Nutmeg's week

The thing that never happens keeps happening

Another week, another man who says he’s a woman is jailed for child sexual abuse offences in the UK.

‘Vicky Butler’ was sentenced to 15 years in jail, after being found guilty of four counts of assaulting a girl under the age of 13 and two counts of assaulting a girl under 13 by penetration. In addition, he pleaded guilty to one count of sexual activity with a child on at least three occasions. All the victims were girls aged between 5 and 13.

Most of the reports did describe Butler as a “man”, and used he / him pronouns for him, but none explained why he has changed his name to Vicky. This does, at least, represent progress given that last week we saw headlines like this:

On the same day that Butler was sentenced, it was reported that Edward Durlik had been sentenced to nine years in prison, also for carrying out sexual offences, also against three girls (aged between eight and 14). And, he also, sometimes, pretended he was not a man. Police said he posed intermittently as an 11-year-old girl, a 13-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl online, and used photos of a child known to him to support the fake persona he was portraying.

Durlik’s trial, incidentally, took place at Guildford Crown Court, some of which was at the same time and same courthouse as the trial of Stephen Ireland and David Sutton, two Pride organisers and trans activists, who are currently defending themselves against numerous child sexual abuse charges. (Note how SurreyLive, a supporter of Pride in Surrey, references who they worked for but doesn’t actually name it in the headline and opening sentence).

All these stories led to numerous people on social media ironically stating ‘This Never Happens’, which even US commentators are now using for their own cross-dressing paedophiles. The phrase probably became prominent after legal academic and transvestite, Professor Alex Sharpe, talked about how ‘utterly bogus’ it is to claim that a cross-dressing man could be a threat to women, if he used their spaces, during a BBC interview (because he refused to participate in a debate) in 2018, adding that if it happened, we would know about it.

Sharpe has just written a ‘new’ paper, Deceptive Sex: Rethinking Consent from the Gender Margins, in which he concludes that rape laws should be loosened for men who lie about their sex.

Speaking of transgender academics, Sophie Grace Chappell, a man who once said it “would not matter” if more women were murdered as a result of the introduction of self ID, will be talking about gender ideology at this year’s Oxford Literary Festival.

Even the BBC doesn't want to hear from Iran’s women

A BBC World Service report highlights Iran’s brutality, detailing how the regime imprisons women for wearing ‘provocative and revealing clothing’ and subjects prisoners to mistreatment. Curiously, though, the piece sidesteps the experiences of women entirely, focusing instead on the struggles of a cross-dressing man with a Michael Jackson-esque nose, leaving the promised perspective on female victims conspicuously absent.

Doctor Cuckoo

The actor David Tennant, a trans activist who took his 11-year-old ‘non-binary’ child to Pride, hosted the BAFTAs last weekend. Given that last year, he got political during a speech and wished that Kemi Badenoch was dead, and he has links to Neil Gaiman, he might have decided to steer clear of politics - but no, he got political and, as anyone would have predicted, it was a cringe-fest.

One of the winners at the BAFTAs was Zoe Saldaña, who won the award for best supporting actress in the film Emilia Pérez, about a male gangster who becomes a woman. (And the man who played the titular role was not at the show because he’s been cancelled after it emerged he’d criticised Islam and George Floyd).

Saldaña, probably like most of the people at the ceremony, has a ‘trans child’ relative - a girl who she calls ‘him’ and ‘they’ - who she dedicated the award to.

The 2025 BAFTAs in review: A woman won best supporting actress for her ‘trans’ gangster film. She blanks the ‘trans actor’ as he’s ‘racist’. She dedicates the award to her ‘trans child’ relative who she ‘misgenders’. And it’s all hosted by an unfunny trans activist who wished a black woman was dead.

While all this seems quite embarrassing, maybe it was a ratings success?

No. Despite being in a primetime BBC One slot, fewer people watched the 2025 BAFTAs than a repeat of an episode of Antiques Roadshow from 2017, which aired on the same channel at 6pm. And the show has been a ratings failure for at least the last four years running.

Speaking of ratings flops and David Tennant - there is now talk of Doctor Who, which has seen its ratings collapse in recent years, a period that included Tennant returning to the programme amid storylines including a villainous drag queen, the Doctor being sexually attracted to men and a monster revealing its pronouns, being axed.

Pink Phony Club

You may remember that in 2023 Dublin Pride posted on its website a picture from a march in 1983 in which a protester was holding a sign saying ‘Trans Rights Are Human Rights’. There was, of course, one problem with this - the sign actually said ‘The police aren’t on your side either’, and it was a reference to a young man who had been killed in an alleged homophobic attack. Someone at Pride had digitally removed the reference to the police to include a reference to ‘trans rights’ instead.

This historical revisionism keeps happening. We’ve seen numerous attempts by trans activists to detail that Nazis committed genocide against ‘trans people’ as part of the Holocaust, when there isn’t evidence of one single person who said they were transgender being murdered.

It’s now also emerged that an academic at the University of Nottingham used images of prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp, in which their triangles had been coloured in pink, to highlight a talk about ‘LGBT victims of Nazi Germany’. The LGBT press then used the original image, even though it is actually a picture of … persecuted Jehovah’s Witnesses.

This week, CNN ran a lengthy article about a former slave who was one of several people who gave evidence about a race riot he’d experienced in Memphis in 1865.

More than a decade later he was arrested for wearing women’s clothing. He was therefore described as a ‘pioneering transgender woman’, and his plight is the same that ‘black trans women’ face today.

As one X user pointed out, the man’s testimony about the race riot seems to beb missing certain key details. According to CNN, he claimed that a group of white men were on the rampage looking for black people to murder, and during this, they found him (a black man) and a black girl, in a house. Four white men then demanded a ‘woman to sleep with’ and raped both of them. There doesn’t seem to be any mention that the men were bothered that they had raped an intact man, and no explanation why they didn’t kill him, despite killing everyone else that they could.

Manic Street Preachy

The Manic Street Preachers have a new album out. It includes the song ‘Dear Stephen’, in which they say they are prepared to forgive Morrissey for his ‘hateful’ political views, such as ‘diversity means conformity’, provided he stops having them.

Been Put Upton

The persecution of nurse Sandie Peggie continued with the news that she is to face an NHS misconduct hearing for ‘misgendering’ Dr Upton while in conversation with colleagues. This development is made all the more ridiculous by the fact that Upton’s own legal representative has ‘misgendered’ him multiple times during the tribunal.

While this hearing has now been rescheduled at Sandie’s request, it’s possible it could eventually result in her sacking. This move seems to be another attempt to silence a brave woman who has withstood so much already, simply because she asserted her right to not to share changing room space with a man.

The Scottish Labour leader and deputy leader, Anas Sarwar and Jackie Baillie, declared support for Sandie and admitted that MSPs should not have supported the SNP’s self-ID gender laws.

Sarwar expressed regret that Scottish Labour ‘took at face value the Scottish government when they, on the record, said that nothing in the legislation would negatively interact with the Equality Act.’ This naivety, or negligence, does not reflect well on Scottish Labour.

If you are not yet familiar with some of the key points of the Sandie Peggie tribunal case, or would appreciate an expert legal perspective, Mr Menno’s discussion with barrister Sarah Phillimore is a must:

Sarah notes that the line Dr Upton’s side is trying to draw in this case, which relies upon the idea that sex doesn’t exist, is ‘terrifying’, but there are reasons to be optimistic. The refusal of NHS Fife’s request to have the hearing in private and the fact that Sarah herself can discuss the case without a realistic fear of professional repercussions demonstrates how much things have changed for the better. Sarah also expresses optimism for Sandie herself should her case fail at the tribunal level. As Sarah concludes, ‘we’ve just got to keep hitting the piñata [of gender ideology] until it collapses.’

History of seamen

Did you struggle for something to do with the kids this half term? Fortunately the BBC was here to help, with details of how your children can find out more about the ‘maritime history of LGBTQ+ communities’.

See you next week!