The Times and Harry The Owl

That's weird. It still works for me. Try copy and pasting the link because it looks like the latter part of the code didn't work as a clicky link.

The ‘company lawyer’ referred to will be Hachette’s in-house legal advisor, rather than Mermaids.

@NoSquirrels - I can't that is right based on the Sunday Times article - quote:

In response to the invitation to suggest changes, the head of legal and policy at Mermaids sent four closely typed pages, including a comment that the article “doesn’t come over as balanced”.

and

Five days earlier, James Benefield, a senior executive at Hodder, had sent Yule the Mermaids review and told him: “Mermaids have requested quite a few changes here. It is important we do follow all of the attached advice — not only is it from a trans-specialist organisation, it is also from the company lawyer who felt they were best placed to review the piece.”

So I take it the "company lawyer" was the head of legal at Mermaids, ie the Hodder executive was emphasising it was not just from some PR person at Mermaids, but from their senior legal representative (and so presumably Hodder were too scared to argue with it).

Not any more, OvaHere! "Page not found"...

Who on earth thought it was a good idea to get a controversial lobby group to review an article about a legal ruling where the audience was going to be A level law students?

What's next? We ask the flat earth society to review articles about space for A level physics students?

What the hell is going on?

If it is this publication there's a 7 day free trial.

www.hoddereducation.co.uk/subjects/law/products/16-18/a-level-law-review-emagazine-volume-15,-2019-20

Am I to understand that this article has already been published? I might have missed it but I got the impression that it has. If that is the case then where is this article? How can we get hold of it to see what has been written? It would be interesting to put it along side other articles of a similar nature, and to compare it to the wording of the ruling itself.

The really galling thing is that this has been warned about for years to a chorus of "don't be so dramatic".

Much like Covid-19 was in February.

Well, this is where we are now. And we can only go forwards, not back.

The ‘company lawyer’ referred to will be Hachette’s in-house legal advisor, rather than Mermaids.
I think that's even worse. They should be expected to justify that advice.

YY Fanny the media side is interesting. Ipso members have basically agreed to conceal certain facts. Hence all the weird news stories about "women" committing crimes that are overwhelmingly committed by men.

The ‘company lawyer’ referred to will be Hachette’s in-house legal advisor, rather than Mermaids. Sounds like the Hachette lawyer sent it to Mermaids, not the editor. Then the editor followed the legal advice. In-house legal in publishing companies are usually generalists a d deal in libel, IP matters etc and will farm out stuff to experts in their fields. It’s perfectly possible this is just a major fuck-up of not understanding the problematic nature of Mermaids - they’ve pitched themselves as ‘experts’ to loads of companies, rather than as lobbyists with an agenda. The in-house legal should have seen this is a wildly problematic set of advice to follow though and been hot on the free speech implications. It should never have got as far as it did with resignations etc.

Thanks ThePurported

And hadn't seen the article by Julie Bindel previously so that was an interesting read.

tbh @DialSquare I think that's the point. This is the new agenda, fact don't matter, they are offensive 😕

So what will happen with the A level article? Given that Hachette stood by it enough to let the author quit over it, will they still publish it? If I were Yule I'd want to publish that four page document by Mermaids.

Yes, verbatim I believe

There's got to be some repercussions legally for this surely. Are court case facts protected in any way?

Not just that, but to slyly change the fact for a fiction.

"So many excellent comments under that article."

They are indeed. People are outraged that this was allowed to happen. I found the article easy to follow, found it hard to believe that Mermaids were allowed to have this much influence over what A Level law students were allowed to read.

So many excellent comments under that article.

It's a shame Andrew Gilligan left the Times. He would have joined the dots with all the other stuff and not made it about JK Rowling.

The comments are better than the article.

Self-identification seems to be acceptable all over the place these days

EHRC - leaked emails suggested they were working with Mermaids to find a test case for suing schools
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3613168-Data-breaches-by-Mermaids-exposed-in-the-Times

Newspapers
thecritic.co.uk/issues/january-2020/triumph-of-the-trans-lobbyists/

I found it difficult to get my head around, but inviting lobby groups to comment on the wording of educational text books/magazines seems like madness to me. Where is the consensus of the experts in this field?