Nutmeg's week: Andrew Boff, Sophie Ellis Bextor, Big Brother

BBC Radio Wales wants more people to know about the Welsh language. Who else could you possibly have on to talk about this then, but a drag queen? Even though ‘Catrin Feelings’ spent most of the interview talking about being a drag queen, rather than being Welsh, the interview was still turned into a nearly 1,000-word BBC News story featuring numerous pictures of him ‘performing’.

It wasn’t the best of weeks for drag queens though. ‘Aubrey Ghalichi’, who was the face of Phoenix Pride, has been ‘charged with having sex with a 13-year-old boy’. Aubrey, real name Michael Browder, met the boy on a dating app and has allegedly confessed to raping him — but claimed it was so dark in the alleged victim’s apartment, “he was unable to ascertain the victim’s age,” and believed he was at least five years older. The investigation into him began in the same month that the face of Pride in Surrey in the UK was convicted of raping a 12-year-old boy who he also met on a dating app.

Meanwhile, a warrant for the arrest of the former campaign manager of the SNP, Nathan Sparling, has been issued after he failed to appear in court on charges of embezzling funds from the LGBT charity which also had him as CEO. He is not to be confused with the CEO of Pride in London, who is also under investigation for embezzlement. Some readers may remember Sparling, a trans activist who became drag queen ‘Nancy Clench’ in 2022 after he was found not proven of taking photos of a half-naked man as he slept. The judge described Sparling’s actions as “clearly reprehensible” during a high-profile trial, but said the Crown had not supplied enough evidence to convict him of breaching the terms of the Sexual Offences Act. While the BBC News story about the warrant being issued for his arrest details his career history, it doesn’t mention that he was a relatively famous drag queen. (Reminder: Two years ago the BBC edited its own news story about a paedophile to remove all references to him being a drag queen.)

In fact, speaking of BBC News, there is nothing on it about Barbie Kardashian’s release from jail, the boycott of Netflix over its transgender propaganda or the latest Pride organiser appearing in court for paedophilia offences. But there was space for this:

And this man is running to be a state senator in California for the Democratic Party. Going by the name ‘Maebe A. Girl’, his main policies are ‘LGBTQIA+ rights’ and ‘fuck fascism’. He’s considered to be a frontrunner, having come second in a congressional election in 2022.

From Downing Street to Downfall

There are many theories as to why the Conservative Party became so unpopular in its last few years of government, and a compelling one is that it ceded too much power to activists for left-wing causes rather than fight them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in an organisation called LGBT+ Conservatives.

Launched in 2016, the group was immediately given a Downing Street garden reception by then-Prime Minister Theresa May. Among other things, it advises the party on LGBT+ related policy and supports LGBT+ candidates.

At the time, it probably felt like like nothing could go wrong with this but, in reality, it’s hard to conclude that LGBT+ Conservatives has been anything other than a complete disaster. Firstly, politicians that it publicly affiliated itself with include Imran Ahmed-Khan, who was then jailed for sexually assaulting a boy, and Jamie ‘Katie’ Wallis, who seems to spend most of his life committing crimes and then dressing up as a woman to appear in court.

Patrons of LGBT+ Conservatives have included Crispin Blunt, who then had the whip withdrawn after he was arrested for rape (the case was later dropped), William Wragg, the MP who gave phone numbers of fellow politicians to a man he met on a dating app and Mark Menzies, who allegedly misused donors’ money to pay “bad people”.

But perhaps worse than the personnel was the ideology underpinning the group’s existence. Just like Stonewall after gay marriage was legalised, LGBT+ Conservatives didn’t have much to advocate for beyond the unpopular issue of self-ID. One of its first chairmen was a Pink News contributor, John Cope, a trans activist who has since become a parliamentary candidate (losing spectacularly). Earlier this year, he was elected chairman of the Conservative Councillors’ Association, a move that was enthusiastically welcomed by LGBT+ Conservatives. This is despite Cope having a history of attacking particularly female Conservative politicians if they did not support self ID.

You may remember that last year the London Tory councillor Ed Pitt Ford posted about his determination to get more men in women’s toilets. To the women who responded saying this would put their safety at risk, he posted a video of the song ‘Fuck You’, adding he will work even harder to get more ‘non cisgender people’ in women’s toilets. Guess what? He was also endorsed by LGBT+ Conservatives.

Which brings us to Andrew Boff, a current patron of the organisation. Boff, deputy chair of the London Assembly, has a long history of trans activism, which also includes attacking women in the party if they do not support self-ID. In 2023 he was thrown out of the party’s conference venue for heckling Suella Braverman, after she criticised gender ideology, and in 2024 he attacked Kemi Badenoch’s campaign for party leader, saying she was “obsessed with genitals”.

This year, he attended the Conservative Party conference wearing a ‘TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS’ t-shirt, and heckled former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies as she tried to talk about women’s sport being for women only.

He later justified his actions by saying her words had “curated hatred”. He then appeared on GB News for a live interview. Unfortunately for him, Marion Caulder from For Women Scotland walked past, and she was invited to join the discussion, which descended into him asking her: “How do you know I’m a man?”

Polyamory and Potter Panic: A normal week in Canada

Canada remains nuts as a ‘throuple’ of three polyamorous men have been allowed to adopt a three-year-old girl. And that’s probably not the craziest story to come out of the country this week.

The Vancouver Park Board, which is responsible for maintaining and managing the city’s parks and recreation facilities, has apologised for approving and planning a Harry Potter-themed forest walk for children. They also ‘disavowed’ Harry Potter author, JK Rowling. A motion was raised by Vancouver Green Party member and park board commissioner, Tom Digby, which demanded an apology from the board and reaffirmation of its ‘inclusionary policies’. The motion bizarrely stated that Rowling is a ‘Holocaust denier’ and accused her of causing ‘global harm’ with her ‘anti trans campaign.’ The board then heard from three men who claimed to be members of the ‘TGD2S’ (‘transgender, gender diverse and two-spirit’) community about the harm caused to them by Rowling’s support for women’s rights. Once the motion was passed, each commissioner present offered a ‘personal apology to the ‘trans community’ and started crying. Rowling confessed she was unaware the board had ever ‘avowed’ her, so ‘the disavowal hasn’t been much of a blow.’ The event will still go ahead.

BBC radio: Now broadcasting on all trans missions

Is it possible to be a BBC radio music presenter and not be a trans activist? Last week we reported on Greg James, who says you age more quickly if you don’t think men can become women.

This week BBC Radio 2 presenter Sophie Ellis Bextor talked about how depressed she gets about ‘transphobia’, saying she welcomes ‘trans mothers’, and people who don’t just “spend their entire day being angry”.

Not to be outdone, BBC Radio 6 Music presenter Mary Anne Hobbs (Ugh, another disappointment- GL) decided to end her latest show with songs by trans activists. The last one was simply an almost unknown Jamaican DJ moaning incoherently that ‘black trans men’ aren’t sufficiently visible in society, but the audio is so poor you can hardly hear what she’s saying.

Elsewhere on the BBC, Josh Cavallo has played four non-league football matches for a club called Peterborough Sports. Despite this, he’s been profiled TWELVE times by BBC Sport and been the subject of a podcast. Why? Because he says, without providing any evidence, that he has received more than one death threat online every day for the last four years, because he’s gay.

Women who don’t want to swim with men are ‘far right’

The City of London Corporation (CLC) has launched a consultation on whether to keep allowing men to use Kenwood Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath. We reported in May that the CLC’s ‘gender identity policy’ allows swimmers to use any of the three ponds (men’s, women’s and mixed) depending on what ‘gender’ they say they are. This policy remains in spite of the Supreme Court clarification that ‘sex’ refers to biological sex in the Equality Act and thus that a woman is an adult human female.

In July the CLC put up a sign at the ladies’ pond stating that ‘those who identify as women are welcome to swim at the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond … [it] is open to biological women and trans women with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment under the Equality Act 2010.’ There is already considerable evidence that women are self-excluding from the ladies’ pond, sometimes after negative experiences with men pretending to be women, which prompted Sex Matters to file for a judicial review of the CLC’s decision to employ gender self-identification.

When the CLC consultation was announced, the Good Law Project put out a statement calling women who want a private swimming space away from men (who can use either of the other two ponds) ‘far right’ and to grift for donations. You can fill the CLC consultation in here.

And finally

A Big Brother contestant was issued with a formal warning this week, because she said “but you haven’t got a willy” to a female contestant, while they were talking about her impregnating another woman. The other contestant pretends to be a man and the comment was considered ‘transphobic’. As Jo Bartosch says: “A woman on a TV show named after a novel about a totalitarian surveillance state has been publicly humiliated for committing thoughtcrime.”

See you next week!