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Royal Wedding street party, Hampshire
Whitstable Oyster Festival, Kent
Royal Gunpowder Mills VE Weekend, Essex
Arsenal fans at Wembley
[Photos © Orlando Gili]
A touch nostalgic in the present socially distancing circumstances – but we'll get back there.
atch. Despite this, Mermaids marches on…
In 2018, I was invited to contribute a chapter to Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body, edited by Heather Brunskell-Evans and Michelle Moore. I interviewed five out-and-proud lesbians, all of whom felt they would have identified as transgender had the option been presented to them as children. Without exception, they felt this would have been a dreadful mistake. Had their ‘trans’ identities been affirmed, each today would be infertile and facing an uncertain future of potential health problems caused by synthetic hormones and invasive surgery.
Despite a paucity of clinical evidence, the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative has spread from lobby groups through to the general public and even clinical practice. When the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) opened at London’s Tavistock Clinic in 1989, it received two referrals over the course of the year. In 2018-19 it received 2,590 referrals. The role of trans groups, including Mermaids, in the promotion of transition as a cure-all solution for troubled young people, is alleged to have prompted a spate of resignations at GIDS, with 35 staff members leaving between 2016 and 2019. One former clinician told The Times: ‘This experimental treatment is being done not only on children, but very vulnerable children, who have experienced mental-health difficulties, abuse, family trauma, but sometimes those [other factors] just get whitewashed.’ Fear of being accused of ‘transphobia’ and the pressure to affirm the ‘gender identity’ of young patients are reported to have put clinicians in an impossible position. Allegedly, GIDS staff frequently remark that there will soon be no gay or lesbian kids left.
But this is not reflected in the mainstream media coverage of the issue. Mawkish dramas and documentaries about children who identify as transgender, from BBC Radio 4’s Just A Girl to ITV’s Butterfly, have become a staple of contemporary broadcasting, cementing the ‘wrong body’ concept in the public imagination. And on many of these shows, Mermaids has acted as an adviser, giving it unprecedented airtime to make its emotionally charged claims.
There's not a little irony in the fact that Stonewall, the ground-breaking gay rights group, has become one of the leading mouthpieces for trans activism – whose roots, as we see here, would seem to lie in efforts by their elders and betters to stop children growing up gay by insisting that what they really need is some serious medical intervention.
a proponent of natalism (he oversaw the end of China’s one-child policy in 2015, for demographic rather than bodily autonomy reasons), not all population growth is wanted population growth.
The babies required are those of the dominant Han group. Chinese of other ethnicities must either assimilate, or be eliminated. State-mandated abortion, IUD insertion and sterilisation of Uighurs has caused the birth rate in Xinjiang (where Uighurs make up 45% of the population) to fall by 24% in the last year; for comparison, the nationwide decline in birth rate is only 4.2%. The attack on reproduction is the most extreme aspect of a programme designed to destroy the Uighur as a people, through prohibition of their language and culture, and “re-education” in brutal camps.
The Uighurs are a problem to the Chinese state because of the way the Chinese ideal of statehood is constituted. David Tobin, Hallsworth Research Fellow in the Political Economy of China at the University of Manchester, explains that since 2012, “policy became about engineering identity”. China’s leadership holds the position that “the disappearance of cultures and language is natural and should be celebrated” — it’s simply a matter of evolution. […]
If you study anthropology in Xinjiang, at the top of your reading list you’ll find an American name: 19th-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan researched and recorded the lives of Native Americans, especially the Iroquois. He was also an avid assimilatist, establishing a narrative of civilisation’s progress which has influenced the treatment of the Uighurs: the First Nations would have to give up their nations, and submit to being “civilized, Christianized, and humanized”.
Lewis helped to formulate early plans for the Indian Reservation system. These turned out to be sites not only of deprivation, but of control: Native American rituals were proscribed, and effectively remained so until the 1990s. And the logic of assimilation developed after Lewis’s death, perhaps inevitably, to include reproductive coercion. The Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, passed in 1970, subsidised sterilisations: as many as 25% of Native American women of childbearing age underwent the procedure over the next six years. Rote sterilisations were nicknamed “Mississippi appendectomies”.
The surgical banality of this violence shouldn’t obscure the fact that it is violence. For the individual, it’s a vicious sundering of her from her future, as well as a physical attack on her insides. That’s another reason to read the DD judgement: it is unflinching in its account of what must be done when an unwilling woman is sterilised. DD would be surprised at her home. She would be restrained. She would be anaesthetised, and she would wake up infertile and in pain.
Compulsory sterilisation is one of the gravest things that can be imposed on a person. When imposed on her because of her ethnicity, it is a genocide — the female body as ground zero in the pursuit of better breeding. It is being done, methodically and barely concealed, now, to the Uighurs.
Chuck Berry, from the 1959 film Go, Johnny, Go!
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyp13Q6dQjY&w=550&h=309]
It sums up Chuck's approach, this – those four teens at the table, clapping along and digging the sounds*. Yes he was a great showman, and wrote great songs, but what really did it for him is that his lyrics aimed straight at the white teen experience: "She's too cute to be a minute over seventeen" – "Riding along in my automobile, my baby beside me at the wheel". All traces of the original black world where the music developed, of hard times and juke joints and cheating women, were stripped away, and instead we got the world of bubble gum and going steady and drive-ins and teenage romance.
Well, fair enough. It worked. He was a pioneer – and had his own experiences of being ripped off. The Beach Boys' Surfin' USA, originally credited just to Brian Wilson, was a straight steal from Sweet Little Sixteen.
[* the guy at the table with the three girls is Ritchie Valens, who was killed in the Buddy Holly plane crash in February 1959, before the film was released.]
It's shameless.
Federal authorities in New York on Wednesday seized a shipment of weaves and other beauty accessories suspected to be made out of human hair taken from people locked inside a Chinese internment camp.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials told The Associated Press that 13 tons (11.8 metric tonnes) of hair products worth an estimated $800,000 were in the shipment.
“The production of these goods constitutes a very serious human rights violation, and the detention order is intended to send a clear and direct message to all entities seeking to do business with the United States that illicit and inhumane practices will not be tolerated in U.S. supply chains,” said Brenda Smith, executive assistant commissioner of CBP’s Office of Trade.
Jewish women were shorn on arrival at the Nazi death camps, with the hair used for army blankets and socks for U-boat crews. The parallel is unmissable.
The ethnic minorities are held in internment camps and prisons where they are subjected to ideological discipline, forced to denounce their religion and language and physically abused. China has long suspected the Uighurs, who are mostly Muslim, of harboring separatist tendencies because of their distinct culture, language and religion.
Reports by the AP and other news organizations have repeatedly found that people inside the internment camps and prisons, which activists call “black factories,” are making sportswear and other apparel for popular U.S. brands.
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Yesterday's collection here.
," he added.
The Metropolitan Police said inquiries were ongoing and no arrests had yet been made after they were called to a report of criminal damage at 17:10 BST on Tuesday.
Selassie lived in Wimbledon in 1936 during his exile following the Italian invasion of his country. The statue was sculpted by Hilda Seligman, while he stayed with her family, and later erected in Cannizaro Park.
I never knew that Haile Selassie – "King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the tribe of Judah, Jah Rastafari" – lived in Wimbledon. It wasn't something that featured in those Rasta reggae chants back in the day, alongside the call-outs to Marcus Garvey, the Black Star Liners, Babylonian captivity and all the rest. No pilgrimages to sunny South London suburbia, mingling with the tennis crowds, to pay homage. Nor will we see much of a reaction now, I imagine. Old Rastas – the few that survive – don't deal with that kind of shit.
put itself out over the trans issue, or come out strongly in support of Rowling's apparently controversial "sex is real" stance. And one hard left sacking was enough for a while. Starmer can't push his luck against a hard left that's still a substantial force in the party.
But, as the man says, you can't make a deal with them. Some sort of reckoning has to come…
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Washington DC, ca. 1936:
[Photo: Shorpy/Harris & Ewing Collection]