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85,000 for failing to uphold freedom of speech.

“I’d love to know what those protesting against me think now,” she says in her first interview since the ruling. “I wouldn’t shame them — I’d have a public conversation with them. Well, not the dicks who threatened me, but the girls with their banners — where are they now?”

Well yes. There haven't, as far as I'm aware, been any public renouncements by any Sussex Uni demonstrators now looking back with remorse at their youthful follies. But it's a lot easier to forgive the students than to forgive those hundred or so philosophy academics who signed a letter of protest accusing her of using her status to “further gender oppression”. How do they feel now? No wonder Stock's happy to be out of academia.

Stock now calls herself a “recovering academic” and makes her living from writing. What made her so sure in her opposition to gender self-ID? In part she says it was being a lesbian, which meant she knew biological sex mattered to sexual orientation, and that she felt immune to the “bewitching” power of gender nonconformity. But her background in philosophy played a role too. “I didn’t believe in the power of words utterly to change reality,” she says.

Universities were once bastions of free speech — how did they become places of censorship and moral cowardice? “Some disciplines in the humanities and social sciences became extremely ideological in the 1970s,” Stock replies. “When I was trying to raise the alarm about this to philosophers, I was stuck between the ideologues attacking me, and a bunch of others who thought, ‘Why are you wasting your time with this when it’s clearly stupid?’ But I could see it would have massive implications if we didn’t stop it.”

Stock emphasises this is not unique to Sussex: “I think there’s contempt in universities for ordinary people’s attitudes … on race, immigration or feminism.”

But she also sees signs this is improving on campuses, with academics setting up groups to promote free speech. The other side of the gender debate has “gone to ground”, she adds, a shift she attributes in part to the work of grassroots campaigners — Fair Play for Women, Sex Matters and Transgender Trend. 

Let's hope she's right. But Sussex University vice chancellor Sasha Roseneil is going all out to fight the OfS fine, so the message hasn't reached her yet. And no doubt she'll be receiving a lot of support from more of those brave academics.

=”font-size: 11pt”>Stonewall has forgotten its founding purpose: to campaign for gay rights. The LGB Alliance was set up in 2019 to fill the gap left by Stonewall after it drank the gender kool aid. It’s time to let a new organisation take over. Stonewall must be consigned to history.

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In short, Putin concluded, get over it. Big countries have territorial ambitions. Deals for land and annexations are not just historical relics – they are a modern reality. And, rejecting generations of international norms not to take territory by force or through extortion, it is none of our business what they do over there.

“As for Greenland, this is an issue that concerns two specific states and has nothing to do with us,” Putin said, while adding that Russia would continue to defend its interests in the Arctic from “dangerous” powers such as Finland and Sweden.

Ha. "Dangerous" only in that they don't accept the Putin-Trump world view.

It does not take a Kremlinologist to understand why Putin has come out in support of Trump’s annexation plan. As US power recedes in Europe, the Kremlin is seizing its chance to establish its long-awaited “multipolar world” in which it holds dominion over a sphere of influence, particularly in Ukraine and Belarus. Putin has railed against US hegemony since his Munich speech of 2007, and he finally has a US president who is just as derisive of the postwar order as he is.

Putin’s mantra that countries should mind their own business dovetails closely with Trump’s transactional view of the world, as well as his deep suspicion of transnational organisations and alliances set up after the second world war….

But as US power recedes abroad, the White House has declared ambitions throughout the western hemisphere in a turn that some commentators have compared to the Monroe doctrine of 1823, under which the US proclaimed itself the protector of the hemisphere. And with each soundbite declaring that the US should take back the Panama canal or that Canada should become the 51st state, Trump will find an enthusiastic ally in the Kremlin who will see his jaded vision of a new world order reflected in another.

in for the far worse crime of misgendering and is taking her case to an employment tribunal.

Yet a lawyer tells me that while previously senior managers preferred to lose a tribunal case than have a showdown with their vengeful LGBT staff network, times and the economy have changed. Gender ideology is creating big red numbers that show up on the bottom line.

It's surely the biggest con in modern history: mistaking a fetish for a civil rights movement. It's perverted not only institutions, but corrupted science itself. It's the new Lysenkoism.

Kim Jong Un posing for a commemorative photo with participants:

An unfortunate side-effect of being a semi-divine leader who can do no wrong is that no one will tell you about lapses in your personal hygiene. The women here, though they do their best to conceal their discomfort, are clearly affected by the inescapable odour.

Genevieve Gluck on the tale of Nonnie Marcella Lotusflower:

Reduxx has learned that a trans-identified male currently incarcerated at a women’s prison in Washington state has been charged with intimidating a public servant and malicious mischief in the first degree after he threatened and assaulted a female correctional officer. Nonnie Marcella Lotusflower, born Nathan Goninan, has a history of violence against women and is currently serving a 10-year sentence at the Washington Correctional Center for Women (WCCW) for the murder of a teen girl.

Because where else would you place a violent and unhinged misogynist who murdered a teenage girl? 

Lotusflower previously. Supported by the ACLU, of course.

Helen Joyce on the turn-around in coverage of trans issues. 

Decades ago, when the first men who said they were women were admitted to women’s spaces, any commissioning editor who was told about it dismissed it as a sideshow. By the time vast numbers of people started identifying as trans, it was rejected because it had been happening for ages and was everywhere.

Also working against news coverage was a determined disinformation campaign. Youngsters were being taught at school and university that it’s impossible to define male and female objectively or to know which individuals are which. Older people were being convinced by lobby groups which wilfully misrepresent the law that if a man said he was a woman it was compulsory to play along.

Few people actively opposed the propaganda because those subjected to it mostly believed it and those spared it mostly didn’t know about it, and if they did, found it implausible that anyone could believe anything so dumb. Now that trans is everywhere, that mutual ignorance has ended. The two groups are increasingly clashing in workplaces, schools and everywhere else. And even if the new belief system doesn’t set editors’ news senses tingling, the clashes do….

More broadly, the narrative about trans issues is changing. Geoffrey Crowther, editor of the Economist from 1938 to 1956, used to tell young journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. That may sound like unnecessary advice in the era of churnalism and social media, but it expresses a timeless journalistic truth: a story can only ever be about one thing.

And for many years, every trans story stuck to a singular narrative: the struggle of the uniquely oppressed and suffering person born in the wrong body, with everyone else relegated to supporting roles if they were lucky and bigoted villains if they weren’t. Now the narrative is in flux: you can still easily find stories about celebrities’ brave trans kids but there’s room to point out that other people’s rights and interests matter too.

Once enough people got their heads around the story, it flipped like an optical illusion. The same facts and events that were once dismissed as too crazy to be happening became the sort of crazy that makes great copy.

Stop the machines at Manchester and Glasgow. Clear the line to Belfast and Paris. Pretending men can be women has been destroying institutions and women’s lives for years now. And finally, it’s news.

It's got very little to do with people's attitude in general. The majority always understood the insanity of this belief that men can become women just by saying so. It's just that now, at last, the media have started to do a little more honest reporting.

icular the Algerian defeat of the French, was a stroke of genius which won unquestioning solidarity from the Left. The delusion persists today.

The reality, of course, is that most Jews are not white. Israel is not a colonial power. The Palestinians have been offered a state on several occasions – including the 2008 Olmert proposal, which satisfied 100 per cent of their supposed demands – but turned down every one in favour of bloodshed.

Hamas is no different from Islamic State. “Resistance” is simply code for the wanton rape, butchery and mutilation of families in their beds, motivated by fanatical religion (Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, for God’s sake). But when you’re wearing your anti-Israel goggles, such subtle distinctions as these become cloudy. Pretty soon, you end up thinking Yahya Sinwar is Che Guevara.

Shamefully, this dogma continues to dominate on the Left today. You just can’t shake them out of it. So we see activists in London, in their keffiyehs and crop-tops, tearing down hostage posters just as the weary people of Gaza take to the streets in defiance of their jihadi oppressors.

rified”—a caveat reserved almost exclusively for Israeli statements. Trust the terrorists and doubt the Middle East’s only democracy; that's the not-too-subtle subtext….

Which brings us to the biggest untruth of all: the delusion that diplomacy could actually resolve this conflict. Britain’s ambassador to Israel, Simon Walters, expressed this fiction best (or worst). “I have worked in and around conflicts for thirty years, and grew up in Northern Ireland during the height of the terrorist campaigns. One of the main lessons I take from that experience is that at some point the fighting has to stop and diplomacy begin. That point is now,” Walters posted on social media. The facile comparisons between the IRA and Hamas distort the realities of both conflicts.

Even evil exists on a spectrum. As Andrew Roberts argues, the IRA, for all its bloodshed, never committed the barbarism Hamas unleashed on October 7 or sought the destruction of Britain. It demanded territorial change, which made a political solution possible.

Hamas, by contrast, is explicit in its genocidal intentions. So what's the diplomatic solution–meet them halfway?

It's the same old story: the delusion that inspires such mind-bogglingly stupid comments about diplomacy is based on the cherished belief that this is another war about territory which can be resolved through getting round a table and talking. But Hamas aren't interested in diplomacy: they're an Islamist group bent on the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews – because for them this is all about Islam. They say it often enough. It's no great secret. But for the media and the political class, this goes against the story they're telling themselves and telling us. So they ignore it, and keep to the same old  blame-Israel line.

There isn’t a more misogynistic idea than Islam.
it crushes women, buries them in cloth. pic.twitter.com/ELOKa9DdPu

— Afghan Zoroastrian (@AfgZoroastrian) March 27, 2025

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