

Discover more from The Distance
We threw a nonce parade! It was diffuclt to get Jessica Yaniv, Rachel McIvyKinnon, Hannah Mouncey, Amy Challenor, Laurel Hubbard, and the guy from the Wi Spa lobby into one photo, and even harder fitting a diminutive Owen Jones in the frame, but we managed to get a whole men’s rights movement into one snapshot for the ages as they march into the Courtroom of Public Responsibility for This Disaster. O joy!
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT: Lawyers in the UK estimate that more than one thousand families are set to sue the Tavistock clinic. Unpossible, I was continually reassured that detransition and regret are not real, and so this day would never, ever happen. What went wrong? Was it all a lie?
They are accusing the gender identity development service [GIDS] at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust of multiple failures in its duty of care.
This includes allegations it recklessly prescribed puberty blockers with harmful side effects and adopted an “unquestioning, affirmative approach” to children identifying as transgender.
Last month NHS England announced it was shutting the Tavistock clinic over safety concerns following a damning external review. Care will be handed to regional children’s hospitals.
The “right side of history” will now spend the next decade or more being sued into penury in British courts. If the Allison Bailey hearings were any indicator, solicitors are going to carve them all up on the stand, Alex Jones-style, for a decade.
Three words from the American side of the pond, guys: “class action litigation”
YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT: The Rt. Hon. Suella Braverman QC, MP, Minister for Equalities in the UK, gave a keynote speech yesterday in London. Although she did not address Stonewall or Mermaids by name, she called out the bad legal advice of gender identity activists through which “some service providers behave as if they have a legal duty to admit biological males who identify as females into women-only spaces, from rape crisis centres and domestic abuse refuges to bathrooms and changing rooms. In my view this is not in accordance with the law.” Same goes for teachers transitioning kids without their parents’ knowledge:
The problem is that many schools and teachers believe – incorrectly – that they are under an absolute legal obligation to treat children who are gender questioning according to their preference, in all ways and all respects, from preferred pronouns to use of facilities and competing in sports. All this is sometimes taking place without informing their parents or taking into account the impact on other children. Anyone who questions such an approach is accused of transphobia. In my view, this approach is not supported by the law.
Here is the video. (Transcript.) Braverman’s remarks on these topics start after the 28 minute-mark.
RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY, ETC: The United States of America are the final boss level against gender gibberish. Lisa Selin-Davis examines the most recent effort to deny, obfuscate, and ignore the “trans train” effect on vulnerable new cohorts of children, especially young women. Lisa is a published author and expert on gender “nonconforming” kids. A complete moderate, she both opposes legislation to criminalize parents and also attacks the “affirmative” model of gender identity.
STOP TEACHING KIDS THEY ARE HATED: It is one thing to argue that a class of people suffers oppression, quite another to raise a person from birth to believe that another class of people hates them. Conservative author Adam Coleman saw the contradiction, and it made him question everything:
I was around Aman’s age when I was told that all white people are racist and can never be trusted; words I’ll never forget. I don’t believe this was explained to me to purposefully corrupt my innocence, but to put me on a higher alert which could lead to me being protected emotionally or physically.
However, the problem was that it created more confusion than certainty because it was illogical compared to my surroundings. At the time, I lived in a majority white neighborhood, went to a majority white school and most of my friends were white. I had never felt targeted because of my race or uncomfortable being black, but I was now presented with a new narrative that was confusing because it didn’t match my reality.
It didn’t make sense to link morality to skin color because I knew of good people and bad people who were black and white. I didn’t like the idea of looking at my white friends negatively especially when their behavior was showing otherwise. Nevertheless, the damage was done and now I felt pressure to abide by this new narrative and when I didn’t, I would be passive-aggressively chastised for treating people the same way I wanted to be treated and not caring about their complexion in order to interact with them.
Schools should start teaching content of character again. I’d vote for that. Coleman is writing about racism, but take this same lesson to what kids are learning about supposed “gender identities” that can make them “trans” in a world supposedly filled with transphobia. LGB activists of the past hyped teen suicide statistics and it was controversial at the time for good reasons.
MAN WATCHING GIRLS PEE AT YMCA IS STRAIGHT MAN: Clementine Adams, the man at the center of the controversy we reported last week from the Port Townsend, Washington, city pool administered by the YMCA, claims on social media that he is attracted to women. It is unclear whether he finds 80 year-old women attractive. (Don’t laugh, it’s an entire porn category for a reason.) We will have more to say on this later today.
WHAT EVEN IS A ‘CULTURE WAR’?: Suzanne Moore asks for a definition. Clausewitz would define it as “the continuation of politics by other means.” That definitition certainly fits the modern social justice warrior ethos of “woke,” which is yet another problematic term.
While some are incredulous that the Tory leadership contest will depend on issues like the contender’s stance on Self ID as well as their tax cutting plans, it is hardly suprising. Let’s not talk about the tiny number of trans people in this country and ask a simple question, which candidate is going to protect women’s rights? If I were a Labour voter, I would also be asking who is going to extend women’s rights, close the pay gap, enshrine reproductive rights properly in law, act seriously on the almost non-existent conviction of rapists amongst other things.
Tory members and MPs may not want to ask such questions and will come back to “It’s the economy, stupid”. And right now this is unavoidable. All the warnings are dire. A winter of discontent like no other is forecasted. Cold, hungry children. But the economy and therefore solutions to dire poverty do not operate in a vacuum. If you don’t understand the centrality of culture, then you have simply not been paying attention.
Steve Bannon says that culture is the wellspring of politics, and his management time at Breitbart can be seen as zoo management, feeding red meat to Brexit voters, for example. The eponymous Andrew Breitbart got his start in partisan news verticals by setting up Arianna Huffington’s post.
Your SJW is just a (generally) left-wing culture warrior. That’s it. That’s all they are.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD PARTISANS: In this terrific podcast, family therapist Stephanie Winn interviews Lisa K Swallow,
the co-founder and Executive Director of Crossing Party Lines, Inc., a national nonprofit dedicated to reducing toxic polarization by creating open dialogue between Americans with dissimilar political views. In this interview, she shares a wealth of wisdom derived from helping hundreds of people heal the political divide in their families and communities, exploring insights and tools derived from mindfulness, relational neurobiology, Nonviolent Communication, and Moral Foundations Theory.
Partisanship has us perceiving and reacting to threats, looking for signs of the enemy in our relationships. Covid-era behaviors like masking have intensified this bad mental habit of moral quarantine. How can we reduce the cognitive biases and close the distance between us?
I WROTE THIS: My writing teeth got cut on local editorial pages. The tradition continues!
I ALSO WROTE THIS: Because I actually never wanted to waste my time and life-energy on gender gibberish in the first place, I have a personal Substack where I write about conflict history. Here’s a long read on the human story of the Black Sea:
Surveying the Eurasian landmass, the only substantial region of fertile black dirt is a streak that runs right through southern Russia and Ukraine. Contested parts of Ukraine today have always been a breadbasket because of this soil, known to locals as chernozem. This is the deep history of human contact with that geography.
CUTE SLIPPERS: I bet you had to buy two pairs tho