Nutmeg's week

John Oliver makes a fool of himself for 45 minutes

Let’s start off with some good news this week. Just one month after the founder of Pride in Surrey, and a senior volunteer at Pride, were found guilty of numerous child sexual abuse offences, two Pride events for this year have been cancelled. One of these events is in Hereford, where the organisation running it is closing down, the other is in Plymouth. In both cases they cite a lack of funding, such as corporate sponsorships, and a lack of people willing to volunteer, as the main two problems.

Last Decade Tonight

Last Week Tonight is a weekly US HBO show that’s aired since 2014. It’s presented by the British comedian, John Oliver, who gets paid $1 million per episode (over 300 have been made) to quickly read out an autocue for 30 to 45 minutes, typically while sporadically smirking and swearing loudly. Most of each show is spent delving into a single topic and, given that one of the show’s researchers is a cross-dressing man (who changed his name from David Brent to Dee Brent), that topic has been the transgender issue from time to time. In fact, he was accused by JK Rowling of “spouting absolute bullshit” when he last covered it in November.

However, what is surprising is that this week, in the year 2025, he argued for well over 40 minutes that men should compete in women’s sports. It was essentially the same argument The Independent notoriously made in 2019, which feels extremely outdated now.

Except there was one key difference - Jonathan Liew ended that article by stating that ‘trans women are women’. While this is a lie, it is at least logical that if they are women then they should compete in women’s sports. However, in John Oliver’s broadcast, no attempt was made at any point to state that men are in fact women, which must have made the entire episode confusing for anyone who’s not been following this story for the last few years. Instead, his main argument seemed to be that most men who say they are women might have taken drugs to weaken their bodies, and therefore it wouldn’t be fair if they competed against other men.

Worse, he barely acknowledged what the counter-argument - that men should not compete in women’s sports because they are not women. In fact the only time in this episode that anything close to this viewpoint was given an airing was when the views of Lance Armstrong - obviously selected because he’s a famous cheat - were broadcast. Armstrong had once said that Rafael Nadal would win at women’s tennis if he decided he was a woman and was allowed to compete professionally.

This was the only argument he responded to - by stating that men would never transition just to win at a sport. No evidence beyond one man who had ‘transitioned’ saying this was given - and this is an irrelevant point anyway.

He also stated that opposition to men in women’s sport is due to Republican propaganda, and cited a poll saying that 60 percent of people are now opposed. However, no data was given on trends on this issue (probably at least partly because no polls had been needed to ask if men should be in women’s sports up until about 10 years ago). The opposition figure today is also actually about 80 percent.

He then made a number of other disingenuous claims. He said “it is not the case that any man is going to be stronger or more athletic than every woman”, something nobody has ever seriously thought. He stated that the claim that at least 900 women have lost out on medals to men is inaccurate. He said it’s extremely rare that men compete in women’s sports, let alone win them, and, when they do, some women are happy to lose to men anyway because they’re their '“friends”.

The organisation he criticised in the video above is She Won, which has highlighted some of the misleading claims he made about them, including the 900 medals figure, here.

He also said there haven’t been many studies of ‘trans women’ in women’s sport, so we don’t actually know if there are differences between them and women. But there have been many studies on the differences between men and women - he seems to want his audience to believe that those studies shouldn’t be considered useful because the men who were researched in them did not say that they believed they were women. (But he refused to explicitly say this, probably because if he did he might then have to define what a ‘trans woman’ is and how they differ from men who don’t say they are women).

Note that the one example he was able to provide in the video above of a sport where a woman might have an advantage over a man is … an aerobics class. Which isn't a sport.

He also mocked Riley Gaines, saying she didn’t lose out when Lia Thomas beat her at a swimming event because she used the loss to become a famous activist. He laughed at Payton McNabb for suffering permanent and career-ending brain damage after she was hit by a volleyball, stating that her male opponent’s team wasn’t very good. And he sneered at the idea of women-only toilets. He ended the episode by stating that cross-dressing men just want to play sport and are actually the real victims in this issue, and for some reason included a video of a ‘trans man’ saying that playing baseball is good for her mental health. There have been several videos and tweets highlighting much of his misinformation, and ones that explore how he used certain techniques in the episode to misinform - such as inventing ludicrous straw men arguments to ridicule and his sleight of hand use of juxtapositions and deflections.

One of the great ironies of this episode was that it was aired during a time in which there have been numerous examples of men winning in women’s sports. On just the same evening it was broadcast, a professional women’s pool final was contested between two men. That was just after several stories broke about brave women standing up to cheating men. For example one woman walked out of a disc golf tournament because a man was put in the women’s division, while another woman was disqualified from a fencing competition for refusing to compete against a man.

As Josh Howie stated, the episode was at least the funniest thing John Oliver has produced in years, and it maybe led to the showcasing of another great British comedian: Tom Harwood.

This was not the only men in women’s sports story this week. Brighton Seagals is a football team that plays in the Sussex County Women & Girls league. It’s changed its name to Brighton Seapals, as it allows cross-dressing men - and women who say they are men - to play for it. Despite this being dangerous and making no sense, it was treated as inspirational by the BBC, which has made a documentary about them.

There’s no saving Grace

Joseph ‘Grace’ Lavery, a cross-dressing man who is somehow still employed to teach English, gender studies and women’s studies at UC Berkeley (when not on extended sabbatical), has announced that his one-year-old baby is gay.

It’s not the first time he’s made this claim, and this latest bid for attention coincided with the release of a publication date for his wife’s second novel. The wife, who pretends to be a man called Daniel but was a successful female writer called Mallory until she married ‘Grace’, usually functions as an unpaid nanny to the baby ‘Grace’ had with his lover, Lily. ‘Daniel’ (left), Lily (centre) and ‘Grace’ now ostensibly live as a ‘throuple’, although ‘Daniel’ is frequently accidentally locked out of the house when there are no domestic duties left for her to perform.

‘Grace’s’ statement that his baby son is ‘already gay’ was undoubtedly intended as rage bait for ‘TERFs’. He’s since said that as he is a ‘professor of English’, he therefore understands words better than other people, and uses his own special definitions for them. This is literally the same argument used by Humpty Dumpty in Through The Looking-Glass. He is also writing a book that states that gay is just ‘made up’ anyway. This also isn’t the first time he has been deliberately provocative in this way. Lily, the baby’s mother, wore a deliberately sexualising t-shirt (above) for a photo shoot during her pregnancy, which ‘Grace’ posted after the baby was born with the additional information that he was ‘the sweetest and mildest child who ever sucked a tit.’ A friend of the throuple once commented on an Instagram photo of the baby that he ‘gives great head’, which both of his biological parents liked.

His response to the Cass Review, a report focused entirely on children, was to mention that he was ‘moved, galvanized, aroused, and intrigued when people take control of their own bodies.’ ‘Grace’ thinks this is the height of wit, but it’s mostly a sign of how far academia has fallen.

Weekly BBC round-up

BBC News India, which is funded by British licence payers, only launched its YouTube channel in September 2024. Yet there are already several videos about ‘trans’ people in India being victims on it, including this new one.

The 2022 documentary Should I Tell You I’m Trans? has also reappeared on the iPlayer. In it, several people are asked if it’s sexual assault to deceive a partner about your sex. It’s not stated that this is illegal and all but one of the interviewees say no (and that one says ‘trans women are women’ but it’s probably ‘better’ not to lie). The film includes a cross-dressing man who effectively admits he sexually assaults people he meets on nights out. The BBC films him on a night out and presents him in an entirely positive manner, including providing him the opportunity to justify his abuse.

The documentary ends with a bizarre story that somehow made the final cut in which a girl talks about the time she supposedly met a man and had sex with him. He didn’t even know that she ‘identifies’ as a man but she still says she’d like to tell him today that he needs to deal with the fact that he is gay.

In other BBC news, two men who identify as a comedy double act called Larry and Paul spoke to Richard Herring about working for the BBC, on one of his podcasts. They recall writing a sketch for BBC radio which mocked Islamist terrorists. Although the sketch was cleared by the legal department, their boss told them it could never be broadcast because ‘some people in Bradford cheered when the twin towers came down, and some of them are our listeners.’

They say they chose to leave the BBC shortly afterwards. Herring’s nervous laugh and quick change of the subject after this story is symptomatic of his terror of being cancelled. His favourite joke at the moment is far safer than Larry and Paul’s because it consists of ‘cheekily’ implying Graham Linehan, a writer he has hugely admired in the past, is on a par with Hitler because he stands up for the rights of women and girls.

And finally

Apparently Celebrity Big Brother is still a thing. But maybe not for much longer as this year one of the contestants is a drag queen. (Although sanity is also represented by Daley Thompson). Is someone at ITV applying for a job at the BBC?

See you next week!