Close your eyes and idennify

Bev Jackson provides some background on Amnesty:

In the UK, the indefatigable women’s rights group For Women Scotland (of whom the late YouTube genius Magdalen Berns was a founding member) achieved a significant victory against the Scottish Ministers at the UK Supreme Court. On 16 April 2025, the Court ruled that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010 and related legislation and regulations, “sex” means (and has always meant) biological sex and that “woman” means (and has always meant) biological woman. That means that all single-sex provisions such as changing rooms and prisons must indeed be single-sex. The inclusion of any male, however he identifies, means that the provision would no longer be single-sex. (Just as it has been observed (not by the Supreme Court!) that a single peanut in a supposedly peanut-free dish is not peanut-free).

LGB Alliance and lesbian groups intervened on the side of For Women Scotland as “the lesbian interveners,” arguing that under the terms of the Equality Act, correctly understood, a “Gender Recognition Certificate” does not turn a straight man into a lesbian. The Supreme Court agreed that it does not. Another consequence of the ruling was to enshrine the rights of lesbians and gay men to their own single-sex associations. Intervening on the other side was Amnesty International UK.

Excellent punchline. On the one hand, a “certificate” does not turn a man into a woman or a straight man into a lesbian. On the other hand…Amnesty International? What next? Amnesty International saying pigs have wings, Trump is intelligent and highly educated, up is down, children are adults?

When Amnesty says, “trans rights are human rights,” it means that trans-identifying people have a “human right” to be treated in all respects as a member of the opposite sex if they so “identify.” 

And yet when has that ever been a right? When has “they so identify” been the last word on significant personal facts, in defiance of an obvious physical reality?

In 2025, Amnesty UK tried out a new term of abuse for those who argue for women’s and LGB sex-based rights. In a bizarre rhetorical flourish, it started calling them “anti-rights.” The writer behind a series of documents and interviews making these accusations is Chiara Capraro, a British-Italian Amnesty UK staff member with the title “Gender Justice Programme Director.” This new terminology brands everyone who fights for women’s, lesbians’ and gay men’s sex-based rights “anti-rights.” As if the supposed right of trans-identifying people to be treated as the sex they want is the only right worth defending. To create confusion and to cement this weird notion in the public mind, Capraro lumps gender-critical campaigners together with anti-abortion Evangelical groups funded from the US. Worse still, she calls all those — including groups of therapists and clinicians – who oppose the medical “transitioning” of children “anti-rights.”

It’s a re-naming cascade. If we can do it with one important fact we can do it with all of them. People are trees; trees are waterfalls; bricks are feathers; feathers are bridges; up is down.

Capraro carried on like this for quite a while, issuing another report in January 2026, condemning the phrase “sex-based rights,” which she says “do not exist in human rights law.” This is of course incorrect, since the rights and protections enshrined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) are explicitly based on sex.

This is called “using gender as your backstop”.

Of course there were sporadic protests against the offensive characterization of people campaigning for their sex-based rights as part of an “anti-rights” movement, but it was not until July 2026, when Capraro crossed a line that could be seen from outer space, that Amnesty UK’s position attracted widespread outrage and calls for retractions and apologies in the media. I am trying to imagine how Capraro thought it made sense to include the support service for female rape survivors Beira’s Place, set up and fully funded by JK Rowling, on a list of organizations comprising the UK’s “anti-rights” movement. Nor can I fathom what she was thinking when she included groups of feminist lawyers on her blacklist. Nor how she thought it was compatible with Amnesty UK’s charitable status to suggest that the Charity Commission review the charitable status of the groups concerned.

Pickling. It’s pickling that does it. Pickle yourself in a fatuous fantasy-based ideology and before you know it you can’t think clearly to save your life.

On the role of women in the promotion of gender identity doctrine: the writer of the “anti-rights” reports attacking women’s and LGB rights groups and those promoting child safeguarding is Chiara Capraro. The Chief Executive of Amnesty UK is Kerry Moscogiuri. The chief executive officer of Amnesty International – which, despite its opportunistic disavowal of Capraro’s latest antics, is fully on board with the “anti-rights’ narrative — is Dr Agnès Callamard. All women.

Depressing, isn’t it.

Extremely.