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February 2023

HISTORY Comments turned off

Lauren Smith:Dr John Money and the sinister origins of gender ideology How a cruel, amoral experiment helped birth today’s trans movement.

By on February 7th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/05/dr-john-money-and-the-sinister-origins-of-gender-ideology/

We are all too familiar today with the basics of trans ideology. That biological sex does not determine one’s ‘gender identity’. That someone born biologically male can become female. And that we need to affirm a person’s ‘gender identity’, even if that person is a small child. What few perhaps realise is that the intellectual origins of so much of trans ideology can be traced back to the work of one man – sexologist and psychologist Dr John Money (1921-2006).

New Zealand-born Money was a pioneer in his field of sexuality and gender. In 1955, he was the first person to use the word ‘gender’ as opposed to ‘sex’ to draw a distinction between the biological attributes and the behavioural characteristics that differentiate males from females. He subsequently popularised terms like ‘gender identity’ and even founded the world’s first gender-identity clinic at John Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US in 1966, specialising in the psychological and medical treatment of transgender patients. Above all, Money pushed the view, so central to today’s trans movement, that though we may be born with biologically determined sex characteristics, they do not determine whether we are male or female. Without Money, it’s unlikely that trans ideology, especially the phenomenon of ‘trans kids’, would exist today in the way that it does.

Not everything Money believed about gender has been absorbed by the trans movement. He believed, for instance, that when children are around two years old they pass through a ‘gender-identity gate’, which locks in their gender for the rest of their lives. Few trans activists would make such a claim today. But the central idea that Money first developed is still upheld by trans activists today – namely, that being male or female is not biologically determined. This is the idea that drives trans ideology, and the notion of trans kids, today. It means that someone can be born with male genitalia, but they can still ‘become’ female.

So why is Money rarely mentioned by those promoting trans ideology today? You won’t find him cited in Stonewall educational guides. You won’t see him quoted in any Mermaids documents. And you won’t hear the #BeKind brigade paying tribute to him. The reason for this is simple enough: John Money’s work was creepy, cruel and amoral – and left a trail of misery, pain and suicide in its wake.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ilhan Omar’s Empire of Censorship The accusation of ‘Islamophobia’ is cynically being used to silence critics of woke. Brendan O’Neill

By on February 7th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/06/ilhan-omars-empire-of-censorship/

It is now Islamophobic to talk about anti-Semitism. Dare to comment on anti-Jewish racism and you risk being called a racist yourself. Witness the media meltdown that followed Republicans’ ousting of Democrat congresswoman and Squad kween, Ilhan Omar, from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It is not really Omar’s past dabbling in anti-Semitic tropes that Republicans are concerned about, the woke set say. No, the real reason they booted her out is because they hate Muslims. As Omar herself said, they just don’t want Muslims to ‘have a voice on that committee’. These people are ‘okay with Islamophobia’, she said.

You couldn’t have asked for a better, grimmer illustration of the social poison in identity politics. It’s like racial Top Trumps. Anyone who says they’re worried about Omar’s singular hostility to the Jewish state, and the possibility that it’s motored more by prejudice than principle, will swiftly be accused of prejudice themselves. We should give a ‘hearty eye-roll’ to the Republican handwringing over Omar’s past comments, says a writer for the Guardian. Apparently the real reason these people ‘vilify’ Omar is because she’s ‘outspoken, principled, black, a refugee, African, female and a hijab-wearing Muslim’. Count the points on that Top Trump card! Every identitarian victim category is marshalled to the task of rubbishing the right’s concerns about Squad anti-Semitism.

It all adds up to a sinister silencing tactic. There’s a constant search for ‘the real reason’ people criticise Omar. As a headline in Mother Jones put it, ‘The real reason House Republicans kicked Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee’. You can guess the real reason, right? It’s because ‘she is a black, Muslim woman’. This claim that a nefarious motive lurks behind every calling out of Omar is chilling. It casts aspersions on efforts to raise the issue of anti-Semitism. ‘Why are people really talking about anti-Semitism?’, the woke are encouraged to wonder. Opposition to anti-Jewish racism comes to be seen as a disguise worn by Islamophobes. Drip by drip, concern about anti-Semitism comes to be seen as something fraudulent.

In truth, there are many good reasons, ‘real reasons’, to be unsettled by Omar’s views on Israel. She once said Israel had ‘hypnotised the world’, playing into the trope about Jews, or in this case the Jewish state, being the shady manipulators of world affairs. She also said that American politicians’ support for Israel is all about ‘the Benjamins, baby’, hinting that the filthy-rich Jewish state is buying people off. Then there’s the sheer intensity of her Israel obsession. United With Israel reports that in 2021, 79 per cent of her tweets on foreign affairs were about Israel. In 2022, 48 per cent were about Israel. In contrast, 17.9 per cent were about Saudi Arabia and 3.8 per cent were about China.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Seen Any Other Spy Balloons Lately? An $850 billion defense budget, and we can’t detect a Chinese airship?

By on February 7th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-spy-balloon-biden-administration-trump-administration-pentagon-glen-vanherck-11675724569?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The U.S. Navy is fishing fragments of a Chinese spy balloon out of the Atlantic Ocean, and each fresh detail about this episode raises new and troubling questions. A striking example is the news from the Biden Administration that previous Chinese balloon incursions into the U.S. appear to have gone undetected. This suggests there’s a major hole in U.S. defenses that needs closing.

A senior defense official told reporters on Feb. 2 that a balloon incursion “has happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this Administration. It is appearing to hang out for a long period of time this time around, more persistent than in previous instances.”

The Biden Team was leaking over the weekend that balloons had snuck into U.S. airspace during the Trump Administration, and the obvious implication was to absolve President Biden of political blame. More than one media outfit took the bait. But then Trump officials started denying on the record that they’d ever heard of such an event—from former national security adviser John Bolton to Defense Secretary Mark Esper to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The Administration’s attempt to muddy responsibility is bad enough, but the revelation that at least three past balloon flights evaded U.S. notice is alarming. “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck of U.S. Northern Command told reporters on Monday. In Pentagon argot for the ages, he called it “a domain awareness gap.” The U.S. government ostensibly pieced the puzzle together later with the help of the intelligence community.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

How ‘Diversity’ Policing Fails Science An open-records request reveals that Texas Tech faculty penalize candidates for heterodox opinions. By John D. Sailer

By on February 7th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-diversity-policing-fails-science-equality-equity-education-texas-tech-job-candidates-interview-dei-pronouns-11675722169?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

At Texas Tech University, a candidate for a faculty job in the department of biological sciences was flagged by the department’s search committee for not knowing the difference between “equality” and “equity.” Another was flagged for his repeated use of the pronoun “he” when referring to professors. Still another was praised for having made a “land acknowledgment” during the interview process. A land acknowledgment is a statement noting that Native Americans once lived in what is now the United States.

Amidst the explosion of university diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Texas Tech’s biology department adopted its own DEI motion promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates.” These short, written declarations are meant to summarize an academic job seeker’s past and potential contributions to DEI efforts on campus.

The biology department’s motion mandates that every search committee issue a report on its diversity statement evaluations. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I have acquired the evaluations of more than a dozen job candidates.

To my knowledge, these documents—published in redacted form by the National Association of Scholars—are the first evaluations of prospective faculty DEI contributions to be made publicly available. They confirm what critics of DEI statements have long argued: That they inevitably act as ideological litmus tests.

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