The backlash to gender ideology in the U.K. has been so effective that even leader Keir Starmer has now conceded that biology is, in fact, a real thing.
If the polls are right – and I suspect they are – the U.K. Tory party is set for a historic shellacking that could reduce them to a mere handful of seats. After a shambolic, rollicking ride through twelve years and five utterly forgettable prime ministers, the British public appears to be out for blood. Nigel Farage’s new Reform U.K. party is surging, and the Labour Party’s Keir Starmer seems poised for a landslide victory.
It may seem like a small thing, but it is worth noting that despite the radical progressivism of the Labour Party, the backlash to gender ideology in the U.K. has been so effective that even Starmer has now conceded that biology is, in fact, a real thing. This recent headline from The Independent highlights both how insane our culture has become and the silver (sliver?) lining of sanity that may be returning to the debate:
Blair right that a woman has a vagina and a man has a penis, Starmer says
The subtitle is equally magnificent: “The Labour leader has hardened his position on biological sex.” I do wonder how the editors and headline writers got through all that without dissolving helplessly into giggles, or if any veteran journalist stared bug-eyed at the sorts of things once-venerable publications are reduced to covering. But either way, it is unfortunately significant that the man who is likely going to be the U.K.’s next prime minister does, in fact, acknowledge that women have vaginas and men have penises.
Previously, the Independent noted with solemnity, “Sir Keir” has “previously said that ’99.9% of women’ do not have a penis.” Since then, he has come to the epiphany that no women do, an affirmation that has deeply offended a clutch of delusional men in dresses who are quite certain that they are women, penises notwithstanding. Of course, neither the former Labour PM nor the next one oppose sex change surgeries – they’ve just been forced to admit the obvious.
Former prime minister Tony Blair made his comments in recent interview with Holyrood magazine, noting: I don’t know how politics got itself into this muddle. What is a woman? Well, it’s not a very hard thing for me to answer really. I’m definitely of the school that says, biologically, a woman is with a vagina and a man is with a penis. We can say that quite clearly.”
Blair went on: “The point is this: if people want to reassign their gender and say, ‘OK I may be born biologically a male but I want to reassign as female’, that’s absolutely fine and people should be entitled to do that. And there is no doubt at all there are people who genuinely feel that they are in the wrong body. I know this, I’ve dealt with it over the years. I was actually, I think, the first MP [who] ever had a full set of meetings with transgender people. So, I completely get it.”
Obviously, Blair is being somewhat disingenuous here. As an extraordinarily talented and very slippery politician, he knows quite well “how politics got into this muddle”: because the LGBT movement effectively captured the entire left-wing of the political spectrum as well as much of the right and demanded that their premises be implemented in law and that society be restructured to suit them.
But that aside, Starmer was clearly relieved to have Sir Tony weigh in. “Yes, Tony is right about that, he put it very well,” he told reporters. “I saw it reported, I’m not quite sure when he said it, but I agree with him on that.” Previously, Starmer had stated that Labour MP Rosie Duffield – a woman – was “not right” for saying that “only women have a cervix,” but apparently when Tony Blair says it, “he put it very well.”
Of course, it was Tony Blair’s government that passed the Gender Recognition Act back in 2004, legally granting trans-identifying people the right to change their “legal gender.” Blair embraced the premises; he rejects the conclusion. So, for the moment, does Starmer. It may not seem like much, but in the U.K. in 2024, it’s not nothing.
Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.
He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.
Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.
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The FDA old guard criticized the new leadership in a Dec. 3 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) letter over a higher regulatory bar for vaccines, namely the expectation that most new vaccine approvals will require randomized clinical trials, arguing it could hamper the market.
“Insisting on long, expensive outcomes studies for every updated formulation would delay the arrival of better-matched vaccines when new outbreaks emerge or when additional groups of patients could benefit,” the former commissioners wrote. “Abandoning the existing methods won’t ‘elevate vaccine science’ … It will subject vaccines to a substantially higher and more subjective approval bar.”
But while the former commissioners disclosed their conflicts of interest to the medical journal — per standard practice in scientific publishing — reporters didn’t relay them to the broader public in reports in the Washington Post, STAT News and CNN.
The headlines about a bipartisan rebuke from former occupants of FDA’s highest office give the impression that the Trump administration is contravening established science, but closer inspection reveals a revolving door between pharmaceutical corporations and the agencies overseeing them.
Three of the signatories have received payments totaling $6 million from manufacturers or former manufacturers of COVID vaccines.
Scott Gottlieb has received $2.1 million in cash and stock from his position on the Pfizer board of directors, where he has advised on ethics and regulatory compliance since 2019, according to company filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stephen Ostroff has received $752,310 from Pfizer in consulting fees since 2020, according to OpenPayments.
Gottlieb and McClellan did not respond to requests for comment. Ostroff could not be reached for comment.
FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad outlined the higher standards and shared the results of an internal analysis validating 10 reports of children’s deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine in a Nov. 28 memo to staff. He called for introspection and reform at the agency.
The NEJM letter criticizes Prasad for cracking down on a practice called “immunobridging” that infers vaccine efficacy from laboratory tests rather than assessing it through real-world reductions in disease or death. The FDA under the Biden administration expanded COVID vaccines to children using this “immunobridging” technique, extrapolating vaccine efficacy from adults to children based on antibody levels.
Norman Sharpless — who in addition to previously serving as acting FDA commissioner also served as the head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute — consults for Tempus, a company that collaborates with COVID vaccine maker BioNTech. He has helped steer $70 million in investments in biotech through a venture capital firm he founded in November 2024. Sharpless also disclosed $26,180 in payments in 2024 from Chugai Pharmaceutical, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that markets mRNA technology among other drugs, on OpenPayments.
“I was grateful for the opportunity to serve as NCI Director and Acting FDA Commissioner in the first Trump Administration, and strongly support many of the things President Trump is trying to do in the current Administration,” Sharpless said in an email.
Margaret Hamburg, another former FDA commissioner and signatory of the NEJM letter, has since 2020 earned $2.8 million as a member of the board of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which markets RNA interference (RNAi) technology.
Hamburg did not respond to a message on LinkedIn.
Most signatories disclosed income from biotech companies testing experimental cancer treatments. These products could face tighter scrutiny under Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist long wary of rubberstamping pricey oncology drugs — which Prasad points out often cause some toxicity — without plausible evidence of an improvement in quality of life or survival.
The former FDA commissioners disclosed ties to Sermonix Pharmaceuticals Inc.; OncoNano Medicine; incyclix; Nucleus Radiopharma; and N-Power, a contractor that runs oncology clinical trials.
Andrew von Eschenbach, who like Sharpless formerly served both as FDA commissioner and the head of the National Cancer Institute, disclosed stock in HistoSonics, a company with investments from Bezos Expeditions and Thiel Bio seeking FDA approval for ultrasound technology targeted at tumors.
Some FDA commissioners who signed onto the letter opposing changes to vaccine approvals have ties to biotechnology investment firms, namely McClellan, who consults Arsenal Capital; Janet Woodcock, who consults RA Capital Management; and Robert Califf, who owns stock in Population Health Partners.
Califf did not respond to an email requesting comment. Woodcock did not respond to requests for comment sent to two medical research advocacy groups with Woodcock on the board. Eschenbach did not respond to a LinkedIn message.
The two signatories without pharmaceutical ties may find their judgement challenged by the FDA investigation into COVID-19 vaccine deaths, having either implemented or formally defended the Biden administration’s headlong expansion of vaccines and boosters to healthy adults and children.
David Kessler executed Biden’s vaccination policy as chief science officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, helping to secure deals for shotswith Pfizer and Moderna.
Meanwhile Jane Henney chaired a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report published in October 2025 that praised the performance of FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine surveillance during the pandemic — underwritten with CDC funding.
That assessment clashes with that of a Senate report, citing internal documents from FDA, finding that CDC never updated its vaccine surveillance tool “V-Safe” to include cardiac symptoms, despite naming myocarditis as a potential adverse event by October 2020, and that top officials in the Biden administration delayed warning pediatricians and other providers about the risk of myocarditis after their approval in some children in May 2021, months after Israeli health officials first detected it in February 2021. The Senate investigation named Woodcock, a signatory of the NEJM letter, as one of the FDA officials who slow-walked the warning.
The U.S. Department of Justice will not release the entirety of the federal government’s files on sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein by the end of day Friday, failing to fully comply with a mandate from Congress.
DOJ will release several hundred thousand documents, however, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a Fox News interview. He estimated that “several hundred thousand more” will be released “over the next couple of weeks.”
The delay, Blanche explained, is due to the significant number of redactions that the department must complete in order to protect the identifications of witnesses and victims in the files.
By failing to fully comply with a congressional edict, lawmakers would have grounds to impeach or hold U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress.
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Nov. 18, which President Donald Trump signed into law the next day.
The bill, sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., requires that the U.S. Attorney General “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice” that relate to Epstein and his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Any Justice Department official who does not comply with this law will be subject to prosecution for obstruction of justice,” Khanna vowed.
Epstein died in jail awaiting trial in 2019 and Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.
President Donald Trump, former president Bill Clinton, billionaire businessman Bill Gates, and dozens of other high-profile figures have received intense public scrutiny for their connections with Epstein and Maxwell.
