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ooms and showers that others rely on for privacy. That’s not the law. But Stonewall presents it as if it is and encourages organisations to treat any objections as a disciplinary matter.

LGB Alliance co-founder Kate Harris:

I was working at American Express in the heyday of Stonewall’s brilliant campaign for LGB equality at work. As a “Stonewall ambassador”, I was pleased and proud to support the Diversity Champions programme created in 2005.

The equality index itself was a relatively small part of Stonewall’s efforts to make employers aware that LGB people existed and should have our rights protected. There were meetings, training schemes and an annual conference with high-ranking speakers such as the home secretary.

The index was a simple set of questions which enabled LGB people to check that our employers knew what the law said and to help them build a diverse workforce by encouraging us to be out and proud.

In those days it was such a mild, well-intentioned programme. Its present-day version makes me shudder. It’s vile. Stonewall encourages organisations to be “ahead of the law” and gives incorrect advice on the Equality Act. It says the protected characteristic of gender reassignment really means gender identity. That is factually incorrect.

It is a mystery to me how what started out as a brilliant and progressive programme went so badly wrong. Stonewall has created an environment where you either toe their line or you are a transphobic bigot. It’s very easy to get it wrong. Ask Stonewall whether we really need to make employees use preferred pronouns or whether women would prefer to keep women-only loos and you’re soon marked as transphobic.

Why are employers in thrall to an unelected lobby group that misrepresents the law, and not safeguarding their organisations’ reputations and the wellbeing of all employees?

The reason people trusted Stonewall was because sensible and thoughtful volunteers told employers it had integrity. We did so in the firm belief that we were making the world a better place. Then, somehow, we took our eye off the ball. Years later, we realised we had created a monster.

An item from South Korea's Chosun Ilbo:

North Korean singer Kim Ok-ju is the unchallenged queen of the crackpot country's official entertainment scene.

At a recent concert for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, she sang no fewer than 22 out of the 26 songs in her breathy voice, a slightly deranged smile while the orchestral arrangements surged and swooned around her.

A stalwart of all official entertainment troupes of the Kim Jong-un era, Kim Ok-ju was at one time a member of the Unhasu Orchestra, where she performed with the leader's wife Ri Sol-ju.

She even performed in Seoul during a North Korean troupe's visit in February 2018.

She continues to dominate the stage in North Korea even though her long-time bandmates have mysteriously vanished, regaling the nomenklatura with such a propaganda favorite as "We Call Him Father."

And here she is, performing this nauseating ode to Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un with tears in her eyes and a catch in her voice.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU78hJovnXI&w=550&h=309]

As I've said on a number of occasions, there is no culture in North Korea beyond worship of the Kim dynasty.

>Small Shops will be published next month.

eft: 40px”>On that score too, Moon may be part of the problem. According to one formerly high-ranking North Korean defector based in Seoul, Kim felt utterly betrayed by Moon for siding with the U.S. after Hanoi, as well as by his purchase of 40 U.S. stealth fighter jets, and sees little point in negotiating with an administration on its last legs. After all, the denuclearization deal signed by Clinton in 2000 was effectively ripped up soon after, when Bush included North Korea in his “axis of evil.” Likewise, a 2007 joint declaration between South Korea and North Korea was walked back by incoming President Lee Myung-bak a year later. “There’s no chance of another summit with Kim Jong Un within Moon’s term,” the defector tells TIME…

6 book The Bitter Cry of the Children by labor reformer John Spargo:

        Work in the coal breakers is exceedingly hard and dangerous. Crouched over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and bent-backed like old men. When a boy has been working for some time and begins to get round-shouldered, his fellows say that “He’s got his boy to carry round wherever he goes.”

        The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the chute to be picked out later smothered and dead. Clouds of dust fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and miners’ consumption.         I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a 12-year-old boy was doing day after day, for 10 hours at a stretch, for 60 cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid, and the birds sang in chorus with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few minutes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed.         I could not do that work and live, but there were boys of 10 and 12 years of age doing it for 50 and 60 cents a day….

ppressing, well-founded concerns in this area. In Britain, Ms. Bell’s case and related developments have set in motion a much-needed process of soul-searching among policy-makers (with the UK government now severing ties with Stonewall UK’s infamously cynical diversity-training program). But this process is less advanced in other English-speaking countries such as Canada. In the United States, meanwhile, the policy landscape is increasingly polarized between progressives who seek total censorship of “gender-critical” viewpoints, and red-state social conservatives enacting overly broad laws that, in some cases, would go too far by banning transition therapies completely.

Is that characterisation of red-state conservatives going too far really fair? From the Reuters article they link to:

Arkansas on Tuesday became the first U.S. state to ban certain types of treatment to transgender youth, overriding a veto by Governor Asa Hutchinson and inviting lawsuits from civil rights groups that have vowed to stop it.

The law threatens any healthcare professional who provides puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or gender-affirming surgery to minors with losing their medical license and opens them up to lawsuits from patients who later regret their procedures.

At least 16 other states are considering similar legislation, which transgender advocates have attacked, saying that cutting off badly needed care to adolescents would inevitably lead to more suicides.

That sounds entirely reasonable to me, and in line with the Keira Bell judgement here. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender-affirming surgery to minors? Not good, especially in the current hysterical social media climate, where troubled young girls are encouraged to think that they can become boys and put an end to all their problems by cutting their breasts off. And the same irresponsible claims about suicides unless all their wishes are granted. Perhaps Quillette are too keen here to find something nasty on the right of the political spectrum, so they can claim to be negotiating some sensible middle path. But there is no sensible middle path here, when we're talking about medical mutilation in the name of gender ideology.

Still, they end well:

While each of the controversies discussed herein may seem small and inconsequential—the contents of a museum gift store, a deleted Twitter account, a canceled university event, a muzzled author—the larger issue at play is not. The “final, most essential command” of any coercive movement is, as George Orwell once put it, “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Once you sweep aside all the glitter showers, animated unicorns, and rainbow emojis, that is ultimately what gender supremacism is truly about.

Indeed. This is real 2 + 2 = 5 stuff.

the data before publication. It all resulted in another messy retraction just two weeks after the paper appeared.

Richard Horton has been The Lancet's editor since 1995. I think it's fair to say that his grandstanding left-wing opinions have played a considerable part in the Lancet's decline over the past 25 years. As I noted a couple of weeks back, he published a letter in Lancet in 2014 from a number of pro-Palestinian activists which the Israeli Ministry of Health characterised as “bordering on blood libel". Some of the letter’s authors were later revealed to have links to antisemitic groups. Two had shared a video of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, railing against Jews and Israel. One author had forwarded a message claiming that Jews and Zionists were behind the Boston marathon bombings. Horton announced in response that while he “deeply regretted” the “completely unnecessary polarisation” the letter caused, he stopped short of condemning the letter itself, and kept it up on The Lancet’s website. And refused to publish a rebuttal. In fact, as shown here, the Lancet under Horton has quite a history of publishing anti-Israel propaganda.

As well as publishing the dodgy Iraq War figures mentioned above, he also railed against "the axis of Anglo-American imperialism" at a 2006 rally in Manchester, and was happy to publish an article titled Neoliberal economics, planetary health, and the COVID-19 pandemic: a Marxist ecofeminist analysis last year, which referred positively to a paper which Horton himself had co-authored.

Then there was the case of Professor Sir Roy Meadow:

Horton published an article in 2005 supporting Professor Sir Roy Meadow who had been charged with serious professional misconduct by the GMC for giving erroneous and seriously misleading evidence in the Sally Clark trial. This was especially controversial as the article appeared whilst the GMC proceedings were still under away and was published on the first day of Meadow's defence. The article "incensed" Clark, a solicitor who had been the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice. With the support of erroneous statistical (and other) evidence from Meadow the prosecution wrongly convicted her of murder and she spent over three years in prison before her successful second appeal.

Her husband wrote a rebuttal letter to The Lancet in order to correct Horton's 'many inaccuracies and one-sided opinions' and to prevent them prejudicing independent observers. James Le Fanu, medical practitioner and writer, also wrote to The Lancet in the same issue and described Horton's words as 'mischief'. The Clark family issued a statement addressing and countering with established fact each of the points making up Horton's biased support of Meadow.

Quite a litany of poor judgement, then. Makes no difference, though: he's still editor-in-chief.

One person who should have an informed view of the transwomen-in-sport debate is Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner, herself a transwoman and former Olympic gold medallist (as a man), who made her opinions known a while back. "It just isn't fair", she said. "And we have to protect girls' sports in our schools."

Janice Turner:

Out of curiosity, I looked at Jenner’s personal bests for the ten events for which, as Bruce, she won a decathlon gold medal in Montreal in 1976. How many would have qualified him (as she was then) for individual women’s events in Tokyo? The answer is five: the 100m sprint, pole vault, long jump, high jump and the 400m, for which Jenner would hold the present women’s world record. Most likely she’d have qualified for the throwing events too, as Jenner’s personal bests were achieved with the heavier men’s discus and shot.

So given she would be an absolute cert for gold in the heptathlon, and likely to be chosen for several relay races, if a 27-year-old Jenner transitioned today, she could hope to carry home about ten women’s Olympic medals next month. No wonder she thinks it’s unfair.

Up at The Hill, Hampstead:

With bonus blooms from Queen Mary's Rose Garden, Regent's Park:

ff your breasts and pretend you're a boy because you’re gender nonconforming. Stonewall, you are responsible for this. And I blame you for not supporting Keira Bell and every other detransitioner. I blame you for supporting men's involvement in (women’s) rugby. How can you do that!? That's clearly dangerous! And I blame you fundamentally for lying. Gender Identity ideology is based on a pack of lies. And everyone on this call who actually considers the background of gender identity theory and queer theory, knows that."