Amnestia
Update 921. Amnesty Against Women's and LGB Rights Special. #BeMorePorcupine.
Thanks to Bev Jackson (see below) for providing the word ‘Amnestia’ ( Greek for ‘forgetfulness’) which I am using as the header for this piece.
We first reported on the recent Amnesty International Report here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/mapantsula
We followed up here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/harry-potter-and-the-chamber-of-secrets
On 08 July Amnesty International UK, together with Amnesty International UK Section Charitable Trust, published a report entitled A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK. This presented 117 organisations and grassroots groups as an “organised anti-rights movement targeting the rights of women and LGBT+ people”. After widespread criticism Amnesty has withdrawn the report for review. A sister report, Like a snowball: the growth and impact of the gender critical movement in the UK (May 2026), made similar accusations. That remains live (with a list of organisations included in the technical annex).
We have received a number of pieces on this issue so we are splitting tonight’s updates into two with the first part looking at the Amnesty Report (with three other pieces tacked on to reduce the length of the second part). We are skipping a film in this part but will have a film in the second part. We will have endpieces in both parts.
Before I bring you the various pieces, I want to look at the phrase ‘anti-rights’. What does this phrase mean!? Is there really a single organisation that thinks that people do not have some rights!!?? It seems the phrase really means ‘anti-trans rights’. So does that mean that the listed Terfy organisations think that people who describe themselves as ‘trans’ ( leaving aside the fact that that word is actually meaningless) have no rights? Obviously not, we all have the rights now listed in the Human Rights Act such as the right not to be tortured, the right to exercise free speech, the right to practise your religion and so on. But what Amnesty really believe, in their rally cry of ‘transwomen are women’, is that ‘trans people’ should be able to override and destroy the rights of women, children and the LGB community. So it transpires that Amnesty are the ones who are guilty of being anti-rights!! All thoughts gratefully received.
Thanks to three wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
Bev Jackson of LGB Alliance on the substack, The Many Faces of Tribalism writes:
Amnestia [Greek], “Forgetfulness”
Amnesty Has Not Just Forgotten But Betrayed its Founding Principles
Jul 15, 2026
Amnesty International is one of the many organizations that have strayed so far from their original principles as to be now diametrically opposed to them. It was founded in 1961 by a British lawyer named Peter Benenson. In his article “The Forgotten Prisoners”, he coined the phrase “prisoner of conscience” and asked people all over the world to write letters to demand the release of people locked up for their political or religious beliefs. Millions heeded his call. What a wonderful initiative it was.
The NGO currently using the name “Amnesty International” is another organization altogether. It not only subscribes to gender identity doctrine but seeks to elevate this set of beliefs above all other causes.
Three foundational assertions underpin the movement that is intent on imposing gender identity doctrine on society. One is “trans rights are human rights”, the second (a derivative of the first) is “trans women are women”, and the third is that there is no conflict between “trans rights” and women’s rights. All these beliefs are – though sometimes sincerely held, as are religious beliefs -- demonstrably false. They are articles of faith recited and propagated by activists whose education is saturated in a soup of ideological orthodoxy.
First: trans-identifying people have the same human rights as everyone else. Human rights are “rights inherent to all human beings,” regardless of race, sex, nationality, language, or religion. These include the right to life, liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, work, and education. They do not include, have never included, the right to be treated as a member of the opposite sex. That is simply a fiction.
Second, “trans women” are male. They are men. They may wish they weren’t men, wish everyone could see them as women, genuinely believe that they are somehow women, but they are not women. You can’t “identify” out of your sex – if you could, there would be no women left in Afghanistan. It is just another fiction.
Since gender identity activists falsely claim that “trans rights” do include the right to be treated as a member of the opposite sex, and that “trans women are women,” these claims clearly conflict with women’s sex-based rights. They also conflict with gay and lesbian rights, since homosexuality is based on sex, not self-defined “gender.”
The full piece is here:
https://bevjacksonauth.substack.com/p/amnestia-greek-forgetfulness
Lucy Leader on her substack, Bodies get in the way… looks at what rights exactly are being erased?
Amnesty International - Nothing to Take “Pride” in Here
According to Amnesty, only one letter needs protecting
Jul 14, 2026
Amnesty International UK has just released a document that purports to name 51 groups that are engaged in “anti-rights” movements aimed at those oh-so vulnerable “rainbow folx”. They obviously realized that public defamation was not the way to go, so they have removed it from their website; but thanks to Wings Over Scotland, you can still find it here.
Here is a link to one of the named “anti-rights” organization where the issues around the legal aspects of the general stupidity of this action are discussed and many other letters to Amnesty can be accessed.
No surprise to find that most of the groups who are pilloried by Amnesty are not “anti-rights” at all, unless you identify as transgendered. Lesbian Strength, Biera’s Place (a women’s refuge that does not accept any men, even the ones with great manicures and pretty dresses), Gay Men’s Network, LGB Alliance, Keep Prisons Single Sex, Trans Widows Voices, and a raft of various denominations of the Christian faith are all considered to be so bigoted that Amnesty believes that any funding they are receiving should be halted and the Charities Commission should be reconsidering the status of the named groups.
Amnesty said the groups included in the report “visibly oppose the rights” of LGBT people and argued that restrictions on the rights of one group can weaken protections for others.
But looking through the list, it is obvious that only one letter counts when it comes to supporting the rights of people, and that would be the only letter built on the foundational sand of gender ideology, not sexual orientation: T.
This report states that:
‘[H] uman rights belong to everyone equally. Human rights are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. When the rights of one group are restricted, protections for others can also be weakened, even where the effects are not immediately visible.’
What a great statement! Unfortunately, it appears that this is not being applied “equally,” but very selectively to a movement that is really only a men’s rights movement in drag. Ignoring the organizations being pilloried for being anti-abortion, as they are not relevant to this post, all the other ones named are noted for being sex realist: that is, not willing to pretend that a fella in a frock is really a woman, just because he says so.
The full piece is here:
https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/amnesty-international-nothing-to
Great evisceration of Amnesty’s report by Glinner ( hope he won’t mind me quoting all of this since it is short):
You’ve Got Mail
Amnesty are having a nightmare of a week and it’s only Wednesday.
Jul 15, 2026
On 8th July, Amnesty International UK published a report naming the “anti-rights organisations” it had identified operating in Britain. The list included a rape crisis centre, two gay rights charities, a child safeguarding group and a network of NHS doctors. On the 10th, Amnesty took it down.
Then the letters started. Twenty-two of them at the last count, collected in one place by Sex Matters. Not one of them raises its voice, which is what makes them such a pleasure to read.
Sex Matters open in a spirit of reassurance:
“You may be relieved to learn that since you have taken the Growing threat report down we are not planning to sue Amnesty or the author for defamation.”
They go on to suggest Amnesty sit down with women’s and gay rights groups to discuss their common interest in human rights, and then add this: “We offered such a meeting to Sacha Deshmukh in 2022, but he said he was too busy.”
The Gay Men’s Network open with the assessment that the report is “an unserious smear designed to delegitimise political opponents”, and note that Amnesty is now “creating lists of dissident gays and lesbians in a fashion reminiscent of the more oppressive regimes Amnesty might once have railed against.” On the accusation of homophobia: “We frequently work with lesbian groups and the implication we are homophobic is, frankly, just bizarre.” And on the report’s removal: “We note Amnesty International wisely removed this report from its websites on 10th July.” Note the “wisely”.
Their Welsh colleagues at LGB Alliance Cymru skipped the subtlety. The report, they write, is “a deeply silly and malicious piece of low politics designed to ‘evidence launder’ a list of undesirable gay and lesbian political actors.”
Thoughtful Therapists, accused of supporting conversion practices in a report that never defines them, reached for Lewis Carroll: “As in the case of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, ‘Sentence first - verdict afterwards.’”
Kate Coleman’s letter opens with a detail Amnesty’s researchers somehow missed: “Notwithstanding that the organisation I set up, Keep Prisons Single Sex, shut down in 2024, I am minded to write to you”. The growing threat Amnesty identified includes a group that hasn’t existed for two years.
Third Sector SEEN had to respond to the report’s claim that the anti-rights movement enjoys “substantial financial resources and funding networks”. Their reply: “Third Sector SEEN has no funding” and is run entirely by volunteers.
Then there’s LGB Alliance. Amnesty, remember, intervened on the losing side of the Supreme Court case that For Women Scotland won last year:
“Having lost the argument at the UK Supreme Court, Amnesty has now taken the extraordinary step of branding LGB Alliance (along with For Women Scotland and numerous other organisations) part of an ‘anti-rights’ movement. It somehow neglected to add the Supreme Court.”
They sign off with “Otherwise we will consider next steps”, a sentence every institution in Britain knows how to translate.
Underneath the politeness, the letters keep circling the same, sad thought. For Women Scotland, fresh from a court win protecting women in Scottish prisons: “The old Amnesty would have taken that case rather than attack the women who brought it.” Thoughtful Therapists: “A former version of Amnesty would have been strongly committed to following evidence and the rule of law.” The Gay Men’s Network: “Having once protected dissenters in politics, we take the view Amnesty is now in the business of harassing and defaming gay men and lesbians who express political views it does not like.” These are people who used to be members. Some of them probably still have the candle badge in a drawer.
Amnesty’s response is written in the purest passive voice. It “regrets that this briefing was uploaded to our website without going through the established internal review processes”. Nobody wrote it, you understand. It was uploaded.
And then, the closer. Beira’s Place, the women-only sexual violence support service JK Rowling founded and funds in Edinburgh, skipped the letters page and went straight to lawyers. The report, they write, “erroneously and maliciously categorises our client as an ‘anti-rights organisation’”. Access to a single-sex service is “a basic right” for women who’ve experienced sexual violence. And then:
“It is therefore beyond comprehension that a supposed human rights organisation would genuinely consider that the work done by Beira’s Place could be classed as ‘anti-rights’.”
The demands are not gentle: permanent withdrawal, an apology on Amnesty’s homepage, an external review into how the “egregious falsehood” got published, and an instruction to preserve all relevant documents. Lawyers only tell you to keep your emails for one reason.
Rowling posted the letter herself: “Another letter to add to Amnesty UK’s overflowing mail box, this one from women-only rape support service, Beira’s Place.” She’s also offered to pay the legal costs of any women’s organisation that fancies taking Amnesty to court.
For years, Amnesty championed the idea that letter-writing gets results. Sadly, for them, the lesson was learned too well.
Sources: the full set of letters, collected by Sex Matters. Beira’s Place letter coverage via LBC and HotAir.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/youve-got-mail
Sex Matters together with 40 other organisations have complained about Amnesty to the Charity Commissioner and also referred to many ‘trans rights’ groups that have been smearing ‘gender critical’ groups:
The Charity Commission must act
Jul 16, 2026
Sex Matters, together with forty of the organisations targeted by Amnesty International, has written to Dame Julia Unwin, chair of the Charity Commission, calling for a reset on the culture of intolerance towards gender-critical views in the sector. Charities should be leading the way in upholding human rights and the law, not smearing those who do.
The Charity Commission should clarify that every charity must follow the Equality Act and ensure that trustees have an accurate, lawful understanding of its purposes as set out in its governing document. This includes where that refers to women and girls or men and boys, to sex or sexual orientation, and to equality and human rights.
The full piece including the full letter is here:
https://www.sex-matters-news.org/p/the-charity-commission-must-act
Nicole Lampert reports in the Telegraph of the granddaughter of Sean MacBride, Amnesty’s late co-founder and international chairman, Iseult White’s experience with Amnesty International Ireland:
How Amnesty International lost its way
With the blacklisting of feminist groups and suspension of its Israeli branch, the charity has steadily abandoned its founding principles
16 July 2026
As the granddaughter of Sean MacBride, Amnesty’s late co-founder and international chairman, Iseult White feels the human-rights charity is part of her DNA. In the Seventies and Eighties, the pre-Christmas period at home was always spent writing to various prisoners of conscience around the world, and supporters of Amnesty’s work were always in and out of her grandparents’ house.
An Irish Republican, MacBride, who died in 1988, had spent time in prison, as had his firebrand mother, Maud Gonne, who set up the Women Prisoners’ Defence League. Years after Amnesty was founded in London in 1961, initially to fight for prisoners of conscience, MacBride widened its remit in the 1970s to champion miscarriages of justice and oppose torture. A fundamental principle of the organisation was that human rights were universal.
So when, in 2020, White saw that Amnesty International Ireland had signed a letter from the lobby group Transgender Equality Network of Ireland, effectively calling for the silencing of free speech on trans issues, she saw red. The letter demanded that the media and politicians “no longer provide legitimate representation” for people described as sharing “bigoted beliefs”.
“The whole letter was bats--- crazy, and I couldn’t believe that Amnesty had signed,” says White, a psychotherapist. “And then I saw the CEO of Amnesty on Twitter claiming it was only British feminists who had any sort of issue around self-ID.”
The Irish Amnesty had effectively waded into what had become known as the gender wars, which saw many feminists and gay men coming out against the idea that society should unquestioningly treat a biological man as a woman if they identify as the opposite sex.
But attempting to silence those who held an opposing view seemed like “authoritarian behaviour”, which is what Amnesty was established to campaign against. “I was shocked,” says White, who describes herself as same-sex attracted. “I felt hurt. So I put myself out there, I wrote a letter saying that by signing such a document, Amnesty was seeking to deny legitimate representation to people of conscience.”
White soon discovered what happens if you speak out against the trans lobby. She got death threats and was warned by her bosses to stay off social media. It became such a storm that she felt she had to take some time off work.
But at the same time she started to look at Amnesty with clearer eyes, and some of the projects it was involved in – from working with pimps to legalise prostitution to working with a British group since accused of having an “Islamist orientation and views” – shocked her, all the more because the organisation’s reputation relies on the good work done by her grandfather and others. The Amnesty International building in Dublin is named after MacBride, who served as Amnesty’s international chairman until 1975 and helped shape it into a global human-rights NGO.
“Amnesty dines out on its reputation,” says White. “Newspapers parrot their findings. People assume what they say is correct. I did. It was only through this experience that my understanding was totally changed. Watching the relationship between governments and NGOs like Amnesty and Stonewall, and how they have worked to silence ordinary people from speaking up about things that impacted them: I didn’t realise this could happen. This is the exact opposite of what my grandfather and others set up the organisation to do.”
White was one of the earlier figures to start raising the alarm about Amnesty’s recent approach. This week, though, a spotlight was shone on the body’s approach to trans issues – and women – when its UK arm published a report called A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK, written by Chiara Capraro, a programme director at Amnesty International UK. It warned that an “anti-rights ecosystem” was threatening “the safety of women and LGBT+ people in the UK”. It identified 117 of these supposedly dangerous organisations, which ranged from British feminist and lesbian and gay organisations to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, to American Christian groups. Perhaps most shockingly it listed Beira’s Place – JK Rowling’s charity for female rape survivors – among the alleged offenders, for which it is now facing legal action from the Harry Potter author.
The full piece is here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/dd9b6b03fc3cb2d8
Jessica Murray in The Guardian reports on Amnesty self-referring themselves to the regulator and providing an apology - but will this be enough?
Amnesty UK self-reports to watchdog after calling JK Rowling women’s centre ‘anti-rights’
Beira’s Place in Edinburgh, founded by the author, says claim was ‘deeply offensive’ as it considers legal action
16 Jul 2026
Amnesty International UK has referred itself to the charity regulator over a report it published that described a sexual violence support centre founded by JK Rowling as “anti-rights”.
The UK branch of the global human rights charity listed Beira’s Place in Edinburgh among more than 100 organisations it said were part of an anti-rights movement.
It later apologised and removed the list – which was titled “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK” – saying it had not gone through “the established internal review processes”.
Lawyers acting for Beira’s Place have accused Amnesty of defaming the organisation and have threatened legal action unless it apologises, permanently withdraws the report and commissions an external review into why it was published.
Rowling has also invited other organisations who are considering legal action after being included on the list – which she described as a “blacklist” – to apply to the JK Rowling Women’s Fund to help with legal costs.
JK Rowling, front left, with the Beira’s Place board of directors in 2022. Photograph: Nicole Jones/PA
On Thursday, the Charity Commission confirmed that Amnesty International UK had referred itself by submitting a serious incident report, and that it was considering whether it needed to take action. A spokesperson said: “We can confirm that concerns have been raised with us about a briefing published by Amnesty International UK charitable trust.
“In line with our guidance, the charity has also submitted a serious incident report. We are assessing the matters raised to determine what, if any, role there might be for us as charity law regulator.”
It has not launched a formal investigation.
Earlier this week, a spokesperson for Amnesty International UK, said the list was “promptly removed” as its language did not reflect the charity’s position. “We regret that this briefing was uploaded to our website without going through the established, internal review processes that are in place to ensure consistency, accuracy and alignment with Amnesty International UK’s positions,” they said.
The charity added that it was committed to defending the rights of women and trans people, and that no community should be “singled out for unfair treatment”.
UK - Trans Bash Back
Meanwhile there is a report on X that the police are investigating Trans Bash Back and speculation as to whether this is linked to barrister Jolyon Maugham deleting his Blue Sky Account.
The police are now investigating Bash Back.
Jolyon has deleted his Bluesky account. I wonder if there is a connection.
Jolyon is a KC who thinks it is ‘legitimate’ for masked men to smash up venues with hammers if the women inside them want women-only spaces. He thinks he is progressive, kind and reasonable.
https://x.com/Shilisad1/status/2077422171849216256
UK - SEEN In Journalism
The wonderful, Cath Leng is standing down as Director of SEEN In Journalism and handing the baton to Janet Murray. Thanks for all your hard work, Cath and welcome to Janet:
https://seeninjournalism.substack.com/p/a-new-chapter-for-seen-in-journalism
The Construction of the ‘Transgender Child’
Very detailed and helpful analysis of the creation of the ‘transgender child’ from Gender Critical Social Worker.
https://gendercriticalsocialworker.substack.com/p/the-cultural-construction-of-the
Endpiece
From Liz Parker
#BeMorePorcupine
#KeepTerfing
#BeMoreSaneLikeOurParents
#KeepFighting
#RepealTheGRA
#AdultHumanFemale
#LetWomenSpeak
#LGB✂️TQ
#BeMoreDissident
#HoldTheLine
#StopTheBlockersTrial
#NeverSurrender
#NeverForget
#TruthWillTriumph
#WeWillWin
Presumably Amnesty International UK employ lawyers? You would think they at least would know and understand the scope of effects of UK legislation which brought it in line with the Articles of the ECHR as long ago as 2005.
This stopped being about Human Rights in 2010 when the Blairites ramped through the Equality Act and became about ideologically dismantling societal norms.
Thanks Dusty and everyone for standing up for our anti-rights rights! Gonna click on woke Jesus now ....