Nutmeg's week

A new regular column from my favourite account on X @RIPX4Nutmeg

If you thought trans insanity in the media might be fading now that Donald Trump is banning men from women’s spaces, think again. This was Lady Gaga’s speech when she won a Grammy for best pop duo/group performance with Bruno Mars earlier this week, in which she, for some reason, talked about “trans people”, saying they’re “not visible”.

And this was the opening of an episode of The Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart said that Trump was a “dick” for trying to make women-only spaces women-only again. (Stewart has form, in 2022, he told his viewers"Puberty blockers do not change people permanently”)

In fact, it’s been quite a week for gender hysteria….

The trans shield is deployed on a child rapist and mass murderer, but not on someone who tweeted negatively about George Floyd.

The incomparable JL wrote of the shocking Newsweek puff piece about a man who raped an 11-year-old girl, then tied her and sister to a bed, and then set fire to both of them. He also robbed, raped and murdered their mother.

The murderer is reported to have found happiness in prison ‘presenting as female’ and suggests the three people he brutally killed might still be alive if he’d just felt able to ‘transition’ earlier in his life. He claims he's a different person now that he’s ‘Linda’ Mai Lee, and the article’s sympathetic author seems to agree.

The same sympathy has not been extended to the first male actor to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Actress category for the Netflix film Emilia Pérez though. Spanish actor Karla Sofia Gascón, who plays a male drug lord who erases his past wrongdoing by ‘transitioning’ into a saintly ‘woman’, has not been able to erase the record of tweets he wrote earlier this decade, which were critical of Islam, George Floyd and the response to COVID-19.

Unit: Karla Sofia Gascon

Since the tweets were discovered, Gascón has been removed from the pre-Oscars and Netflix publicity campaigns for the film and has faced calls to hand back his nomination, which he has refused to do. It’s now likely we will be spared the spectacle of the legitimate nominees for Best Actress faking tears of joy as Gascón gives his acceptance speech at the ceremony in March. Unfortunately for him, the ‘trans shield’ doesn’t work for everyone.

Is this the worst BBC article ever?

The Newsweek article might be the worst thing that’s ever been published, but just a couple of days later the BBC published what might be its worst-ever story.

In what appears to be an advert for a company that makes chest binders for girls, the BBC wrote about a woman who pretends to be a man called Jay-Harley, who is so disturbed by having to wear ‘female underwear’ during her period that she has sometimes stayed at home. In a contradiction of the idea that ‘trans men are men’ which is enforced throughout the article, she still claims victimhood because she had to “pretend to be a lad just to go to the shop, a restaurant, or pub.”

In other words, she’s a woman, but because she pretends to be a man, the BBC also pretends she’s a man. Pretending to be a man is both life-saving and makes her brave and stunning, but at the same time pretending to be a man is also an awful experience which makes her a victim, and means the BBC’s readers know she is not actually a man. As always with gender ideology, it feels like you’re meant to be confused, because that makes it more difficult to call out the nonsense.

The BBC also reveals in the article that using a binder for 18 hours a day ‘because of his (sic) job as a barista’ led to ‘bumps developing on his (sic) ribs from the compression’. The ‘non-binary’ therapist consulted by the BBC as an ‘expert’ states that, although the Cass Review found that binder use was ‘painful, and potentially harmful,’ it is necessary because it ‘reduces risk of violence’. The piece ends with promotions for Jay-Harley’s ‘trans’ coffee mornings held at the café she runs, and for a ‘trans underwear brand’, which sells binders and ‘packing underwear’ to simulate a ‘bulge’.

Brittle Whittle

Professor Stephen Whittle is the female legal scholar who has played one of the most pivotal roles in dismantling women’s rights in the UK, not least by influencing both the Gender Recognition Act (2004) and the Equality Act (2010).

This week she appeared on LBC after it emerged that a film showing a teenage girl taking cross-sex hormones and using a chest binder as part of her 'transition to a man' has been made available to every state school in the UK to celebrate LGBTQ+ History month.

When asked for her comments, she said the film will reduce both 'transphobia' and child suicides. Unfortunately, she didn’t appear to expect to be challenged on these ludicrous claims, and when she was, she got aggressive and put the phone down.

Who let the DOGE out?

One of the biggest stories in the world this week has been the US government’s new and temporary Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, which, just one week after Donald Trump had been inaugurated, had already shut down 85 public diversity contracts worth more than $1 billion.

USAID alone had seven contracts worth a total of $375 million, and we’ve been discovering what some of the money was being spent on. For example, $47,000 of US taxpayers’ money went to a transgender opera in Colombia while $32,000 was spent on a transgender comic book in Peru. BBC Media Action in the UK, a charity that aims to 'make a safer planet for LGBTQI+ people', was also being paid £2.6 million a year via USAID.

Most people probably have no idea what BBC Media Action is or, more importantly, that even if you live in Britain and don’t pay the licence fee, you’re probably still funding it, as more than £3 million was granted to it in the last year out of taxation by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

The impact of Musk’s success has finally raised questions about taxpayer spending on UK diversity initiatives. In January, a Freedom Of Information request about these matters was submitted to West Yorkshire Police, a force that recently announced that it has a £17.4 million funding gap. The response came through this week: West Yorkshire Police employs NINETEEN diversity officers. Their combined salary is well over £1 million per year, and that excludes the £361,000 the force spends every year on diversity training programmes.

One of the biggest examples of taxpayer waste like this has of course been in academia. The ‘asexual activist’ Yasmin Benoit has just been appointed as a visiting research fellow at King’s College London.

However, even this grift doesn’t come close to some of the taxpayer-funded projects that the journalist Charlotte Gill has discovered. For example, she found that one man - who’s not even British, he’s a Portuguese academic based in Sweden - was given £840,000 of British taxpayers’ money to watch gay porn made in Europe in the second half of the 20th century.

Story of the week

Now you see him, now you don’t. Dr. ‘Beth’ Upton

A&E nurse Sandie Peggie’s tribunal case started on Monday. Peggie is claiming sexual harassment related to a protected belief, indirect discrimination and victimisation by her employer and a male doctor, Dr ‘Beth’ Upton. Upton immediately began using women’s facilities when he began self-identifying as a woman. Fife Hospitals Board had requested that the hearing be held in private but Sandie, with the help of Sex Matters, For Women Scotland and Tribunal Tweets, was granted her request for proceedings to be public. Peggie said, “going to an employment tribunal is very stressful for all concerned, but everyone has a right to a fair and public hearing. Changing rooms are a place where we expect privacy. Courtrooms are not.”

Peggie objected to sharing a women’s changing room at her workplace with the doctor, who undressed in front of her while they were alone. She then became the focus of lengthy disciplinary action, including suspension. The doctor’s own submissions accuse Peggie, who has decades of experience as a dedicated nurse, of ‘micro-aggressions’ such as failing to make eye contact with him.

During a hostile cross-examination on Tuesday, Peggie stood firm in her assertion that sharing a changing room with a man, however he behaves, is intimidating in itself. When questioned why the situation came to a head, she replied that her period was so heavy she thought it may have leaked through her clothes and she felt distressed about dealing with this in the male doctor’s presence.

Peggie told Upton that she felt embarrassed and didn’t feel she should have to deal with this issue in the proximity of a man; he responded that he had every right to be there as a ‘trans woman’ and later accused her of using discriminatory language towards him.

Maya Forstater gave evidence as a witness for Sandie on Wednesday, which BBC Reporting Scotland ignored.

Afterwards Maya wrote this on X:

The male doctor’s legal representative questioned Maya’s ‘belief’ that ‘trans women are men / male’, since Maya isn’t a biologist. As incredible as this exchange seems, it is made all the more ridiculous by the fact that the lawyer had referred to her client with male pronouns on at least 21 occasions at the time of writing. The outcome of the tribunal will have huge implications for women inside and outside of the NHS.

As Maya concluded her thread: ‘It is utterly shameful.’

See you next week.