Transgender

This week it became clear that almost none of the adults whose job it is to teach students the truth are much inclined to do it. Even the doziest vice-chancellor must by now have twigged that gender ideology is dangerous bunk and that it lures in the most vulnerable – yet still they can’t bring themselves to speak out. This goes not just for academics, but for politicians in the education business too. For anyone minded to understand how poisonous the atmosphere in universities is, the story of poor Professor David Gordon is horribly instructive. His ordeal began more than a year ago when he invited another professor, Alice Sullivan,

We will remember 2025 as the year that a madness which had gripped us for a decade finally succumbed to that most irritating of things, reality – and the edifice it had built began to crumble like a 1970s brutalist building constructed from high alumina cement. It is not quite the case that woke is over, as Piers Morgan believes, simply that its appurtenances have become despised and those who shout most loudly in favour of its idiotic shibboleths are confined to a smaller and smaller tranche of far-left delusionals. The decision of the Supreme Court in April that the word ‘sex’ as used in the Equality Act should refer

It is more than nine years since I was suspended by the Labour party for – I think – a comment I made about Palestine. I had written: ‘If you handed over Israel to the Palestinians they would turn it into Somalia before you could say Yom Kippur.’ I remember having worried about the sentence a little – not because of its meaning, but because I wasn’t sure that ‘Yom Kippur’ was quite right in that context. I thought, and still do, that ‘Allahu akbar!’ might be better, but there we are. Anyway it was either that or a following sentence where I wrote: ‘For many Muslims the anti-Semitism is

For years, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has wrapped itself in a guise of medical expertise, advising doctors, schools and corporations in America about how best to treat the hundreds of thousands of people who have mysteriously become confused about which sex they are (personally, I’d recommend a quick dart to the loo to pull down their pants). In truth, WPATH is an advocacy organisation whose storm troopers comprise manic men in dresses who hate women but also think they are women. Get your head round that. Last year, a trove of intra-organisational emails exposed the recklessness of its indiscriminate promotion of ‘gender-affirming care’ (neither affirmative nor

True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – famously providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. But that was a long time ago. Since, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then, that when the culprit in a high-profile attack on young children is a woman, that anomaly would merit journalistic remark. After all, following these baffling bursts of nihilistic animosity, there’s little enough to say. Yet after ‘Robin’ Westman opened fire on kids at mass in a Catholic school in Minneapolis last week, segments of the

Every week brings a new revelation about the Zizians: the craziest, saddest cult in recent American history. Eight deaths have been linked to them so far, including 80-year-old Curtis Lind, stabbed with a samurai sword, US border patrol agent David Maland, shot by the roadside in Vermont, and the elderly parents of another member, shot dead at home in Pennsylvania. What’s gripping the American press is that the young Zizians seem to have been such nice kids once. The leader of the cult, Jack Amadeus LaSota, has a degree in computer science from Alaska University and a father who still teaches there. Another Zizian, Daniel Blank, was a straight-A student,

An interesting event occurred in London at the weekend. A young man who goes by the name of Montgomery Toms attended a Pride parade. But he did not attend in order to dress in bondage gear while shouting ‘Love is love’ and ‘Free Palestine’. Instead he went with a sandwich board which had a trans flag on it, followed by an equals sign and then the words ‘mental illness’. This is a tactic pioneered by an American man known as ‘Billboard Chris’, because his name is Chris and he wears a billboard. Chris’s schtick is to walk around with a sign saying things like ‘Children cannot consent to puberty blockers’.

Indisputably a nutjob, Chase Strangio is the soul of nominative determinism. The lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union is a ‘trans man’ – meaning a woman, of course; one of the trans movement’s lesser impositions is forcing consumers of pliant media to keep translating wishful thinking into real life, much as the unhip once had to keep remembering that ‘super-bad’ means ‘super-good’. Strangio is a rare example of sexual disguise that is reasonably persuasive. The 42-year-old woman passes for a certain kind of man: weedy, slight and very short, with narrow shoulders, Marx Brothers eyebrows, just-credible facial hair, a tight fade over the ears bursting into a cocky skywards

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

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, no longer believes that a trans woman is a woman, his official spokesman said at a lobby briefing. He was asked about this six days after the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex in equalities law. The justices unanimously allowed an appeal by the campaign group For Women Scotland in a case against the Scottish government. Sex-based protections, notably in the Equality Act 2010, the court found, only apply to people who are born in that sex, not to those whose gender is reassigned. The court emphasised that transgender people still have protections against

Two months ago, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) upheld a complaint against The Spectator for referring to Juno Dawson, a transgender author, as ‘a man who claims to be a woman’. It may have struck some as unfathomable. I was less surprised. As I read the news, it took me back six years to when I was lead author of a report for Ipso, examining how the press treats trans-related issues. I have been a management consultant for more than 30 years so am used to being asked by institutions as varied as the BBC and the Football Association to help shape strategy. For Ipso’s project, it effectively asked

It’s amazing how many people have responded to what they think of as the shattering catastrophe of Donald Trump’s victory by crafting: making rag rugs, ceramic pots, knitting scarves. A woman I know from long ago is so traumatised that she has started quilting. I’m not sure what sort of quilt she’s making – a patchwork of Harris/Walz ballot papers, maybe – but I know better than to make a light-hearted enquiry because this is not an ordinary quilt. It is a recovery quilt and part of the healing process. The most popular flavour of post-Trump soup seems to be spiced pumpkin Many unhappy Democrat women have announced that they

Would-be veep Tim Walz has opened Pandora’s box with his use of the W-word to characterise Donald Trump and his running mate (no sniggering at the back: this W is for ‘weird’). Because, let’s face it, a heck of a lot of politicians are way-out weird, aren’t they? It’s practically part of the job description. If we start calling them all out on it, the currency’s going to devalue fast. My thesaurus devotes nearly half a page to synonyms for weird. ‘Freaky. Wacko. Odd. Eccentric. Crazy. Off the wall. Out to lunch…’ Well, sure, that’s pretty much Trump to a T. He is uniquely odd, but those adjectives neatly summarise

Some of my good male friends, Tories, are sick of terfs. I can see it in their shifty eyes, in the way they won’t quite look at me when terfy issues creep into conversation, but stare gloomily at the skirting board. Terf stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and terfs are women who insist that you can’t change your biological sex, and that the whole notion that some humans are born in the wrong body is not only daft, but catastrophic for our culture and our children. It could soon be a criminal act to try to talk a gay boy out of castrating himself It’s been a half-decade since

The state of our defence Sir: Your article on the etiolated state of European, including Britain’s, defence, is spot on (‘The price of peace’, 27 April). Rishi Sunak’s belated conversion to increasing defence expenditure is welcome but is, frankly, too little, too late. What it most definitively does not do is place the UK on a ‘war-footing’. By contrast, Russia is already in that state. It spends between 6 and 8 per cent of its GDP on defence. It has established strategic alliances with China, Iran and North Korea, and now much of West Africa too. We need a severe dose of realism. To begin, we must stop pretending that Ukraine