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t”>Fiona McAnena, of the charity Sex Matters, described the leaflet as “shocking propaganda” and a “shameful new low”.

She said: “The fact that Lush is presenting the story of a suicide to seven-year-old girls and telling them that puberty blockers have ‘no major side-effects’ is, frankly, a serious safeguarding matter. Parents need to know what they are exposing their children to if they let them attend events at Lush.

“The evidence runs completely counter to the alarmist and desperate claims of trans activists.”

Helen Joyce at The Critic on the Sussex University fine of £585,000 by the Office for Students, for failing to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom in the case of Kathleen Stock. It's an important first step in the battle for free speech in universities, and, perhaps, the end of student infantilisation.

University senior managers now aim to convert their institutions into “safe spaces”, rather than bracing environments where even difficult ideas can be discussed fearlessly.

When I was preparing to speak at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge in 2022, LGBT student reps claimed allowing the event to go ahead was “potentially putting transgender students in harms’ way”. Rather than reminding them that Cambridge isn’t a creche and they aren’t toddlers, the college master agreed that my presence would interfere with making Caius an “inclusive, diverse and welcoming home”.

Those trying to drive Stock out of Sussex were mostly students, and senior management should have treated their protests as a teachable moment. Instead, the response tacitly framed totalitarian slogans and emotional incontinence as on a par with serious academic endeavour.

The pandering and promises of emotional safety are in part an adaptation to undergraduates whose childhood was spent in a school system that encouraged them to obsess about their special identities and to think of themselves as mentally and emotionally fragile.

More than half of university and college students in the UK now claim to suffer from a mental health issue, often something nebulous such as ADHD, OCD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety or depression. A quarter say they have been formally diagnosed. A fifth are registered with their institution as disabled — twice the share a decade ago.

Such registration generally unlocks an “individual support plan” that grants accommodations such as extra time in exams, extended coursework deadlines and exemptions from presenting their work to their peers or being called on in class. But once more than a handful of students have been given them, it’s impractical not to grant them to everyone.

How to remember which students cannot be called on? Why set essays when a quarter of the class must be given extra time? And how can the university manage closed-book exams if more than a handful of candidates are entitled to extra time or separate rooms with fewer distractions? Accommodating this fragile minority ends up denying all students the chance to learn from coping with everyday minor challenges and increases fragility in everyone.

And now graduates are turning up in workplaces lacking resilience and expecting their colleagues to be riveted by their special identities. To humour them, employers sponsor “affinity groups” for people with minority sexualities, gender identities and ethnicities and for mental health conditions snazzily relabelled as neurodiversity.

In recent years they have scattered the calendar with quasi-religious observances such as Trans Day of Remembrance, International Asexuality Day and LGBT History month. They take knees, display the Progress Pride flag and denounce Trump.

Thankfully, a backlash is building….

I hope she's right.

Azaleas at Kenwood this morning:

It's a dynamic cultural and economic powerhouse, right next to the most benighted and repressed nation in the world: of course the South Korean influence will get to the North one way or another. TV and films are banned, with the threat of years in a labour camp, or even execution. Now it's….cosmetics:

North Korean women are now sacrificing basic necessities to acquire South Korean cosmetics, once accessible only to the wealthy elite….

Among middle-aged North Korean women with stable finances, owning South Korean cosmetics has become both an aspirational goal and a status symbol. Despite their high cost—a basic skin and lotion set sells for 70,000-100,000 North Korean won (equivalent to 10 kilograms of rice)—women are willingly reducing household expenses to afford these products.

The cultural shift is notable. Previously, women feared displaying South Korean cosmetics due to potential government crackdowns. Now, proud owners place their dressing tables in private rooms where they can discreetly showcase their prized possessions to trusted friends.

“Women are cutting back on essentials like firewood and food to save for these products,” the source explained. “There’s a new conversation about self-care, where women who previously focused solely on family needs now express desires to care for themselves.”

While wealthy North Koreans have always used South Korean cosmetics, their use has expanded to women with modest but stable incomes. The luxury brand Sulwhasoo has become particularly coveted, with ownership of at least one product becoming “a standard for living as a proper woman.”

This trend suggests South Korean cosmetics have transcended their role as wealth indicators to become important tools for personal empowerment and self-esteem among North Korean women.

It used to be the South Korean Choco Pies that the North Koreans loved. Given out to workers at the long-defunct Kaesong industrial complex, and later sent over in balloons, they were much preferred to the cheap and nasty North Korean versions – to the extent that the alarmed Pyongyang authorities claimed the pies were contaminated and must at all costs be avoided. I imagine we'll soon be hearing propaganda about the contamination of these South Korean cosmetics, threatening the purity of North Korean women. It's always about contamination of the North Korean people/system by nasty foreign influences.

holds 37 state records in Arizona and North Carolina, and taken 22 national championship titles, with 15 of those being in individual events.

In Crossfit competitions, which he competed in from 2012 to 2021, Caldas was ranked as the number one woman in his age category in his home country of Portugal from 2018 until his retirement from the sport. He has ranked highly in a number of competitions, including taking women’s prize money and first place in Croatia, Argentina and Cyprus from 2014 to 2016. This is all despite the fact that Crossfit did not allow trans-identified men to officially compete in the sport until 2019. Although the sport has recently undone this policy, there is no screening required.

During the global COVID-19 lockdowns, Caldas became the 2021 world champion in the open category of the indoor rowing world championships, and still currently co-holds the world record in the women’s 500 meter category.

What a guy. Just shows how determination and hard work can make you a winner – plus a total lack of moral scruples, a contempt for women, and a complacent and useless sporting infrastructure.

verse people”.

I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Nor, I imagine, do these doctors. A binary divide between sex and gender? Is that like the binary divide between vegetables and cooking?

The branch of the British Medical Association (BMA) — representing about 50,000 younger doctors — said it “condemns scientifically illiterate rulings from the Supreme Court, made without consulting relevant experts and stakeholders, that will cause real-world harm to the trans, non-binary and intersex communities in this country”.

It is, embarrassingly, the BMA who are scientifically illiterate here. Doctors, ffs! Though they have history:

It follows the union’s decision last summer to lobby against the Cass Review and to call for an end to the ban on puberty blockers for children identifying as transgender.

Sex Matters, the campaign group, accused the doctors of being an “embarrassment to their profession” and said it is “terrifying” that people who have undergone years of medical training can claim there is “no basis” for biological sex.

The motion, seen by The Times, was passed on Saturday at an annual conference of the BMA’s resident doctors, and represents the stance of the BMA’s junior wing — with the wider BMA union not adopting the policy until it has been voted on at an annual meeting in June….

Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at Sex Matters, said: “It’s terrifying that a group of young doctors, all of whom have been through several years of advanced education and training in biology, have been indoctrinated by trans activism to such an extent that they claim categorisation by sex — male and female — is ‘reductive’ and has ‘no basis in science or medicine’.

“These junior doctors are an embarrassment to their profession. What next: young geographers claiming that the Earth is flat, or junior vets who think it’s bigoted to suggest that cats can’t identify as dogs?"

If nothing else it shows the power of the gender cult. And the way that unions get taken over by the ideologically driven. 

They published new guidance on April 1 that continued to allow transgender women – biological males – to play in the women’s game, just over two weeks before the Supreme Court ruling. Whoops.

The Football Association is in “crisis meetings” over its trans policy which campaigners claim may be proved unlawful less than a month after it was issued….

Campaigners claim that the FA remains at risk of discrimination claims after the judges’ ruling. Su Wong, spokeswoman for SEENinSport, said: “The FA is one of several governing bodies forced into crisis meetings by the Supreme Court judgment.

“There are several reasons why its policy is particularly egregious. They ignored the guidance and clear legal advice given by the Sports Councils’ Equality Group in 2021 that it is not possible to eliminate male advantage, including through testosterone reduction.

“To spend a decade updating their policy, and publishing it weeks before a landmark Supreme Court ruling, shows an extraordinary lack of judgment, particularly in the face of mounting public concern.”

Lord Triesman, the former chairman of the FA, called for the heads of sports governing bodies to resign following the Supreme Court’s decision.

“The pitiful excuses of some sports bodies, and especially the FA, have been shown to be unlawful,” he said in a statement earlier this month. “Women’s sport as in all else is defined by biology facts. There is no room for alternative propositions … What a perverse way of thinking to have promoted something so blatantly unfair that they stripped away the very concept of ‘sport’.”

The FA is not alone in its blinkerism.

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) also gave an update on Friday, saying that its rules allowing transwomen and girls to play in female competitions remained in place.

It said it was taking legal advice on “any impact” the Supreme Court ruling “may have” and would “also await updated guidance from Sport England”.

“Our existing regulations for transgender participation in recreational cricket remain in place,” it said. “These aim to ensure that cricket remains an inclusive sport, while including measures to manage disparities — irrespective of someone’s gender — and ensure the safety of all players.”

They seem to believe that by chanting "inclusive sport" and putting their hands over their ears the Supreme Court ruling will just disappear. Time to smell the coffee, read the room, get with the message, wise up, and…just for god's sake once and for all drop the Stonewall gender woo.

;thought crime, one which is strongly reminiscent of the way the Soviet Union dealt with the "enemies of the people". And our media and politicians are giving it their blessing. Did not the French president himself, never one to miss a blunder – not compare Islamophobia with Antisemitism? A tragic error. Racism attacks people for what they are: black, Arab, Jewish, white. The critical mind on the other hand undermines revealed truths and subjects the scriptures to exegesis and transformation. To confuse the two is to shift religious questions from an intellectual to a judicial level. Every objection, every joke becomes a crime.

And my take:

A fundamental principle of Western thought is the separation between a person and their beliefs. This is not a fundamental principle of Islamic thought. Quite the contrary: born a Muslim, you die a Muslim. The notion that you might change your mind is so alien that the punishment for apostasy – in theory, if not necessarily in practice – is death.

The charge of Islamophobia deliberately obscures that separation between a person and their beliefs. It accepts the Islamic vision of an immutable union of person and religion. We should refuse to accept those terms. A person's ethnic origins may be Pakistani, Arab, Kurd, European, whatever, and to criticise or abuse them for that is racist and unacceptable. Their beliefs, whether in Islam, Scientology, UFOs, or any other ideology, creed or cult, is an entirely different matter, and should be open to criticism, debate, scepticism, up to and including ridicule. That's the way we do it, and that's what we should be defending. Worship who or what you want, wear what you want, think what you want, but don't expect to be spared from being offended by the opinions and beliefs of others. The charge of Islamophobia is, precisely, an attempt to make criticism of Islam illegitimate – and that attempt should be resisted. We should be free to criticise Islam just as we criticise Christianity, socialism, capitalism, or any other system of beliefs.

How's North Korea's bold reforestation plan going?

Not so well, sadly:

According to a Daily NK source in Ryanggang province recently, the provincial branch of the Ministry of Land and Environment Protection marked Arbor Day on March 14 by launching spring reforestation activities, ordering local authorities to plant saplings in designated zones.

However, these efforts are largely superficial.

“Most reforestation takes place along roadsides or visible mountain slopes, and the work stops once the assigned saplings are planted,” the source explained. “People typically just dig a shallow hole, drop in the sapling, and cover it with dirt.”

The minimal effort extends to aftercare, resulting in extremely low survival rates for the trees.

“While planting the required number of saplings is reported as success, less than 10% actually survive,” the source noted. “Most are left unattended and die, while others are pulled up for firewood.”

The situation is further complicated by the fact that many reforestation zones overlap with small, privately farmed plots, creating resentment toward the government’s tree-planting campaign. Residents frequently remove newly planted trees to grow crops instead.

“It starts with people quietly removing a few trees, but eventually entire reforested areas are cleared,” the source explained. “Many saplings die anyway due to poor planting and lack of maintenance, but people worried about their own survival uproot the rest to plant corn and other crops.”

Despite deploying forest management and protection officers, authorities struggle to prevent people from clearing trees for farmland.

“No matter how much the officers try to enforce the rules, they can’t stop desperate locals determined to grow food,” the source said. “The officers themselves are struggling to feed their families, so they’ve largely given up on protecting the saplings.”

Ah well. It's the thought that counts.

This.

Access to toilets is undeniably important.

But it is perhaps the least important aspect of the Supreme Court ruling.

So I wish people would talk more about the other aspects.

Prisons, hospital wards, sports, rape refuges etc. are all more important in my view.
And the…

— Bev Jackson (@BevJacksonAuth) April 28, 2025

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

"Prisons, hospital wards, sports, rape refuges etc. are all more important in my view. And the existence of sexual orientation. Which is based on biological sex.

"We intervened to secure legal recognition of the rights of lesbians – and of the existence of sexual orientation. Which would have become “meaningless” – in the Supreme Court’s words – if the ruling had gone the other way.

"Please don’t let interviewers focus exclusively on toilets. Of course there is not going to be a “toilet police”.

"Decent people respect the rule of law. Decent men respect women’s boundaries."