Imane Khelif; Paris Lees; Jade Thirlwall: Nutmeg's week

Imane is a man

Now we’ve had confirmation via leaked sex test results that boxer Imane Khelif is biologically male, you might have expected the apologies to start flooding in. Perhaps first in line would be those who pretended not to notice this fact when he was awarded Olympic gold last year for beating up women.

Only one apology has been forthcoming and that came from World Boxing, which apologised to … Khelif, for naming him in its statement about the introduction of mandatory sex testing. By asserting that Khelif would not be allowed to compete at any World Boxing event until he passes a sex test, World Boxing apparently breached his privacy and singled him out. The Algerian Boxing Federation claims Khelif has suffered ‘psychological damage’ as a result of World Boxing’s statement. The women whose safety, dignity and privacy was breached by being forced to fight and lose to a man who visibly maintains all the advantages of male puberty are yet to receive an apology or any official consideration at all.

The gloating of those who pretended to support Khelif as a ‘gender non-conforming sportswoman’ last summer has been one of the most grotesque spectacles in this battle to restore sanity. Labour MPs Zarah Sultana, Nadia Whittome, and Kate Osborne condemned as bigots the women who protested a male fighter hitting female opponents, insisting these objections were about “her” lack of “conventional femininity” rather than the fact he is male.

Even the sight of Khelif’s first opponent, Angela Carini, falling to her knees and crying at her inability to compete against the much larger and stronger man was not enough to provoke empathy. Air-headed celebrities and faux-intellectuals such as Rufus Hound, Richard Bacon and Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu embarrassed themselves by claiming to know Khelif was a biological woman and, in Mos-Shogbamimu’s case, mocking Carini’s ‘white women’s tears’. Hound in particular became aggressive in hastily deleted tweets accusing those who recognised Khelif as a man of being ‘fucking idiots’ and ‘cunts’. He even told Dr Emma Hilton, the developmental biologist whose brilliant discussion with Andrew Gold shed so much light on why Khelif has been able to compete, to ‘go boil your head, you handmaiden.’

BBC boxing correspondent, Steve Bunce is one of the only public figures who supported Khelif last year to address the latest news in this cheating saga. During the Olympics he said of Khelif that ‘people have damned this girl because of the way she looks’, called Khelif an ‘Algerian hero’, denied that he was born male and insulted anyone who asked him to rethink. Upon seeing confirmation that Khelif is a man Bunce implied he’d always known he wasn’t female and had simply called for better testing. He wasn’t very happy with the community note on his post.

Sharron Davies, who has been a tower of strength on this issue, called Bunce a hypocrite and told him she has ‘zero respect for a man who was happy to see another man hit a woman in the boxing ring!’ Sharron has called for Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, another man who boxed and won in the women’s category, to be stripped of their Olympic medals. Apparently, this is unlikely to happen because the IOC ‘did not require competitors to be biologically female’, merely to have an ‘F’ on their passport. Khelif has since pulled out of a tournament he would be required to take a sex test to compete in.

Several nights in Paris

What It Feels Like For A Girl, an eight-part drama based on the derided memoir by Paris Lees, began airing on the BBC this week.

The series is about a gay boy in Nottinghamshire, initially aged 15 (but played by a man in his late 20s), who becomes a rent boy to serve the needs of local paedophiles, and then realises he’s a girl. He also commits a crime and gets sent to jail. He might not exactly be qualified to know what it feels like for a girl, but that hasn’t bothered anyone at the BBC.

The show, which lasts in total for nearly six hours, will be broadcast on both BBC One and BBC Three throughout June, and it’s received rave reviews across the mainstream media, including the BBC. For example, one reviewer said it will “save lives” while another described it as “the most important British show since It’s a Sin”.

But when you drill down, those reviews might need a little bit of context added. The first was in the Radio Times by trans activist David Opie, who describes women who know that men and women are not the same as being part of a ‘bigoted troll cult’. The second was by his former employer, Digital Spy, which refused to allow any comments on its social media posts promoting the show.

Perhaps confused by the lack of objective reviews, Paris Lees seemed to think he had a smash hit on his hands. He set up an account on Bluesky to get his fellow trans activists talking about how great the show is, by asking this question:

Unfortunately for him, reality quickly hit home. Well, not that quickly actually. Twelve hours later, the post had received just nine comments, and most of them were from people who thought he was literally asking if they’d seen anything good on TV. In fact, most of the replies were people recommending other shows to him.

There will be a review of the full series next week, but the first half of it, at nearly three hours long, feels like two and a half hours too many. It portrays all gay men as paedophiles, all women have no character, all homophobes are cartoon characters and all ‘Byron’ (Paris Lees) has to do to realise he’s a girl is watch Abigail's Party. This is from the first episode:

The series is full of paedophile apologism. For example, in the book, Paris Lees says Max was a 21-year-old man who groomed him from the age of 13. In the second episode, Max is depicted as 19 years old (but played also by a man in his late 20s), and the duo are presented as similar-aged lovers rather than an adult abusing a child.

We get to see the robbery that Paris Lees was actually jailed for in the third episode. In this portrayal, the victim is another paedophile who suffers no physical violence and Paris is merely the reluctant sidekick. We have no idea how accurate this depiction is as it’s impossible to find anything about the crime from the time online, but it is thought unlikely that a 16-year-old boy would get sentenced to eight months for a non-violent first-time offence.

In episode four, Byron, now 16, steals a wig and puts on a dress. Immediately, every straight man wants to have sex with him, believing he’s a girl, and every woman is jealous of him. The BBC says this is based on a true story.

With the large budget, the mass marketing and the ‘gripping’ storyline, this is a huge hit, yes? Er, no. For a start, even trans activists have turned against it, because the lead actor does not identify as trans and is male. The first episode that was broadcast, at peak time on BBC Three, drew in just 40,000 viewers. This was more than 20 percent below the average ratings for that timeslot for that channel, and even less than Smoggie Queens got for its first episode. Matt Baker’s British Isles on More 4 got nearly five times as many viewers.

This was, of course, not the only case of the ‘clown driving a bus’ theory in action at the BBC this week.

Nature programme Springwatch had Max (he / him) on to talk about ‘his’ love of trees. Except Max is evidently female.

The same programme also used the colours of the trans flag to describe marine biology.

BBC News ran two stories, within a few seconds of each other, about the FA ruling that competitive women’s football in England is, from now on, for women only. The first was relatively objective, featuring different viewpoints. The second was about how a giant cross-dressing man feels about this. Guess which one was tagged so that it appeared on both the BBC News homepage and BBC Sport homepage.

And here is that person that the BBC wants you to pretend is just a sad vulnerable woman who wants to play football.

The BBC is, of course, not alone. The mainstream media continues with the same propaganda. This is from an episode of Narrow Escapes, a Channel 4 documentary series about people who live on Britain’s canals and waterways, this week.

Revolting women

Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester is currently running a Women in Revolt! exhibition, showcasing female artists who ‘helped fuel the women’s liberation movement’ in the 1970s and 1980s.

However, the exhibition also features a sign saying it is ‘trans-inclusive’ in case any woman visiting revolted, presumably against the ‘LGBTQ+ activism’ that was also on display.

At the same time, in London, the two-day ‘Women Create!’ event took place, featuring dozens of cancelled female artists and women at risk of being cancelled. Tickets were being sold on Eventbrite - but it decided to mark the event as ‘postponed’ shortly after it started.

It’s Pride month!

Pride might not be off to the same bang as normal, what with a few senior officers getting convicted for sexually abusing children and many sponsors realising it’s not the PR victory it used to be. But that didn’t stop the usual beclowning.

The head of MI6, who has pronouns in his social media bio, revealed that his organisation is flying the Pride flag for the whole month. Brighton-based Beach Box Sauna issued an apology for organising a women-only sauna session. But perhaps the most embarrassing entity, so far, is Marks & Spencer (M&S), which announced that, for the month of June, online shoppers will be able to donate to LGBT charities via its website. But recently the M&S website was hacked and M&S announced that it won’t be fixed until July - meaning it won’t be possible to buy anything on the website throughout the month of June.

And finally

If you thought the music industry had its peak vacuousness with Kate Nash, maybe think again. This week the singer Self Esteem talked for 40 minutes about how queer and non-monogamous she is, but during which she also mentioned that she’s in a steady relationship with a man. While Jade Thirlwall, performing at a music festival in London, got the crowd to chant “fuck you” to JK Rowling and “transphobes”. She was introduced by the BBC’s ‘I Kissed A Boy’ host Dannii Minogue, who then posted a picture of the two of them grinning together.

See you next week!