Author: Mick Hartley

Last featured here in May, so it's surely time for the Everly Brothers to make a return:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnpbzmjcxQM&w=550&h=309]

Early in their careers, this. The song was released in 1958 – another classic penned by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. From their 1960 UK tour, backed by the Crickets.

There's a fuller version of this here. Slightly better visuals, and including Don's intro – "We'd like to slow the tempo down just a little bit…" – but marred by intrusive adverts.

Chen became the region’s party chief and pushed for legislation that allowed the construction of such facilities. Last December Shohrat Zakir, the governor of Xinjiang, told the press that all students at “education and vocational training centres” had graduated.

But ASPI, drawing on latest satellite images, said that at least 61 suspected detention facilities showed signs of new construction and expansion between July 2019 and July 2020, and that 14 were under construction this year.

As we heard yesterday, Beijing is so pleased with its work in Xinjiang that it appears to be extending the system to Tibet. And Inner Mongolia may very well be next in line.

gland. GB. © Josef Koudelka | Magnum Photos

e=”font-weight: 400″>"I confess to being perplexed…". Oh ffs. This is straightforward whataboutery of the crudest kind. As Sam Leith notes: 

Prof Butler pivots from the question asked to bring up the street harassment of trans people in Poland or Romania. This is an irrelevant false equivalence. Telling JK Rowling to choke on a dick doesn’t stop trans people being harassed in Romania; and finding the former objectionable doesn’t green light the latter.

So no, not enlightening. Though why anyone would expect anything different from Judith Butler is beyond me. Remember this?

Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.  

Judith Butler….reliably wrong, on everything.

Nicole Lampert in the Spectator on the transgender wars:

It has been more than 100 years since women got the vote. We’ve had two female prime ministers. The #MeToo movement has been and gone. And yet people are still suspicious of what women say. Has the battle for equality been won? I'm not convinced.

In the last few weeks we have seen: a best-selling author's books set on fire after she was branded a ‘Terf’; a Ted talks series for females change the word women to 'womxn'; the Irish health service remove references to 'women' on its information page on cervical smears; the Lib Dems devising a definition of ‘transphobia’ that effectively silences women who have the wrong opinions about ‘gender identity'; and a writer told that the word ‘female’ – which she had used in her book reviews – has ‘pejorative connotations’.

Does this happen to men? As far as I can tell, man hasn’t been changed to mxn; ‘people with a penis’ has not been used on posters about prostrate cancer; and no one says the word male might be 'pejorative'. Yet when a female dares says anything against these erasures of our womanhood, they are labelled by some as hateful transphobes.

Well yes. As anyone who's been paying attention can confirm, what we're seeing now is a new attack on women – a misogyny revival – dressed up in progressive clothes.

The saddest thing is that this emerging trend – sometimes driven by people who are neither trans nor female – divides women from transwomen and transmen when they often want the same thing; safety and respect. Dr Debbie Hayton, who is a transgender writer for The Spectator, has written movingly about how trans people like her just want to get on with their lives without usurping women’s rights. Buck Angel, who transitioned to become a man 25 years ago, tells me:

‘This new language situation is hurting more than helping. There is a lot of anger that is coming from all of this; it is not a good thing. The majority of us can see that we can make this work by co-existing, but there are some people who have been socialised as males and are refusing to listen to women. I find it hurtful because they don’t seem to want to understand that women have been fighting for their rights for centuries. If they had more compassion, they would understand why women are saying what they are saying.’

The erasure of words which depict and describe femaleness – particularly from so-called woke organisations who say they are on our side – undermines everything women have ever fought for. Those who insist on erasing 'women' need to start listening and stop calling us bigots.

Yes, but these people who've been "socialised as males" were socialised as males because they are males. Males who've decided they'd like to live now as females: transwomen who continue to expect real women to make way for them as they act out their exciting new lives.

be breaking at last.

The Palestinians are furious, but the Arab states seem finally to have lost patience with them. And Tehran is furious too, of course.

It’s in Tehran’s response that the bigger story is told. The Arab states, weary enough with the Palestinian leadership’s habitual rejectionism, have had it up their eyeballs with Khomeinist mischief and mayhem in the region. So have the Americans. So have the Israelis. And at long last, something’s being done about it.

That’s what makes the Abraham Accords a big deal.

level criterion is absurd. Post-adolescent male athletes have already built up a huge advantage over women in muscle density, bone strength and lung capacity, irrespective of testosterone levels. It's a joke. But he can get away with it because of these ridiculous IOC guidelines – so he does.

Competing as a woman in the Tokyo Paralympics is the next goal, which Petrillo feels is completely fair, due to now being 1.5 seconds slower in the 200 metres compared to pre-transition. Petrillo states: "We all have the right to be happy. And if I made it everyone can. I’d like to be talked about for my sporting results rather than for who I am. I hope to win the race, shake hands with the other girls on the podium and receive a beautiful bouquet of flowers."

We all have the right to be happy – apart from women, obviously. We men all have the right to be happy.

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[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration]

pro-democracy leaders in Hong Kong.

I've covered the Uighur reports reports by Dr Zenz here, here, and here.

have always been reasonable and yet were dismissed as bigotry. We have always supported the rights of trans people to live their lives free from discrimination and harassment. We also understood that a conflict of rights would need to be addressed.

Today the Government’s announcement is broadly in line with what we were calling for…

James Kirkup has some thoughts:

This decision is a significant reversal in government thinking. In 2017, when the May government announced a consultation on GRA reform, a system of self-ID was effectively the default option. Most politicians paid no attention to the detail, instead outsourcing their judgement on a complex and seemingly obscure issue to officials who were often very (too?) close to highly-effective professional advocacy groups such as Stonewall, which has led the push for self-ID.

Today’s announcement is a product of remarkable grassroots political organisation. Even though a great many politicians privately came to see the flaws and risks of the self-ID proposal, very few of them engaged with this topic publicly. The real political opposition to self-ID came from 'ordinary' women who saw the proposal as a potential threat to their legal rights and standing. Some of them came to the issue via Mumsnet . Others attended townhall meetings of A Woman’s Place UK, a group set up by women with their roots in the trade union movement.

This grassroots movement deserves a lot of attention and study. It shows how, even when politicians aren’t doing their job properly and listening to all sides, people with determination and organisation can make themselves heard. They can also go head-to-head with the professional advocacy groups. In the consultation on GRA reform, there were around 102,000 responses. 39 per cent of them came from an online form set up by Stonewall, a professional and well-funded charity. But 18 per cent came via Fair Play for Women, a feminist group opposed to self-ID which has almost no formal resources and largely rests on the tireless work of one woman, Dr Nicola Williams. This was a fight between big organisations and small groups of women. And the women won.

As Kirkup goes on to say, the government is not making a big deal of this. It doesn't want to set off a round of public gender wars – for the moment. The Labour position is different, with some prominent Labour politicians being vocal advocates of self-ID. This could prove another tricky test for Keir Starmer, just as he's trying to regain the trust and support of Labour's traditional "red wall" voters.