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t I want to deal with it when we come to a decade — the 1970s — when I was an adult, turning 20 in 1974, the year before Todd was born.

To Todd this was a golden decade of equality, political innovation, successful revolt, worker-student unity and so on. Over our national landscape marched and organised legions of committed change-agents. And what spurred them on? One aspect, Todd writes, was “the existence of the USSR and the eastern bloc [which] provided a highly visible reminder that capitalism wasn’t the only way to organise society”.

I was there. I was a young communist. I can assure Todd that the existence of the eastern bloc provided daily reminders that no alternative to capitalism had yet been found. But then I don’t suppose she ever met a Romanian youth delegate.

So she'd have a lot in common with John McDonnell, it seems. But her left-wing views count as nothing for the Oxford University Labour Club when it comes to the unforgivable crime of transphobia.

hese have all been tropes in the history of racism. And I suppose that the history of racism is alive, well and continuing at the New York Times. Under the guise of ‘anti-racism’, obviously.

instructed transgender people that they could answer the sex question in line with their self-identified gender, rather than the sex on their birth certificate. The proposals for the 2021 Census currently include this guidance, although it has yet to be finalised by the ONS. At a meeting last year with concerned data users, Iain Bell, the Deputy National Statistician, confirmed that this guidance was “added at the request of the LGBT community.” 

It is important for both equalities monitoring and resource allocation that the census collects robust data on the transgender population, and campaigners are not objecting to the addition of a voluntary gender identity question on the forthcoming census. However, through a process of policy capture by specific interest groups, our census authorities have conflated the sex variable with gender identity, a situation which in 2018 produced the remarkable suggestion by National Records of Scotland that a "non-binary" option be added to the census within the sex variable. This is a clear example of allowing subjective gender identification to overwrite the recording of biological sex and, along with issues around the guidance, demonstrates that our census authorities have indeed abandoned the principle "of collecting data on biological sex".

This is a matter of considerable concern to data-users, academics who do statistical research, and women’s rights campaigners. In 2017, when the ONS briefly mooted making the sex question non-mandatory, Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at Oxford University, said that without robust sex data, “[w]e would be unable to calculate the most basic of social statistics.” Selina Todd, Professor of Modern History at Oxford, makes clear in the foreword to our report that sex data is vital to illuminating how “participation in key areas of economic and social life has differed according to sex.” Alice Sullivan, Professor of Sociology at UCL, has likewise argued that sex is “a powerful predictor of almost every dimension of social life,” including education, work, crime and physical and mental health. Lastly, sex is also a "protected characteristic" in the 2010 Equality Act, and monitoring data on sex is crucial for institutions to execute their public equalities duties….

Addressing the inequalities women face necessitates that we are able to record, describe and analyse how sex impacts women’s life chances. By prioritising the specific interests of LGBT lobbyists, and consistently refusing to heed the concerns of data users and women’s rights campaigners, our census authorities are now in danger of corrupting the data we need to tackle women’s disadvantages, all in the name of "equality".

Could those "specific interest groups" include Stonewall UK, by any chance?

We've already seen the effect of this slippage – with gender identity replacing biological sex – in the distortion of violent crime statistics. Last month the BBC reported an astonishing recent rise in female child sexual abuse, without noting that most UK police forces are now recording self-identified gender instead of sex for the abusers.

John Vachon – March 1941. "Gas station. King William County, Virginia."

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

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Bau der Jannowitz-Brücke – Einschwenken einer Stütze, 1931
[Photos © Staatsarchiv Freiburg]

No hint of what was to come. There is a small political section in the archive, showing Nazi banners and the like, but clearly Pragher was not a political animal. No "yet throughout his photos we get a sense of foreboding, a warning of the nightmare that was just around the corner". Not even any Cabaret-style decadence. Just a young photographer wandering round a large prosperous European city, with an eye for a good composition.

— Save Women's Sports (@SaveWomensSport) February 10, 2021

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Meanwhile the issue of trans men competing in men's sports has, unaccountably, yet to arise. 

've been drinking from a broken cup/Two pairs of pants and a mohair vest/I'm full of bourbon, I can't stand up/Hey little bird, fly away home/Your house is on fire, children are alone."

I featured Rain Dogs (the song) four years back, along with an admission that I'd changed my mind about Waits. Yes, that "boozehound-beatnik balladeer" persona had put me off, but he is better than that.

s a Polish hero who had saved Jews, and that the scholars had harmed her good name and that of her family.

At stake in the case was Polish national pride, according to the plaintiffs, and according to the defendants, the future independence of Holocaust research.

Judge Ewa Jonczyk ultimately ruled that Engelking and Grabowski must make a written apology to Leszczynska for “providing inaccurate information” that Malinowski robbed a Jewish woman during the war and contributed to the death of Jews hiding in a forest in Malinowo in 1943, when Poland was under German occupation. They were also ordered to apologize for “violating his honor.”

The case was been watched closely because it is expected to set an important precedent for independent Holocaust research. The ruling can be appealed, however.

Defending Engelking and Grabowski, Yad Vashem said, “Historical research must reflect the complex reality that existed in a given period, grounded in the scrupulous analysis of a body of existing documentation, as was done in this thorough book by the researchers.” Malinowski was acquitted in a communist court in 1950 of being an accomplice to the 1943 killing by Germans of 18 Jews in a forest near the village of Malinowo.

He is mentioned in a brief passage of the 1,600-page historical work, “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland,” which was co-edited by Grabowski and Engelking. They researched and wrote parts of it, along with other researchers.

Yad Vashem said that in light of the ruling, it would publish an English version of the book. “As with all research, this volume about the fate of Jews during the Holocaust is part of an ongoing discussion and as such is subject to critique in academia, but not in courts,” the museum said.

Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian history professor at the University of Ottawa, and Engelking, founder and director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, are among Poland’s most prominent Holocaust researchers. […]

Poland has never admitted to complicity on any large scale and in 2018 Warsaw passed a law prohibiting people from blaming the Polish nation for Holocaust atrocities; the law was subsequently amended to remove criminal penalties.

“The existing diverse documentation, along with many decades of historical research, shows that under the draconian Nazi German occupation of Poland and despite the widespread suffering of the Polish people under that occupation, there were Poles who were actively involved in the persecution of the Jews and in their murder,” Yad Vashem said.

“The prosecution of researchers and journalists who deal with these issues, instead of pursuing academic discussion as is the norm throughout the world, constitutes a real threat to academic and press freedom,” the statement concluded.

Is the Polish judge, then, a historical expert, with a knowledge of this particular case sufficient to challenge and rebuff the scholarship of Engelking and Grabowski?

Probably not.

in which he has believed for years.” The party was a lifeline, a mother, a god. Bukharin said, “For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why?” Bukharin explained that “an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness.” You have to give your death a meaning, and the only real meaning is to sacrifice yourself for the party in whose will you long ago drowned your own….

The role that public confessions play in demonstrating and validating the power of ideologies that refuse any criticism is worth revisiting for the obvious reason that such confessions are now part of our culture, too. Now, as then, the most baffling and disturbing aspect of these confessions is the enthusiasm with which the accused embrace their supposed guilt.

Can we really compare America now with the Soviet Union then? Well, no, obviously not….but then again….yes, perhaps we can:

If I were Donald G. McNeil Jr., I would want to tell The New York Times, and its publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, to go jump in a lake. Instead, McNeil chose to declare his love for the paper and proclaim his guilt for having “hurt” many hundreds of people. For McNeil’s professional death to have meaning, the party—or the paper—must be infallible. Death to me!

That this kind of groveling confession is not unique to the Times, but rather plays a key functional role in the politics of woke anti-racism, can be judged with the frequency with which such apologies are staged across institutional and corporate settings where wokeness holds sway.

The wretched McNeil had no intention to insult or offend, but the outraged feelings of pain so loudly proclaimed by the woke NYT staff meant he had to go. 

But, as Mikics notes, it's not as though the NYT is itself innocent. 

Astoundingly, the editors of The New York Times are now on the record saying that the mere appearance of a word in one’s mouth renders one guilty, “regardless of intent.”

OK, fine. If that utterly nonsensical standard indeed applies at The New York Times, then let’s consider the evidence of the paper’s own guilt: A quick search of the Times archives reveals a total of 135 uses of the N-word and 23 uses of a common slang variant over the past five years.

Though you might not want to type that word in the search bar, if you value your job, consider what this terrible number says about the paper’s own guilt, and what punishment would be appropriate. If the harm caused by McNeil’s repetition of the N-word before two high school students in Peru mandates his firing and public humiliation, the harm that the paper has done 158 times over, in public, before an audience of 4 million subscribers, as well as potentially every person on the planet with access to the internet, numbering perhaps 3 to 4 billion—is incalculable, even genocidal.

Shouldn’t every writer and editor at the Times—starting with Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn, and of course publisher A.G. Sulzberger—resign their jobs, right now? Resign! But first, confess—so that your departure can have meaning, and so that America’s once-greatest newspaper can continue leading us into a future free from hatred, bigotry, want, need, fear, and war, just like in the old Soviet Union.

rtant to take a gender lens to addressing health inequities. But this gendered perspective must not be unidimensional. We now call upon our colleagues, particularly influencers in high-income countries, to meaningfully engage with critical race theory, a transdisciplinary intellectual movement to understand and disrupt systemic racism. Of particular relevance to these efforts is the concept of intersectionality, a central tenet of critical race theory coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how multiple social categorisations—such as race and gender—interact and confer interlocking oppressions and privileges. This intentional centring of race in global health will help to achieve the mutually reinforcing goals of eradicating both racial and gender inequity. As a point of departure, we articulate the multiple racial contexts of the global health sector, with the aim of moving beyond a colour-blind gender lens.

We are pleased that scholars and advocates of global health and gender now acknowledge the importance of explicating the interlocking oppressions of gender inequity and racism, among other “-isms”. For decades, the concept of intersectionality has been foundational to scholarship addressing systemic racism, most prominently in the USA with respect to simultaneous oppressions due to race and gender. Nowadays, concepts such as intersectionality are also applied to other social categories, such as religion, nationality, and socioeconomic status. However, the concept of intersectionality is a relatively new addition to the global health gender lexicon. The deep wellspring of learnings it affords remains underused in mainstream initiatives on gender and global health. For example, little attention is given to ethnoracial imbalances in discussions about the dearth of women in global health leadership. Consider the ambitious Global Health 50/50 workforce analysis, which revealed that women comprise 70% of global health workers, but less than 5% of leadership positions. The finding that 84% of global health organisations are headquartered in the USA or Europe invites further questions about ethnoracial disparities within headquarters and across their international offices. Which women of which nationalities are in senior management? And where are American or European women of colour situated in the organigrams of headquarters staff?

As delineated in Ford and Airhihenbuwa's Public Health Critical Race Praxis, we must first develop a consciousness about the intersecting racial contexts of global health work. The notion of racial consciousness should ring familiar to those who use a gender lens to understand how health is influenced by gendered biases and norms. Like gender's problematic binary of male versus female, race is a complex social construct with biological implications, the classifications of which vary across history and geography. Globally, many societies—particularly racially homogeneous ones—do not regard race as the predominant societal fault line along which health disparities fall. But it bears reminding that global health research and practice take place in multiple, interlocking racial contexts.

And so on.

Philosophy Now? Critical Race Theory Monthly? The Judith Butler Digest?

The word "health", peeking occasionally out of the miasma, should provide a clue. It is, of course, the Lancet – one of the world's oldest and best-known general medical journals.

It's good to know the medical profession is keeping its finger on the pulse, so to speak, of modern thinking.