#Hadley Freeman

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Sting

[mysterious circle of robed figures] JK Rowling: hello children Rowling: i call before me... Rowling: hadley freeman! Hadley Freeman: d-dark lord? Rowling: DO NOT SSSPEAK Rowling: i am Rowling: dissspleassed

Rowling: you promisssed you could deliver unto me margaret atwood Rowling: and at thisss you failed Freeman: atwood is wiley oh dark lord Rowling: you promisssed you could deliver unto me judy blume Rowling: and at thisss you alssso failed Freeman:  blume is crafty oh dark lord!

Freeman: one more chance dark lord! just one! Freeman: i'll bring you Freeman: i'll bring you Freeman: i'll bring you sting! Rowling: sssting? Freeman: yes! sting! Rowling: hmm   Rowling: now ssssting would be a fine prize Rowling: a fine prize indeed

Rowling: you ssay you can get sssting Freeman: oh yes your evilness your rottenness Freeman: your most excellent cartoon villainess Rowling: very well Rowling: i sshall allow you Rowling: thiss one chance Freeman: oh thank you dark lord thank you! Rowling: thiss one FINAL chance

Hadley Freeman: hi hadley freeman, legitimate journalist here, i'd like to interview sting, top song guy and singer of such hits as Stand and the Bee movie cameo Sting: no thanks Freeman: Freeman: what Sting: i'm declining the interview Freeman: Freeman: what

Rowling: did you get sssting? Freeman: he declined the interview! Rowling: Rowling: wait he can do that? Freeman: that's what i said! Rowling: my god that wiley devil Rowling: alwaysss two ssstepsss ahead!

Freeman: apparently my single-minded obsession with tricking celebrities into making anti-trans statements was the deal breaker Rowling: but Rowling: that'sss what makesss you a legitimate journalisst! Rowling: that'sss literally the point of journalisssm! Rowling: go back to sssting Rowling: tell him i know the awful truth Freeman: dark lord? Rowling: sssting'ss not even hiss real name you know Freeman: what?! Rowling: yeah itsss gordon sshumway Freeman: WHAT?!? Freeman: i don't even know what to believe now

#midnight pals #the midnight society #midnight society #jk rowling #hadley freeman #sting

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Hadley Freeman

Date: Feb 11, 2023

It wasn’t easy for Hannah Barnes to get her book published. As the investigations producer for Newsnight and a long-term analytical and documentary journalist, she is used to covering knotty stories and this particular one, she knew better than most, was complex. She had been covering the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), based at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London — the only one of its kind for children in England and Wales — since 2019 and decided to write a book about it. “I wanted to write a definitive record of what happened because there needs to be one,” she tells me. Not everyone agreed. “None of the big publishing houses would take it,” she says. “Interestingly, there were no negative responses to the proposal. They just said, ‘We couldn’t get it past our junior members of staff.’ ”

Whatever their objections were, they could not have been about the quality of Barnes’s book — Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children is a deeply reported, scrupulously non-judgmental account of the collapse of the NHS service, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with former clinicians and patients. It is also a jaw-dropping insight into failure: failure of leadership, of child safeguarding and of the NHS. When describing the scale of potential medical failings, the clinicians make comparisons with the doping of East German athletes in the 1960s and 1970s and the Mid Staffs scandal of the 2000s, in which up to 1,200 patients died due to poor care. Other insiders discuss it in reference to the Rochdale child abuse scandal, in which people’s inaction led to so many children being so grievously let down.

Gids treats children and young people who express confusion — or dysphoria — about their gender identity, meaning they don’t believe their biological sex reflects who they are. Since the service was nationally commissioned by the NHS in 2009 it has treated thousands of children, helping many of them to gain access to gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists, known as “puberty blockers”, originally formulated to treat prostate cancer and to castrate male sex offenders, and also used to treat endometriosis and fertility issues. The service will shut this spring, following a deeply critical interim report in February 2022 by Dr Hilary Cass, a highly respected paediatrician who was hired by NHS England to look into the service. Dr Cass concluded that “a fundamentally different service model is needed”.

Gids should be an easy story to tell: many people have been trying to blow the whistle for a long time, but Anna Hutchinson, a clinical psychologist who used to work at the Tavistock Centre, told Barnes that those who spoke up were “always driven out one way or another”.

“It is really not normal for mental health professionals to talk to journalists as openly as they talked to me, and that shows how desperate they were to get the story out,” Barnes says. The clinicians struggled to be heard, just as Barnes later struggled to get her book out; some people prefer censorship to the truth if the latter conflicts with their ideology. And yet, concerns about the service had been in plain sight for years: in February 2019, a 54-page report compiled by Dr David Bell, then a consultant psychiatrist at the trust and the staff governor, was leaked to The Sunday Times. Dr Bell said Gids was providing “woefully inadequate” care to its patients and that its own staff had “ethical concerns” about some of the service’s practices, such as giving “highly disturbed and distressed” children access to puberty blockers. Gids, he concluded, “is not fit for purpose”. Many of Bell’s concerns had been expressed 13 years earlier in a 2006 report on Gids completed by Dr David Taylor — then the trust’s medical director — who described the long-term effects of puberty blockers as “untested and unresearched”.

“Taylor’s recommendations were largely ignored,” Barnes writes, and, in the decade and a half between Taylor and Bell’s reports, Gids would refer more than 1,000 children for puberty blockers, some as young as nine years old. It’s impossible to obtain a precise figure because neither the service nor the endocrinologists who prescribe the blockers could or would provide them to people who have asked for them, including Barnes. One figure they have given is that between 2014 and 2018, 302 children aged 14 or under were referred for blockers. It is generally accepted now that puberty blockers affect bone density, and potentially cognitive and sexual development. “Everything was there — everything. But the lessons were never learnt,” Barnes says.

Because this story touches on gender identity — one of the most sensitive subjects of our era — it has been difficult to get past the ideological battles to see the truth. Was the service helping children become their true selves, as its defenders contended? Or was it pathologising and medicalising unhappy kids and teenagers, as others alleged?

This reflects the fraught, partisan ways people see gender dysphoria: is it akin to being gay and therefore something to be celebrated?; or is it an expression of self-loathing, like an eating disorder, requiring therapeutic intervention? This has led to the current confusion over whether the planned conversion therapy ban should include gender as well as sexuality. “Conversion therapy” obviously sounds terrible, and politicians across the spectrum — from Crispin Blunt on the right to Nadia Whittome on the left — have loudly voiced their support for the inclusion of gender on the bill, which would thereby suggest that therapy for gender dysphoria is analogous to trying to “cure” someone of homosexuality.

But many clinicians argue that including gender would potentially criminalise psychotherapists exploring with their patients the reason for their confusion; after all, a doctor wouldn’t simply validate a bulimic’s desire to be thin — they’d try to find the cause of their inner discomfort and help them learn to love their body. Gids itself has long been conflicted about this complex issue. Dr Taylor wrote in 2005 that staff didn’t agree among themselves about what they were seeing in their patients: “were they treating children distressed because they were trans,” Barnes writes in Time to Think, “or children who identified as trans because they were distressed?”

How did the country’s only NHS clinic for gender dysphoric children not even understand what they were doing, and yet keep doing it? Thanks to Barnes and her book, we now know the answers to those questions, and many more.

Gids was founded in 1989 by Domenico Di Ceglie, an Italian child psychiatrist. His aim was to create a place where young people could talk about their gender identity with “non-judgmental acceptance”. Puberty blockers were available for 16-years-olds who wanted to “pause time” before committing themselves — or not — to gender-changing surgery. (Gids never offered that surgery, which is illegal in England for those under the age of 17, but it did refer patients to the endocrinology clinic, which provided the blockers. Blockers stop the body going through puberty, thereby making it easier — in some ways — for a person later to undergo the surgery.) In 1994 the service became part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which was known for its focus on talking therapies. By the early 2000s those working within Gids noted that certain gender activist groups — such as Mermaids, which supports “gender-diverse” kids and their families — were exerting an “astonishing” amount of influence on Gids, especially in regard to encouraging the prescribing of puberty blockers. Barnes writes in her book that Sue Evans, a nurse who worked at Gids at the time, asked a senior manager why Gids couldn’t just focus on talking therapy and not give out body-altering drugs. According to her and another clinician, Barnes writes, the senior manager replied, “It’s because we have this treatment here that people come.”

In around the year 2000, the trust asked Di Ceglie to draw up a report of who its patients were. The results were astonishing. Most of Gids’s patients were boys with an average age of 11. More than 25 per cent of them had spent time in care, 38 per cent came from families with mental health problems and 42 per cent had lost at least one parent, either through separation or death. Most had histories of other problems such as anxiety and physical abuse; almost a quarter had a history of self-harm. No conclusions were drawn and Gids continued to treat gender dysphoria as a cause, rather than a symptom, of adolescent distress.

It was a gender identity clinic in the Netherlands in the late Nineties that came up with the idea of giving blockers to children under 16, and in doing so furnished Gids with the justification it needed. The Dutch clinic said that 12-year-olds could be put on blockers if they had suffered from long-term gender dysphoria, were psychologically stable and in a supportive environment. This was known as the “Dutch protocol”. Pressure groups and some gender specialists encouraged the clinic to follow suit.

Dr Polly Carmichael took over as Gids’s director in 2009 and, in 2011, the service undertook an “early intervention study” to look at the effect of blockers on under-16s, because so little was known about their impact on children. Instead of waiting for the study results, Gids eliminated all age limits on blockers in 2014, letting kids as young as nine access them. At the same time referrals were rocketing, meaning clinicians had less time to assess patients before helping them access blockers. In 2009 Gids had 97 referrals. By 2020 there were 2,500, with a further 4,600 on the waiting list, and clinicians were desperately overstretched. “As the numbers seeking Gids’s help exploded around 2015, there was increased pressure to get through them. In some cases that meant shorter, less thorough assessments. Some clinicians have said there was pressure on them to refer children for blockers because it would free up space to see more children on the waiting list,” Barnes says.

Clinicians were seeing increasingly mentally unwell kids, including those who didn’t just identify as a different gender but as a different nationality and race: “Usually east Asian, Japanese, Korean, that sort of thing,” Dr Matt Bristow, a former Gids clinician, tells Barnes. But this was seen by Gids as irrelevant to their gender identity issues. Past histories of sexual abuse were also ignored: “[A natal girl] who’s being abused by a male, I think a question to ask is whether there’s some relationship between identifying as male and feeling safe,” Bristow says. But, clinicians point out, any concerns raised with their superiors always got the same response: that the kids should be put on the blockers unless they specifically said they didn’t want them. And few kids said that. As one clinician told Barnes: “If a young person is distressed and the only thing that’s offered to them is puberty blockers, they’ll take it, because who would go away with nothing?”

Then there was the number of autistic and same-sex-attracted kids attending the clinic, saying that they were transgender. Less than 2 per cent of children in the UK are thought to have an autism spectrum disorder; at Gids, however, more than a third of their referrals had moderate to severe autistic traits. “Some staff feared they could be unnecessarily medicating autistic children,” Barnes writes.

There were similar fears about gay children. Clinicians recall multiple instances of young people who had suffered homophobic bullying at school or at home, and then identified as trans. According to the clinician Anastassis Spiliadis, “so many times” a family would say, “Thank God my child is trans and not gay or lesbian.” Girls said, “When I hear the word ‘lesbian’ I cringe,” and boys talked to doctors about their disgust at being attracted to other boys. When Gids asked adolescents referred to the service in 2012 about their sexuality, more than 90 per cent of females and 80 per cent of males said they were same-sex attracted or bisexual. Bristow came to believe that Gids was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids” and there was a bleak joke on the team that there would be “no gay people left at the rate Gids was going”. When gay clinicians such as Bristow voiced their concerns to those in charge, they say it was implied that they were not objective because they were gay and therefore “too close” to the work. (Gids does not accept this claim.)

What if becoming trans is — for some people — a way of converting out of being gay? If a boy is attracted to other boys but feels shame about it, then a potential way around that is for him to identify as a girl and therefore insist he’s heterosexual. This possibility complicates the government’s plan — which has cross-party support — for including gender alongside sexuality in the bill to ban conversion therapy, if enabling a young person to change gender is, in itself, sometimes a form of conversion therapy.

I ask Barnes what she thinks and she answers with characteristic caution: “It’s a bit surprising that the NHS has commissioned one of the most experienced paediatricians in the country to undertake what appears to be an incredibly thorough review of this whole area of care, and not wait until she makes those final recommendations before legislating,” she says, weighing every word. (Dr Hilary Cass’s final review is due later this year.)

The sex ratio was also changing to a remarkable degree. When Di Ceglie started his gender clinic, the vast majority of his patients were boys with an average age of 11, and many had suffered from gender distress for years. By 2019-20, girls outnumbered boys at Gids by six to one in some age groups, especially between the ages of 12 to 14, and most hadn’t suffered from gender dysphoria until after the onset of puberty.

Some said this was simply because teenage girls felt more free to be open about their dysphoria. Some clinicians suspected there were other reasons. The clinicians Anna Hutchinson and Melissa Midgen worked at Gids and, after they left, wrotea joint article in 2020 citing a number of potential other factors: the increased “pinkification” and later “pornification” of girlhood; fear of sex and sexuality; social media; collapsing mental health services for adolescents, and so on. “It is important to acknowledge that girls and young women have long recruited their bodies as ways of expressing misery and self-hatred,” Hutchinson and Midgen wrote. And yet Gids’s response was to send these girls to endocrinology for puberty blockers.

The clinicians knew their patients were nothing like those in the Dutch protocol. The latter had been heavily screened, suffered from gender dysphoria since childhood and were psychologically stable with no other mental health issues. “Gids — according to almost every clinician I have spoken to — was referring people under 16 for puberty blockers who did not meet those conditions,” Barnes writes. The majority of children aged 11 to 15 referred to the clinic between 2010 and 2013 were put on blockers. The clinicians tried to reassure themselves by saying the blockers were just giving their patients time to think about what they wanted. They might even alleviate their distress. But in 2016 Gids’s research team presented the initial findings from its early intervention study, which looked at the effect of prescribing blockers to those under 16: although the children said they were “highly satisfied” with their treatment, their mental health and gender-related distress had stayed the same or worsened. And every single one of them had gone on to cross-sex hormones — synthetic testosterone for those born female, oestrogen for natal males. Far from giving them time to think, blockers seemed to put them on a pathway towards surgery. Clinicians were concerned that the service had abandoned NHS best practice. They repeatedly raised this with Carmichael and the executive team, but nothing changed. In just six months in 2018, 11 people who worked at Gids left due to ethical concerns. People who spoke up, such as David Bell and Sonia Appleby, the children’s safeguarding lead for the Tavistock trust, say they were bullied or dismissed. Appleby later won an employment tribunal case against the trust. Bell has said the trust threatened him with disciplinary action in connection with his activities as a whistleblower. He later retired.

Everything the whistleblowers tried to say has been borne out. A 2020 Care Quality Commission inspection of Gids rated the service “inadequate”, and pointed out that some assessments for puberty blockers consisted of only “two or three sessions” and that some staff “felt unable to raise concerns without fear of retribution”. Around the same time, the former Gids patient Keira Bell instigated a judicial review against the trust, arguing that at 16 she had been too young to understand the repercussions of being put on blockers, and that she bitterly regretted her transition. The High Court found in her favour that children are unable to give informed consent to puberty blockers. The Court of Appeal later overturned their verdict on the grounds that it should be up to doctors and not the court to determine competence to consent, but the damage was done: thanks to Bell’s case, it was now public knowledge how shambolic the service had become, unable to provide any data on, for example, how many children with autism they had put on blockers.

So what actually happened at Gids? And why did no one stop it? Barnes’s book suggests multiple credible factors. Activist groups from outside, such as Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence, came to exert undue influence on the service and would complain if they felt things weren’t being done their way. For example, Gendered Intelligence complained to Carmichael, the Gids director, when a clinician dared to express the view publicly that not all children with gender dysphoria would grow up to be transgender. In 2016 an expert in gender reassignment surgery warned Gids that putting young boys on puberty blockers made it more difficult for them to undergo surgery as adults, because their penis hadn’t developed enough for surgeons to construct female genitalia. Instead, surgeons had to use “segments of the bowel” to create a “neo-vagina”. But senior managers rejected calls from its clinicians to put this on a leaflet for patients and families. In the book, Hutchinson is quoted as saying, “I may be wrong, but I think Polly [Carmichael] was afraid of writing things down in case they got into Mermaids’s hands.”

Susie Green was at this point the chief executive of Mermaids and had taken her son, who had been on puberty blockers, to Thailand for gender reassignment surgery on his 16th birthday. In an interview, which is still on YouTube, Green laughingly recalls the difficulties surgeons had in constructing a vagina out of her child’s prepubescent penis. Green stepped down from Mermaids last year.

Money is suspected to have been another issue. When Gids became part of the Tavistock trust, it was such a minor player it wasn’t even in the main building. But by 2020-21, gender services accounted for about a quarter of the trust’s income. David Bell says this allowed the trust to be “blinkered”. The children and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) possibly had similar blinkers. They were so overstretched it appears they were happy to offload as many kids as possible onto Gids, and then disregard what was actually happening there.

“It’s really striking how few people were willing to question Gids. As one clinician said to me, because it was dealing with gender, there was this ‘cloak of mystery’ around it. There was a sense of ‘Oh, it’s about gender, so we can’t ask the same questions that we would of any other part of the NHS. Such as: is it safe? Where’s the evidence? Where’s the data? And are we listening to people raising concerns?’ These are basic questions that are vital to providing the best care,” Barnes says.

And then there was the outside culture. Basic safeguarding failures at Gids seem to have accelerated from 2014 onwards, at the same time that there was a push for the rights of transgender people. Stonewall, having helped to secure equal marriage, had now turned its sights on the rights of trans people. Susie Green, at Mermaids, gave a TED talk that suggested taking her teenage son for a sex change operation was a parenting template to admire. Meanwhile, the TV networks weighed in. In 2014 CBBC aired a documentary, I Am Leo, about a 13-year-old female on puberty blockers who identifies as a boy — mainly, it seems, because of an abhorrence of dresses and long hair. In 2018 ITV showed the three-part drama Butterfly, about an 11-year-old boy whose desire to be a girl is expressed as a desire to wear dresses and make-up. Susie Green was the lead consultant on the show.

David Bell suggests that the Tavistock trust protected Gids “because they saw it as a way of showing that we weren’t crusty old conservatives; that we were up with the game and cutting-edge”. That the Tavistock clinic was briefly, in the 1930s, a place where homosexual men were brought to be “cured” probably also played a part in the trust’s embrace of gender ideology, as if it were an atonement for a past wrong.

As per Dr Cass’s suggestions, Gids will shut this spring and be replaced with regional hubs, where young people will be seen by doctors with multiple specialties. The obsession with gender, and the ensuing lack of intellectual curiosity at Gids about factors that might contribute to a person’s distress and sense of their identity will, hopefully, be gone.

On the one hand, it feels incredible that such a disaster happened. How did an NHS service medicalise so many autistic and same-sex-attracted young people, unhappy teenage girls and children who simply felt uncomfortable with masculine or feminine templates, with so little knowledge of the causes of their distress or the effects of the medicine? And how did Carmichael, still the director of Gids, suffer no repercussions, whereas those who tried to blow the whistle say they were bullied out of their jobs? On the other hand, it is a miracle that the information is now out. For too long, too many people have turned a blind eye to problems arising from gender ideology, including healthcare for gender dysphoric children — because they have been focused on trying to be on the right side of history, they refused to look at the glaring wrongs.

Barnes knows that some will be angry at her for having written the book. But she also knows that she had to write it: “There’s been this idea that the kind of treatment young people got at Gids — physical interventions — is safe treatment for all gender-distressed children,” she says. “But even among the clinicians working on the front line of this issue, there is no consensus about the best way to care for these kids. There needs to be debate about this, and it needs to come out of the clinic and into society, because this isn’t just about trans people — it’s bigger than that. It’s about children.”

[ Via: https://archive.is/Fv41w ]

==

Modern-day Lysenkoism.

#LGB Alliance #Hadley Freeman #Hannah Barnes #Tavistock #GIDS #genderwang #gender ideology #queer theory #ideological capture #ideological corruption #medical scandal #medical malpractice #medical transition #medical corruption #gay conversion therapy #gay conversion #gender dysphoria #dysphoria #puberty #puberty blockers #hormone blockers #homophobia #anti gay #woke activism #wokeness as religion #cult of woke #woke #wokeism #trans the gay away #trans away the gay

[fuckyeahilike]

MATT OSBORNE

AUG 9, 2023

After conferring with colleagues and the LGB United board, I am pleased to announce that The Distance is now offering a £1 million prize for this elusive citation. We are naming it for Steve Wardlaw.

We say that the much-ballyhooed quote does not exist.

We contend that Mr. Wardlaw, and the Dunning-Kruger chorus of progress flag-waving critics of Rowling who attribute “anti-trans” views to her perfectly reasonable statements, are all telling on themselves.

Rowling’s views are decidedly pro-woman. If pro-woman is “anti-trans,” then Mr. Wardlaw, and everyone ‘pro-trans,’ is anti-woman.

To win the Steve Wardlaw Prize™, an entrant must demonstrate that the cited statement by J.K. Rowling does not involve a rights conflict. That is, the cited statement must materially detract from the human rights of ‘transgender people’ without simultaneously arguing for the rights of another group, such as women, children, or people with faith traditions.

For example, Rowling has funded a rape crisis shelter for women in Scotland. Males are simply not allowed there, no matter how they ‘identify,’ because (Rowling argues) women have a right to heal from sexual trauma in a place that is physically free of males. Wardlaw is free to argue otherwise, but Rowling’s statements about it are clearly referring to a conflict of rights and therefore do not qualify for the prize.

Here are some fictional statements that would absolutely qualify for the £1 million Steve Wardlaw Prize™. To our knowledge, Rowling has not uttered anything like them. Which is ironic, since all of these things have actually been said about, or actually done to, people deemed guilty of transgender-related wrongthink:

‘Trans people are inherently dangerous to other people’

‘Trans people should be denied health care or other services’

‘Trans people should not be allowed to have bank accounts’

‘Trans people should not be free to speak their views in public’

‘Trans people should be fired from their jobs, have limited opportunities’

Rowling has discussed her views at length in a recent podcast. She has written an essay on her website. She has tweeted about her views and unlike Mr. Wardlaw, Rowling has never had to delete a tweet over factual inaccuracies. With such a wealth of sources, someone ought to be able to locate just one J.K. Rowling quote on the above lines, but no one has succeeded.

One proviso: we are not taking bets on the future, here. Rowling has been accused of making these sorts of statements already. If anyone can find Rowling saying anything like the above prior to the date of this post, they can claim the £1 million Steve Wardlaw Prize™ by contacting us. All entries are subject to an authentication process commensurate with findings of fact according to the laws of the United States, because that is where we live.

As mentioned at the beginning, Wardlaw was reacting to a piece by Hadley Freeman about an interview that she did not get to do. Sting, the musician, apparently wanted a different interviewer, since Freeman’s views are unacceptably TERFy.

Wardlaw thinks that this is fine. He thinks that women should be punished for their opinions. He does not realize yet that he and Sting are the ones completely out of step with broader public opinion. He does not think of himself as a woman-hater.

In his mind, Maya Forstater is guilty of harassing colleagues at work simply by having her unacceptable views. She did not have to voice them aloud in her workplace to be held responsible for them at work. Just having them was a crime.

Of course, British employment law begs to differ: the Forstater decision found that her opinions are “worthy of respect in a democratic society” and awarded her compensation. Her precedent is already empowering critics of gender ideology to push back all across the UK. Employers, services, and police departments have all exposed themselves to damage claims by following the fashion of the times and the bad advice of Stonewall.

J.K. Rowling was right. Maya Forstater was right. Hadley Freeman was right. Steve Wardlaw hates that they were right. He hates, hates, HATES them all for being right. He hates them so much that he has earned the right to have his name on this prize.

The £1 million Steve Wardlaw Prize™ is waiting.

#transgenderism #misogyny #feminism #jk rowling #hadley freeman #sting #maya forstater #pinned #lgb #lgb united #matt osborne #steve wardlaw

[jaynedolluk]

Last few weekends of the Times had a really good piece on The Rocky Horror Show plus one on ‘rich mom energy’ (which is what I’d love) and reviews of Dead Ringers/Beef/Succession and Blue Lights. Plus a bit on that new play about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, The Motive and The Cue and interviews w/Keeley Hawes, Lenny Henry and Susanna Hoffs (discussing her new book, The Bird has Flown, which has a character based on Prince in it). Hadley Freeman wrote a great piece on Barbie and seeing the photos of the various dolls really made me wish Mattel did some of them as prints.

#times #rocky horror #dead ringers #beef netflix #succession #blue lights #richard burton #elizabeth taylor #keeley hawes #lenny henry #susanna hoffs #hadley freeman #barbie

[kanadabiscuits]

This was a charming farewell article from someone who wrote my favourite Helena Bonham Carter interview.

#hadley freeman #journalism

[gwydionmisha]

CW: Suicide

#Hadley Freeman #Suicide #LGBTQIA+ #Trans Youth #News

[kiramoore626]

Journalist Hadley Freeman condemned for ‘dangerous’ comments about suicidal trans kids

Journalist Hadley Freeman condemned for ‘dangerous’ comments about suicidal trans kids

Journalist Hadley Freeman condemned for ‘dangerous’ comments about suicidal trans kids So-called ‘gender critical’ journalist Hadley Freeman has been criticised for claiming that trans youth use suicidal thoughts “to get their way”.

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#Gender Non-Conforming #Hadley Freeman #LGBTQ #Suicide #The Sunday Times #Transgender #Transgender Youth

[kepage3]

Books Read in 2022: 19. House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth Century Jewish Family.

Books Read in 2022: 19. House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth Century Jewish Family.

Narrative Style: First person Genre: Memoir, Biography, History Rating: 5/5 Published: 2020 Format: Kindle Synopsis: Long after Hadley Freeman’s grandmother, Sara, died, Freeman found a box of keepsakes and photos tucked away in her grandmother’s closet. The discovery led to Freeman on a quest to discover exactly what happened to her family during the war, something which her family did not…

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#book reviews #hadley freeman #house of glass

[pedroam-bang]

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

“Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free”

#1994 #film #movie #The Shawshank Redemption #Frank Darabont #Tim Robbins #Andy Dufresne #Morgan Freeman #Ellis Boyd Redding #Red #Clancy Brown #Captain Hadley #Bob Gunton #Warden Norton #Rita Hayworth #Stephen King

[finitevariety]

Helen McCrory on playing Medea

#interview's at the guardian if you want to catch it but i'm not linking bc fuck the grauniad #no more money in hadley freeman's pockets thanks #medea #helen mccrory #euripides

[jmunneytumbler]

'Miller's Girl' Just Wants to Have Huh

'Miller's Girl' Just Wants to Have Huh

CREDIT: Lionsgate/Screenshot Starring: Jenna Ortega, Martin Freeman, Gideon Adlon, Bashir Salahuddin, Dagmara Domińczyk Director: Jade Hadley Bartlett Running Time: 93 Minutes Rating: R Release Date: January 26, 2024 (Theaters) Miller’s Girl is the sort of tawdry movie that probably makes a lot of viewers go, “Why is this coming out in 2024? And why did we ever think this type of premise was…

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#Bashir Salahuddin #Dagmara Domińczyk #Gideon Adlon #Jade Hadley Bartlett #Jenna Ortega #Martin Freeman #Miller&039;s Girl

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Blume

[mysterious circle of robed figures] JK Rowling: hadley freeman, your failuresss disssspleasssse me Rowling: you promissssed me you would deliver margaret atwood Rowling: instead, nothing but ashess and wind Hadley Freeman: p-please dark lord Freeman: one more chance, just one!

Rowling: very well Rowling: you will deliver unto me Rowling: judy blume Freeman: j-judy blume?! Freeman: b-but dark lord Freeman: judy blume is friend to all children! Rowling: DID I SSSTUTTER FREEMAN Freeman: n-no dark lord Freeman: [bowing, groveling] it shall be so

Freeman: i'm really honored today to interview judy blume, beloved author of the mouse and the motorcycle and the cat ate my gymsuit Judy Blume: thanks for having me Freeman: so first question Freeman: isn't jk rowling just awesome Freeman: i mean, just tops at being an author

Freeman: so JK Rowling said that trans people should be eradicated from public life. Agree or hard agree? Blume: no i don't agree with that Freeman: Freeman: [narrowing eyes] you clever devil Freeman: you win this round blume Freeman: but this battle is far from over

Freeman: ok how about this Freeman: hypothetically Freeman: if someone were to drop a big anvil on JK Rowling's head Freeman: that would be bad, right? Blume: yeah sure Freeman: [rushing from room] ok that's all i need, thanks, bye Blume: Blume: you know i have a movie coming out

Freeman: behold! dark lord! Freeman: the judy blume interview! Freeman: "I... stand... behind... JK Rowling... 100%!" Rowling: Rowling: what was cut out with the ellipsesss Freeman: [sweating] ellipses? what ellipses??

Judy Blume: it seems like there's some confusion about my interview Blume: it was taken out of context Blume: what i meant was i stand 100% behind jk rowling's scottish castle ductwork Blume: it looks so welcoming & cozy Blume: [licking lips] and that particle board! so tasty!

JK Rowling: fool!!! blundering nincompoop!! Rowling: i asssk you to deliver judy blume! and what do i get? Rowling: jussst pathetic excusssesss! Rowling: you've failed me for the last time, freeman! Rowling: i'm gonna drag you so hard in my next cormoran ssstrike doorssstopper!!

Freeman: [cowering, groveling] forgive me, dark lord! Freeman: blume was too wily! Freeman: it's almost like she's got some mystical power to see through bullshit moral panics! Freeman: it's almost like she's been through all this before!

#midnight pals #the midnight society #midnight society #jk rowling #judy blume #hadley freeman

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Hadley Freeman

Published: Nov 29, 2022

It’s incredibly easy to criticise Susie Green, the influential and, as of Friday, ex-CEO of Mermaids. But I’d like to say this in her defence: she never lied about who she was.

From her early interviews in 2012, when her trans daughter, Jackie, then 19, became a Miss England finalist, Green, then an IT-manager, was utterly open about how she first knew her child was trans: “As a toddler, Jackie always headed for the dolls in toy shops.” And if a four-year-old looking at dolls weren’t evidence enough that this child should be committed to a lifetime of medicalisation, Green added, “[Jackie] loathed having her hair cut.” Green put Jack — as he was then known — on puberty-blockers and flew him to Thailand for a sex change operation when he was 16, making him the youngest person in the world to undergo that surgery.

She merrily recalls in a YouTube interview that because Jack’s penis hadn’t developed due to the blockers, “there wasn’t much for the surgeon to work with” when constructing their vagina. “Sorry, Jackie!” she laughs.

During her time at Mermaids, Green has been advising parents, schools, the police, the media and NHS trusts about how to deal with other children who dare to not be gender stereotypes. She was their first staff member — before Mermaids was run by volunteers — and under her leadership, she has transformed the organisation from a quiet, low-key charity to an energetically active lobbying group, and her theories about childhood and gender have been at least as influential as Judith Butler’s. Mermaids has been endorsed by the Be Kind brigade, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jameela Jamil and Emma Watson, accrued a slew of corporate sponsors and been awarded £500,000 by the National Lottery. Progressive newspapers advise readers to contact the service should they have any concerns about their child.

Since 2017, I regularly asked editors at the newspaper where I worked if I could write about Mermaids in general and Green specifically, because it was so obvious that something was very wrong here. The answer, always, was no, but the reasons given were fuzzy: it wouldn’t be right in that section, they couldn’t see the news peg, it felt too niche. A more likely reason was one articulated to me with some passion on social media any time I tweeted anything sceptical about Green or Mermaids: to question either was to wish trans children would die. Doubt the charity, hate the cause, in other words. Weirdly, this attitude seems to hold true only for charities connected to trans issues: no one, as far as I know, screamed that The Times hates starving people when they investigated Oxfam in 2018 about allegations that some of its workers paid for sex.

I do have some sympathy with those who were too scared to question Mermaids. Under Green’s leadership, the organisation has done its utmost to evade scrutiny, trotting out — even in parliamentary committees, even in the 2018 ITV drama Butterfly, starring Anna Friel, and for which Green was the series lead consultant — the claim that 48% of young trans people attempt suicide. A terrifying statistic for any parent of a gender dysphoric child, and almost as scary for any organisation that cares more about being kind than being accurate. Happily, the statistic is bunkum, as the researcher behind the study it’s based on has said, because the study involved 27 self-selecting trans volunteers, and therefore its findings should not be widened out to all gender dysphoric young people, as Mermaids had done.

You would think that discovering attempted suicide is not as common among young gender dysphoric people as previously believed would be greeted with triumphant cheers and celebrations by a charity that claims to support them, and the celebrities who frequently tweet their love for the group routinely described as “the most oppressed people in the world”. And yet, strangely, not so much. As a result, that statistic is still routinely banded around by activists. (Is telling oppressed people that they are likely to try to kill themselves, despite the facts suggesting otherwise, really Being Kind?) It’s the same story with puberty blockers: for years, Green and Mermaids insisted they were fully reversable. Green had given them to her child, as she repeated so often, and she wouldn’t deliberately harm her own child, right? Online obsessives — such as one full-time tweeter, part-time lawyer and occasional fox murderer — parroted these claims, and people went along with the theory that a drug originally licensed to treat prostate cancer would be fine for children. In fact, it is now becoming widely accepted that blockers affect bone development, and may prevent the young person from ever being able to orgasm.

Despite telling Jackie’s story over and over, and always including the detail about the girls’ toys, Green took pains to stress that being trans child went deeper than a desire for dolls. But how else would a four-year-old boy express a wish to be a girl other than through the medium of toys? What else would being a girl mean to them? In her Tedx talk, Green says that as soon as her baby boy “got mobile” — ie, learned to crawl — “he was gravitating to things that you would think are stereotypically female”. Like what, tampons? Was her one-year-old trying to book an appointment for a cervical smear test? Nope, “the Polly Pocket and My Little Pony”, she says, and then quickly adds “that was fine – but not for Dad”. Green’s then husband disapproved of his son playing with My Little Pony toys and therefore banned them from the house. (A macho father who abhors effeminacy in his son is a common feature in the life stories of trans women; Paris Lees’ semi-autobiographical novel, What It Feels Like for a Girl, is a recent example.)

Shortly after that, the child then known as Jack told his mother, “God made a mistake and I should have been a girl.” As Green recounts in her talk, “What I had come to the conclusion, up until she was about two, was that I had a very sensitive, quite effeminate little boy who was probably gay.” So when four-year-old Jack told her he should be a girl, Green felt “it explained so many things”. And to be fair, a trans four-year-old makes about as much sense as a gay two-year-old. No one has ever accused Green of failing to maintain fidelity to her extraordinary version of logic.

Jackie Green has occasionally spoken up in defence of her mother. In 2018, a journalist tweeted that Green had “castrated” her teenage son when she arranged for the sex change operation in Thailand. Jackie tweeted back that this was untrue: “I was meant to be female and thus had surgery to correct my small defect,” was how she put it. As to how she knew she was meant to be a girl, Jackie said, “For a long time I was told I had to play with action men and other ‘boy toys’, another concept I find rather silly, but I still wanted the Barbies and little mermaids.” And so her mother arranged for the “small defect” to be “corrected” so she could.

No one has said why Green is suddenly no longer the CEO of Mermaids. But the fact that the charity has said they are appointing an interim one for now suggests the decision was quite sudden. The timing was certainly peculiar, coming 10 days after Green gave a rare interview, refuting all recent criticisms of her organisation.

Slowly, it seems, the tide is turning against Mermaids. When it was announced this year that the NHS was going shut down Gids, its gender identity clinic for children, in the spring, attention quickly turned to Mermaids. Former clinicians at Gids have accused the charity of having a “harmful” effect on the clinic by promoting transition as a cure. Mermaids has denied this, but it didn’t help matters by putting itself in the spotlight when it launched an appeal against the Charity Commission’s decision to award charitable status to the LGB Alliance, now the only specifically gay charity in this country which does not include trans people. Witnesses for Mermaids have had to defend gender theories under questioning this autumn, which has led to extraordinary moments such as Mermaids’ chair of trustees, claiming, “I’m not sure that people come out of the womb with a sex.”

A Daily Telegraph investigation in September found that the charity was offering to send breast binders to children against their parents’ wishes, which prompted the Charity Commission to open a regulatory compliance case. Green later defended Mermaids in The Guardian by saying a binder is better than “a young person using duct tape on themselves”. In October, the Times revealed that one of the Mermaids trustees, Jacob Breslow, gave a 2011 presentation for B4U-ACT, an organisation that aims to promote better understanding of paedophiles, in which he criticised the negative ideas about “paedophilic desire”. “We did some general top-level Google and internet searches. We did a social media search [and it] didn’t come up,” Green told The Guardian. Then, 10 days later, she was ousted.

Maybe the Mermaids board belatedly realised that if they want their organisation to endure, they needed to get rid of the wacky front woman. Ultimately, I don’t care why she went, because so much damage has already been done. But what I do want to know is this: how did so many people take Green so seriously for so long? Why did so many people turn off their intelligence when faced with this former IT consultant from Leeds? And how could so many LGBT activists champion and defend a woman who saw effeminacy — and therefore homosexuality — in her two-year-old and feel she had to “correct” this “defect”?

Green kept telling the story of Jackie because, for a long time, it gave her moral authority. No doubt, parents have long been great advocates for the rights of their marginalised children. But an alternative way of looking at Green is she was at least as good an advocate for her own rights: the right to put her child on untested hormone pills, the right to take her child to Thailand for a sex change. There is a fine line between using your parenting experience to help others, and validating your parenting choices by encouraging others to do the same.

I’m not waiting for celebrities such as Emma Watson to own up to their foolishness, mainly because I don’t care what Emma Watson thinks about anything. But all the journalists, teachers, editors and activists who endorsed Green’s obviously ludicrous ideas and shouted down anyone who didn’t, they really need to take a long look at their judgement, their motives and themselves. Because Green never once hid who she was.

==

Like Nancy Kelley, the best thing Susie Green ever did was unashamedly tell everyone what she stood for and what she was up to.

#Hadley Freeman #Susie Green #Jack Green #Jackie Green #transhausen syndrome #munchausen syndrome #munchausen syndrome by proxy #gay conversion therapy #gay conversion #Mermaids #stereotypes #gender stereotypes #gender ideology #queer theory #medical mutilation #medical scandal #sex trait modification #genderwang #trans away the gay #trans the gay away #religion is a mental illness

[jaynedolluk]

A few weekends ago Times had a piece on Taylor Swift as a poet plus that new feature length episode + prev series of The Last Kingdom (which I really must catch up with) and interviews with Metallica and J. Smith-Cameron. Plus reviews of Dreamland, Rain Dogs and Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies (which I really want to see).

Also had interviews with Lily Allen + Juliette Lewis (I really need to see S2 of Yellowjackets) plus Hadley Freeman on her anorexia and a tour of Dita Von Teese’s home. They had features on the rise of Manchester, hidden TV gems, female toxicity and high-flying lawyers plus reviews of Succession and Blue Lights.

#times #taylor swift #the last kingdom #metallica #j. smith cameron #dreamland story #rain dogs #grease: rise of the pink ladies #lily allen #juliette lewis #hadley freeman #dita von teese #succession #blue lights

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“I read my colleague Hadley Freeman’s column in The Sunday Times this weekend in a growing state of shock. Hadley described how, on three occasions, a man had choked her in bed. I then read the section in Escape, the book she references, written by another journalist, Marie Le Conte. Le Conte writes that choking during sex was “mainstream” among those under 40. “If I were to rank it,” says Le Conte, “I would say it sits somewhere around the light spanking mark . . . not so out of the ordinary that you would mention it to someone.”

Readers around my age, 58, will appreciate how I felt. Never mind incorporating strangulation into sex, we belong to a generation where the “light spanking” Le Conte references is itself regarded as a bit weird, a bit pervy, a bit “why would you want to hit someone, or be hit by someone, in bed?” As regards throttling a partner, a phrase I am shocked to find myself writing, that belongs in my mind to the realm of bullies, abusers, thugs, misogynists, rapists. Very niche. Very sinister. Very illegal.

I would regard even pretending to strangle a partner as an outrage. If a male friend told me such behaviour turned him on, that friendship would end. If I contemplated doing it myself, I’d get therapy. And let’s be clear, the choking under discussion, which a study last year found almost 60 per cent of female students in the US had experienced, does not refer to play-acting, but actual hands round the throat, pressure on the windpipe, possible-loss-of-consciousness suffocation. WTF?

When I got to work yesterday morning three younger female colleagues — in their forties, thirties and twenties respectively — confirmed how widespread the practice is. I suppose when Men’s Health carries idiotic articles headlined “how to do choking safely, according to experts” I should have known asphyxiation-as-foreplay had become, if a long way from normal, then at least normalised. All three women said they had encountered it, along with being slapped, hair-pulled and spat on (eh?!) by male partners. None had welcomed any of these actions.

I should emphasise that these were not super-traumatic encounters with evil psychos, but otherwise consensual acts with otherwise normal blokes. Not pleasurable in any way, but not, I gathered, a massive deal either, such is the extent to which formerly minority, hardcore aberrations have entered the everyday bedroom experience.

The youngest colleague told me several of her female friends did enjoy the experience. I’m sceptical about that. I fail to see how partial suffocation by someone physically stronger, someone you don’t necessarily know well, with no help at hand, can be anything other than terrifying. I find it more likely that some young women, not yet fully confident, have been persuaded that being choked is not only not weird, but now a standard aspect of sex to which they ought to submit. Human beings are hard-wired for self-preservation: oxygen deprivation is something we desperately strive to avoid, not embrace. I’m in no doubt that the vast majority of women subjected to choking do not like it, to put it mildly.

What shocks me is why men, so-called normal men who aren’t sadists who ought to be locked up, would want to strangle their lover in the first place. Of course the easy answer is the malign influence of protracted youthful exposure to pornography. Such exposure has, it is argued, normalised sexual behaviour previously thought extreme. And yet it is possible to view porn without going anywhere near clips of men choking women.

A correctly socialised teenage boy in receipt of the correct moral guidance would shut down such content in a cold sweat should his cursor so much as inadvertently hover over a link. Yet evidently lots of boys and young men blithely consume the dodgy stuff, presumably not knowing it is dodgy. They then expect to mimic it when their sex lives begin to encompass people other than themselves.

Therefore, older people, parents, specifically fathers, are not doing their job properly. Shame on them. They should be telling their sons that all sexual violence is despicable, full stop. We’re not in groovy, liberal, “each to their own” territory here. We’re not talking dress-up or role play. We’re talking about actions which are at best distressing and degrading, and at worst deadly. This behaviour should not be up for discussion. It’s just plain wrong.”

[toohardontheknees]

For a lot of people, there is something thrilling in watching a woman waste away, maybe because it seems like the ultimate expression of female self-denial, a feminine helplessness, a sexless kind of self-published pornography.

— Watching girls die online, Hadley Freeman (on anorexic online presence)

#rice cake #diet coke #ed not ed sheeran #girl blogger #coquette #dollette #girl interrupted #waif #waifspo #girlblogger #dollcore #nicole dollanganger #sylvia plath #red scare #dasha nekrasova #my dark vanessa #radblr #radfem #femcel #female manipulator #90s #female hysteria #the bell jar #courtney love #hole #bpd