because it tells us they realize, on some level, that what they’re actually campaigning for is indefensible.

Welp.

Stonewall tried to suppress early warnings to schools about the shaky evidence base for medical transitions for children, The Times can reveal.

Not just ignore; not just dispute; not just dismiss; suppress.

Speaking for the first time since the publication of the Cass review, Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green insisted that Stonewall had always supported calls for evidence-based medicine during her leadership from 2014 to 2019.

That buzzing you hear? That’s gender-critical types exclaiming “Like hell it did!!”

However, when campaigners sent out resource packs to schools in 2018 warning teachers that there was little medical evidence to support puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, Stonewall sought to have them removed from schools.

The evidence-led approach advocated by the resource pack was sent out to thousands of schools by the pressure group Transgender Trend in February 2018. Much of its content has since been upheld by Dr Hilary Cass in her landmark review.

The pressure group Stonewall has some explaining to do.

The resource pack warned about autism and mental health issues, and the sudden spike in girls joining the gender mania.

It advised them to be cautious if supporting a pupil’s social transition, pointing out that “very few come off the path of increasingly invasive medical treatments once they start” and reminded them of their safeguarding and legal responsibilities. It also advised school leaders to resist offers by external activist organisations to “mentor” children in this complex area.

Advised them to be cautious! How scandalous! Obviously it’s the right thing to be reckless and in a great big hurry to persuade children to ruin their bodies and futures.

In response, Stonewall Scotland told its tens of thousands of followers on Twitter/X: “We, in the strongest possible terms, denounce and condemn this publication. If it lands on your desk, do the right thing: shred it.”

A further Stonewall statement branded the pack as “dangerous” material, “masquerading as a professional, ‘evidence-based’ advice. One thing we want every educator to be clear on is that they must have nothing to do with this deeply damaging publication.”

That’s so fascinating, because what did Stonewall think it was doing? If it’s “masquerading” to urge caution before letting children ruin their bodies, what is it to urge children to ruin their bodies? Eh? How is it that Stonewall has every right to urge children to do drastic life-altering things while others have no right to urge caution? Why did Stonewall think the default was go ahead and mess up your body, and the evil deviation was slow down and use caution before messing up your body?

Hunt, who stepped down in August 2019, has denied that her organisation suppressed debate around transgender healthcare. “If we thought it was bad guidance, and it is, we were right to tell people we thought it was bad guidance,” she said, referring to its scepticism around the concept of a “trans child”.

But you thought it was bad guidance and it isn’t. That’s the problem. Not that you thought it was bad guidance, and it is, but that you thought it was bad guidance, and it isn’t. Do you get it now? You’re the ones who put out the bad guidance. Not those other people; you.

[Hunt] denied that she had ever supported “no debate”, adding: “I’m absolutely someone who has always been working in the middle ground, trying to build consensus.”

Hunt’s critics may contrast that position with her response in October 2018 to a petition asking Stonewall to acknowledge there was a conflict around transgender rights and sex-based women’s rights. She wrote: “We do not and will not acknowledge this. Doing so would imply that we do not believe that trans people deserve the same rights as others. We will always debate issues that enable us to further equality but what we will not do is debate trans people’s right to exist.”

And there it is again, The Big Lie. There’s the implication that gender skeptics wanted genocide for trans people. There’s the sneaky malevolent lie that feminist women hope to see trans people killed. That’s her “middle ground, trying to build consensus.”