domingo, 7 de setembro de 2025

The Spectator - The next front in the gender wars

(Personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-next-front-in-the-gender-wars/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020250529%20%20AL+CID_83d953a79cdabfea3945b1ed965a8d21

The next front in the gender wars

Lara Brown

April’s Supreme Court judgment ought to have been the final nail in the coffin for transgender ideology. The belief that you can pick your gender, like you would a hat in the morning, seemed to have ended. The highest court unanimously confirmed that for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex is biological – immutable, material and not up for ideological reinterpretation.

Yet if the past decade has taught us anything, it is that the gender industry doesn’t give up; it adapts. Numerous organisations, many taxpayer-funded, now exist for the sole purpose of pushing back against any resistance to trans orthodoxy. Defeat is merely a fundraising opportunity.

The semantic contortions have already begun. India Willoughby, a biological male who has fathered a child, has tweeted: ‘UK Supreme Court rules butterflies are biological caterpillars and frogs are biological tadpoles. It means butterflies can no longer fly – and frogs are banned from sitting on leaves. Butterflies and frogs say they will ignore the ruling.’ If you can’t make any sense of this point, join the club.

Then there’s Dr Helen Webberley, founder of GenderGP, a ‘clinic’ that is registered in Singapore in an attempt to circumvent UK laws about prescribing children puberty blockers and hormones. She recently told GB News that while the Supreme Court has confirmed ‘the literal interpretation of the Equality Act is that “woman” is biological sex… they haven’t said what biological sex is’. Activists almost succeeded in redefining ‘woman’. Now they have lost that fight, on they move to the definition of ‘biological’.

Predictably, a legal counteroffensive is already under way. The tax-barrister-turned-Twitter-pugilist Jolyon Maugham KC, best known for killing a fox while wearing a kimono, is raising funds to ‘stop the UK’s attack on trans people’. The plan? To argue that the Supreme Court’s ruling violates the Human Rights Act and demand a declaration of incompatibility, because apparently the right to a private life includes the right to access single-sex spaces reserved for the opposite sex. Who knew? It’s hard to say who might win this case. On one hand we have five Supreme Court justices in unanimous agreement. On the other we have Maugham’s Good Law Project; since 2017 its crowdfunded cases have had a success rate of roughly 10 per cent.

On the night of the judgment, Maugham declared his astonishment on the progressive social media platform Bluesky: ‘I’m genuinely stunned. I spoke to KCs at three leading sets of chambers with deep specialisations in equalities law. Each of them told me that For Women Scotland’s position was not even arguable.’ One has to ask from which chambers he is getting his legal advice. Not many ‘unarguable’ cases make it to the Supreme Court.

Should the Human Rights route fail, expect campaigners to become stealthier. Next we will see a flurry of judicial reviews and lobbying efforts. Their latest target is the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, currently in the ping-pong stage between the Lords and the Commons. Tucked within it are proposals to formalise new forms of digital ID. These could allow individuals to self-declare their sex and have that self-identification carry the same legal weight as a passport for some purposes. Self-ID, in short, by the back door.

After a Lords victory last week, Stonewall told its supporters that ‘the government agreed with us that attempts to use this bill to collect or share gender identity or gender history were both disproportionate and unhelpful. We’ve been working closely with parliamentarians and stakeholders to ensure the bill was not hijacked in this way’. This sort of battle will now take place over every piece of legislation.

Victory at the doors of the Supreme Court is not pyrrhic, but it is also not the end of the story. Since 2013, when the battle to legalise gay marriage was won, many organisations switched their attention to ‘trans rights’ at the expense of unfashionable women’s rights. They are well-funded and embedded within the civil service, charity sector and corporate HR complex. We’d be fools to expect the gender ideologues to down tools now.

The Spectator - Why were the Abedis here in the first place?

(personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-were-the-abedis-here-in-the-first-place/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020250417%20%20VIRGIN%20%20AL+CID_f8cdc9be4f7fa646f0a4f99393d4b27a

Why were the Abedis here in the first place?

Douglas MurrayThursday 17 July 2025, 7:00pm

In recent days parliament has been recalled on a Saturday to debate the renationalisation of the British steel industry. Then, after a month-long strike by binmen in Birmingham, army planners have been called in to help address the issue of large amounts of refuse piling up in the city.

Absent a major ideological split on the right, it is hard to see how much more reminiscent of the 1970s Britain could become. I don’t however want to join the legions of people who are carping. Rather, I should like to suggest an answer to some of these things.

The news at the weekend that Hashem Abedi, the brother of the Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi, had allegedly assaulted and stabbed prison officers at HMP Falkland also presents an example of a problem that needs to be addressed rather than simply wailed about. It is alleged that Abedi had thrown hot cooking oil over the officers and then stabbed them with ‘homemade weapons’. This poses many questions. One is how a jihadist in prison could get access to boiling cooking oil; the other is why in a British prison someone can feel so at home that they are able to make knives out of cooking trays.

This is one of those occasions when all political sides assume their natural positions. Many people wondered what had gone wrong with security arrangements in British prisons. Others pondered why Abedi was in a prison with so many other jihadists.
A few wondered why this country had to pay to house the brother of the Manchester Arena bomber at all. The union representing prison officers said that inmates should be prevented from cooking in jail. The Lord Chancellor said he was ‘appalled’ by the attack. Robert Jenrick MP said it should be ‘a turning point’.

I would prefer to expand these points by asking why the Abedi family were in the UK in the first place and why we still don’t know – eight years after the Manchester Arena attack – who allowed them to enter and stay in this country. If we could even ask, let alone answer, these questions, it is possible we could reach not just a turning point but a learning point. Just one of the problems with only asking secondary questions is that it prevents us from asking the primary ones.

Hashem Abedi was in prison because he helped his brother in the preparation of the 2017 Ariana Grande concert suicide bombing in which 22 people – mainly young girls – were killed. An elder brother, Ismail, refused to co-operate with the inquiry into the attack and for a time fled the jurisdiction of our courts. He claimed legal privilege against ‘self-incrimination’ and that if he co-operated with inquiries he might put his family at risk. The inquiry found that the Abedi family had ‘significant responsibility’ for the radicalisation of both Hashem and Salman Abedi. The mother, father and Ismail were all described as having held extremist views.

Those extremist views appear to have been the reason why the Abedi family came to Britain from Libya in the first place. It appears that in the 1990s the family fell out with Colonel Gaddafi. I think we can all agree that Gaddafi would have been an easy man to fall out with, but the Abedis did not do so because they were secular, pro-western democrats seeking to bring a Jefferson-ian democracy to Tripoli and Benghazi.

Rather, it turns out that Abedi senior was a member of a jihadist faction that came into conflict with the Colonel. So naturally they relocated to the UK, first to London and then to Manchester, where Salman and Hashem were born.

Their son Salman detonated his suicide bomb at the Manchester Arena aged just 22. In other words, he killed one innocent person for every year of life this country gave him. The Abedi family did not seem especially perturbed by the young man they had created, and since there was silence, complicity or intransigence from them all, this country did what it would obviously do. We had an inquiry into the bombing and we had endless press reports questioning why MI5 had failed to prevent it. Yet what still remains unanswered is why the Abedi family were here in the first place.

Why should Britain be a sanctuary for Islamists who have fallen out with other Islamists in various Islamic countries? Is it the best use of our asylum or immigration laws to allow such people to settle here? And if not – as we can probably agree it is not – why do we still not know who it was who allowed them to come here in the first place and to settle here?

Why have there been no investigations, reports or firings among the Home Office officials – and presumably ministers – who oversaw this insane and literally self-destructive process? Are there any ‘lessons learned’ among the civil servants or the civil-society organisations that lobby our government to allow every Mohammed al-Jihadi to settle here?

I ask these questions because, as I have said for the eight years since the Manchester atrocity, I would like to know the answers. More importantly, I think the victims’ families and the people severely wounded in that attack – as well as the wider country – need to know the answers to these questions.

This is what I mean about national inertia and how to combat it. It is all very well to ask how a jihadist got hold of boiling oil or was able to make knives in prison or why MI5 failed to stop his brother from committing the atrocity. If you import the world’s problem cases, you will also import the world’s problems. And it seems to me that the girls of Manchester should have been prioritised over the families of jihadists.

Finding out who is responsible for insane policies such as these and holding them accountable is the sort of thing this country might start doing if we ever want to turn anything around.