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40px”>The Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office confirmed they let membership expire, and DCMS, Frances’s former employer, left in 2022.

However, Frances warned: “Leaving these schemes is not enough to undo their lasting influence. If organisations have incorporated biased or unlawful practices into their policies and strategies, then these will continue until they are actively halted.”

Maya Forstater, chief executive of the charity Sex Matters, said: “It’s fantastic news that the majority of government departments have stopped wasting public money on Stonewall’s scheme, but it’s just the first step. Gender identity ideology is now deeply entrenched in the UK civil service.

“In every department it worked with, Stonewall’s legacy is likely to be a raft of ideological policies, staff networks and programmes.

“Even if Stonewall’s consultants are no longer involved, activist staff networks continue their work across government and many are funded by taxpayers to do this activism in their working hours.

See here for more on Eleanor Frances.

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Dublin 1979

Hare Row, Hackney, 1979 (both)
[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Syd Shelton]

Yesterday I wondered if gender woo was the hill that the Democrats were choosing to die on. Kara Dansky at Spiked has had the same thought – Will Democrats ever drop the ‘transgender lunacy’?

It’s difficult to know exactly when the Democratic Party began its full-throated embrace of gender-identity ideology, at the expense of women and girls as a sex class.

We know that Joe Biden was saying as early 2012 that anti-transgender discrimination is the ‘civil-rights issue of our time’. That happens to be the same year that his friend, Tim McBride, decided that he is a woman named Sarah (he has since been elected to Congress). We know that Democratic members of Congress first introduced the so-called Equality Act, which redefined sex to include ‘gender identity’ for all purposes under US civil-rights law, in 2015. We know that under President Obama, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice issued a joint ‘Dear Colleague’ letter to US schools in 2016, instructing them to interpret sex to include ‘gender identity’ for all purposes under Title IX, which was originally intended to prohibit sex discrimination in education. Earlier this month, during a debate on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, a perfectly sensible proposal to maintain single-sex sports in US schools, every single Democrat who spoke in opposition to the bill came off as an unhinged lunatic….

One Democratic congressman did see the light. Less than a week after the election, Seth Moulton said: ‘I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.’ In response, Matt Chilliak, his campaign manager, had a temper tantrum and resigned….

Still, none of these criticisms or defections seem to have prompted any soul searching from Democratic leaders. Americans have heard nothing from Biden or Harris on this issue. We have heard nothing from senior Democrats Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer….

Sadly, things are not changing in the US Democratic Party, and it appears that the Democrats are indeed prepared to die on the hill that ‘some men are women’. … It’s still not too late for the Democrats to change course. They’d better do it soon if they hope to gain back voters.

I'm not holding my breath.

Here we go. Trump prepares to sell out Ukraine:

President Donald Trump claimed in part two of a televised interview that the nearly three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine that started when Moscow’s forces kicked off an invasion in 2022 was the fault of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s failure to preemptively capitulate before Russian troops began their attack.

Trump made the incendiary comments in a pre-taped interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that aired Thursday on Hannity’s program….

Zelensky, he said, is “no angel” and “shouldn’t have allowed this war to happen,” even though it was Russia that invaded Ukraine.

“First of all, he’s fighting a much bigger entity, okay, much bigger. When he was, you know, talking so brave… Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful. He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal, and it would have been a deal that would have been, it would have been a nothing deal,” Trump claimed.

He added that had he been in Zelensky’s position he could have “made that deal so easily.” He claimed that it was the Ukrainian leader who decided on hostilities even though it was Putin who ordered the invasion of Ukraine…

What deal did he have in mind? Surrender how much of Ukraine, exactly? Start with 50%, and work up till Putin nods his head in agreement? 60%? No. 70%? No. 75%? OK, that's a good start…maybe we can do business here. Plus of course no more talk of an independent Ukraine. And no Ukrainian language – all Russian. And Ukrainian children to be sent off to Russia for a proper education into how Ukraine doesn't really exist as a separate country and how you're all Nazis. And a few billion dollars reparation for all the trouble of getting an army together to invade and bomb your hospitals and schools. Reducing cities to rubble doesn't come cheap. After all, remember, we're a much bigger entity than you. In fact you're not even an entity at all….

Of course this could all be Trump braggodocio. He can't resist boasting about his best-ever world-beating negotiating skills. But, as we remember from his last presidency, there's quite a gap between what he says and what he does.

Yes, he has a weakness for Putin's alpha male style – hey, two alpha males head to head negotiating about the future of Ukraine…what could be better?

Apparently he's reinstated the bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. Perhaps, if he glances up, he'll be reminded that taking up arms against tyranny is sometimes the only choice.

(1/3) Steve Witkoff – Trump's man of the moment in the Middle East – noted other countries like Qatar could join the Abraham Accords if the Saudis lead the way. There are few in Israel who would oppose normalization with Qatar….

— Calev Ben-Dor (@Fathom_Editor) January 24, 2025

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(2/3) But they remain the main sponsors of Hamas (and Al Jazeera). 2 Israelis i recently spoke to (heavily involved in peacemaking for decades) talked about the sophisticated game Qatar plays and emphasized what a bad actor it has been.

(3/3) let's hope this will change – but we shouldn't hold our breath

Qatar is where the Hamas leaders lived their billionaire lives of luxury before Israel sent them off to meet Allah. So…normalisation, perhaps, but much would need to change…

From the Times:

The number of children in England diagnosed with gender dysphoria has risen 50-fold over the past decade, research shows.

Analysis of NHS GP records suggests that more than 10,000 under-18s identified as transgender or struggled with gender distress in 2021, up from about 200 in 2011.

Gender dysphoria describes the sense of anxiety when people feel a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity, which prompts some to take steps to transition to the opposite sex using hormonal drugs or surgery.

Since "gender identity" is a maufactured construct – an ideological construct – it's no surprise that the huge increase in so-called gender dysphoria is so closely related to its promotion on social media. There could hardly be clearer evidence that this is all a cult, on the lines of the satanic panic, or multiple personalities, – or even alien abduction, though that never really caught on. This is the biggie though: a toxic combination of postmodern Queer Theory and the old religious body/soul dualism. This is the one that's really caught on; that's left thousands of unfortunates with mutilated bodies, that allows men into women's sport, and women's prisons, and women's rape centres. That's captured institutions and even governments across the western world. 

Gender dysphoria can be a useful diagnostic term, no doubt, for the psychological condition of feeling you should somehow be the other sex, but in the past it was extremely rare. The new terminology of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) was introduced to describe this new sudden explosion – which is not a  discovery of a new medical condition which has only recently been uncovered – like, say, autism – but a term for these young kids persuaded by their time on social media that all their pubertal problems can be solved if they transition to the other sex. It's not a medical problem so much as a social contagion.

In other words, nobody's born in the wrong body.

A BBC report – 'I had anti-government views so they treated me for schizophrenia':

When Zhang Junjie was 17 he decided to protest outside his university about rules made by China's government. Within days he had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital and treated for schizophrenia.

Junjie is one of dozens of people identified by the BBC who were hospitalised after protesting or complaining to the authorities.

Many people we spoke to were given anti-psychotic drugs, and in some cases electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), without their consent.

While there have been reports for decades that hospitalisation is used in China as a way of detaining dissenting citizens without involving the courts, a leading Chinese lawyer has told the BBC that the issue – which legislation sought to resolve – has recently seen a resurgence.

Junjie says he was restrained and beaten by hospital staff before being forced to take medication….

"The doctors told me I had a very serious mental disease… Then they tied me to a bed. The nurses and doctors repeatedly told me, because of my views on the party and the government, then I must be mentally ill. It was terrifying," he told the BBC World Service. He was there for 12 days.

He's not the only one, of course.

An activist called Jie Lijian told us he had been treated for mental illness without his consent in 2018.

Lijian says he was arrested for attending a protest demanding better pay at a factory. He says police interrogated him for three days before taking him to a psychiatric hospital.

Like Junjie, Lijian says he was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs that impaired his critical thinking.

After a week in the hospital, he says he refused any more medication. After fighting with staff, and being told he was causing trouble, Lijian was sent for ECT – a therapy which involves passing electric currents through a patient's brain.

"The pain was from head to toe. My whole body felt like it wasn't my own. It was really painful. Electric shock on. Then off. Electric shock on. Then off. I fainted several times. I felt like I was dying," he says.

He says he was discharged after 52 days. He now has a part-time job in Los Angeles and is seeking asylum in the US.

st, and particularly in Gaza under Hamas, where the children are taught Jew-hate in UNRWA schools and the regime spends all its energy on the infrastructure for attacking and destroying the "Zionist entity". But to see the explosion of sheer naked antisemitism across the west, in marches for Free Palestine, across universities – that's been just shocking. Even supposedly serious organisations like Amnesty International joined in with the "genocide" accusation against Israel – an absurdity loaded with a calculated and profoundly offensive antisemitic insult against the people who experienced the Holocaust, where the term "genocide" was first coined. As though at last the guilt could be thrown off and hurled back at the Jews for their inexcusable role as victims in the worst crime in history.

There is also something much deeper and much darker behind anti-Zionism. One of the most troubling things, post-7 October, was the business of the Israeli hostages and the attitude of so many people in the West towards them. These hostages included mainly women and small children, but also some men and elderly people. In London and other cities across the West, posters depicting those hostages were posted up in various public places, and we saw that they were torn down. As fast as they were torn down, they were put up. And as fast as they were put up again, they were torn back down.

It was an astonishing thing to see that the faces of the people who were tearing the posters down were very often convulsed with hatred and rage. They were not protesting against Israel. They were tearing down images of innocents who were kidnapped and, in some cases, slaughtered, tortured or lost to a terrible, unknown fate. Why does that fill them with such murderous rage?

What were they tearing down? They weren’t just tearing down pictures of Israeli hostages. They were tearing out the Jews from their heads, from their conscience and from their world. They wanted the Jews gone.

That, to me, is what has been going on in the West in certain circles. I don’t wish to exaggerate it, but we’ve had these massive ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations going on all the time. Nobody, apart from Jews and supporters of Israel, has asked what abomination we are seeing here.

We’re seeing a mass movement against Jews, Judaism and Israel. I say all three of those together because of the nature of these protests – what’s being chanted, the banners, the relentlessness of it, the obsession. We’re seeing something very much darker and deeper. There is no other cause in history where the West has behaved like this.

More trees, plus Henry Moore at Kenwood. That second image: I thought for a moment it was a carving – an angel or devil, perhaps – but no, just a natural break.

“font-size: 11pt”>In the aftermath, the Ministry of Atomic Energy Industry has appointed a new research team to lead the project, with the Central Committee mandating increased party oversight of technological research and development.

Increasing party oversight of technological research and development? That'll work.