Nutmeg's week: Barbie Kardashian, Leah Blake, Lucy Powell

(I feel I should warn you. Nutmeg’s column this week begins with an extremely disturbing look at the Barbie Kardashian story. Anyone with experience of sexual assault might choose to skip certain sections. GL)

‘Self-ID has never been a problem in Ireland’

Pictured above is ‘Barbie Kardashian’ (real name Gabriel Alejandro Gentile), who has been released from Limerick Prison after serving two and a half years of a five and a half year sentence for threatening to torture, rape and murder his mother. Gentile started identifying as a girl when he was 15 and now has a gender recognition certificate (GRC). Due to Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act (2015) and self ID laws, he is considered to be legally female and can use all spaces and services intended to be women-only. He will be housed in Dublin in unknown circumstances and has confirmed he will be using women’s public toilets and facilities.

On his release, Gentile was interviewed by former RTE journalist Paddy O’Gorman and repeated his intention to murder his mother as well as his father. He added that he wants to stab the governor of Limerick Prison in his testicles. He calmly stated that he isn’t a ‘risk to the public in general, but just certain members of the public’ and that he will find another victim to ‘murder’ if he cannot locate his parents. He appeared in full clownish makeup with oversized fake breasts and posed for photos holding O’Gorman’s dog, outside the prison.

In conversation with Graham Linehan on the day of Gentile’s release, O’Gorman said Gentile had made several threats to murder specific people and even threatened to rape a woman he recognised outside the prison ‘with an object’. The full interview is here.

Gentile experienced extreme abuse as a child and was taken into care at around the age of 10, by which time he was already making serious violent and sexual threats. It is thought he had been subjected to sustained physical and sexual abuse by his father and was also forced into abusing his mother. A detailed account of his background, written in 2020, can be found here.

He was charged with seven counts of making threats to rape and kill his mother after he told social care managers of a detailed plan he had made to mutilate her ‘body and her genitalia’ and make her suffer ‘for as long as possible’. Upon his release this week he confirmed that he still intends to ‘sexually torture’ his mother and repeatedly expressed the desire to rape women with objects rather than his penis, because ‘I’m a woman and women rape with objects.’

Gentile told O’Gorman that he has ‘a need for people to view me as a woman, not a man’ and intends to complete a vast list of surgeries in order to embody the ideal woman: ‘a sex doll.’ Although he was referred to the Tavistock gender clinic at the age of 15, at which it noted his ‘scripted’ response to questions, he started ‘fully identifying’ as female when he knew he was going to face a custodial sentence for the offences against his mother. He claims he has been given ‘hormone treatment’ while in prison and wants full ‘gender reassignment’ surgery so he can become a ‘female porn star’.

Gentile has around 15 previous convictions for physical and sexual assaults and threats. As a juvenile, he ripped a social worker’s eyelid off and called her screams ‘music to my ears.’ During his latest sentence he was removed from the women’s prison he was initially housed in and moved to the men’s estate, despite his GRC, because he made multiple threats to kill and rape fellow prisoners and female prison officers. He admitted he wanted to injure a female prisoner so severely that ‘she would not be able to have children’ and that he had fantasised about torturing her sexually and electrocuting her genitalia. He was found not guilty of these offences in court (in a separate trial to the one involving his mother) and admitted to O’Gorman this week that he is only free now because he ‘got away with’ those crimes. In the same interview, he confessed that he regretted not being able to go through with his threats because the women ‘deserved it.’

Now aged 23, Gentile is considered by Gardaí (Irish police) and every psychiatrist involved in assessing him to pose an ‘imminent’ threat to the public. As his interview with O’Gorman drew to a close, Gentile told him: “I’m not someone that has remorse for my actions. I actually take great pleasure in the suffering that I’ve caused people”. His latest threats have been reported to Gardaí.

It might be time to rename Pride

Not that you’d know if you only followed the establishment media, but Pride has not had the best few months, with one founder jailed for paedophile offences, a volunteer jailed for paedophile offences, an operations lead charged with paedophile offences and a CEO under investigation for embezzlement.

Maybe Pride’s offshoot, ‘Trans Pride’, is performing better? Er, no.

A manager at Trans Pride Portsmouth, ‘Alison’, has written a Substack post, in which he’s made several allegations about the organisation and, in particular, its chair, ‘Leah Blake’. The most damning of them is that it had a Discord server in which ‘underage attendees were able to participate in channels that were never intended for them’. Incredibly, he (Alison), alleges, this even included a dating channel - seemingly involving cross-dressing adults and children - that was later taken down. He also states that there were concerns that donations to Trans Pride Portsmouth were being ‘mismanaged to cover Leah’s personal expenses’. And he writes that he resigned from the organisation in July after someone else in it exposed his genitals to him, without consent.

What about Leah Blake? As with almost every other disgraced Pride leader, he has a history of being subjected to glowing profiles on the BBC. In fact, under a picture of him, aged in his 40s and dressed as a sexualised girl, he was given a lengthy BBC interview in which it’s agreed that people opposed to his lifestyle are “mentally ill”. He also talked about a “coloured gentleman” he once met. This is still available on the BBC (wow! It’s gone already! GL)

This week BBC Bristol also linked to an article about a transgender protest, which gives an entirely positive spin on the ‘trans march’ that took place in the city. It’s only slightly undermined by the main image, showing three masked men holding a sign saying ‘FUCK COPS ARM TRANS WOMEN’.

The fix is (always) in

A new survey into the British media has found that, after investing hundreds of millions of pounds in diversity measures in recent years, the BBC is now … ‘highly unrepresentative of the public’ and has ‘become [significantly] more elitist’ in the last 11 years.

It seems that part of the problem has been that while there is an almost infinite number of categories that humans can belong to, the mainstream media, and particularly the BBC, has been exclusively focused on race, sex and LGBT when it comes to DEI initiatives.

One area the BBC has been less bothered about representation is with class. The report shows that, while about six percent of people in the UK went to a fee-paying school, 38 percent of BBC executives and 47 percent of political commentators went to one.

One BBC employee who went to the same school as Munroe Bergdorf, at the same time, is Radio 1 DJ Greg James, the corporation’s fourth highest-paid presenter. James is married to the trans activist daughter of a former Guardian editor (not to be confused with the current Guardian editor, who’s married to a different BBC radio presenter).

He has a book out at the moment in which he states that people age more quickly if they don’t believe that some men are actually women. Despite this absurd disinformation, the BBC has been promoting the book. James adds in it that the Supreme Court ruling is a ‘backward step’ as ‘you’re whoever the hell you know yourself to be’.

Meanwhile, new research into television advertising has found similar levels of skewed representation. Channel 4’s Mirror on the Industry study discovered that, while just four percent of the population of England and Wales is black, more than half of commercials now feature black people. At the same time, disabled people make up almost 18 percent of the population but were included in just four percent of the TV adverts studied. And while about 12 percent of people are aged 70 or over, just two percent of TV commercials feature an elderly person.

This disconnect between people in the media and people who consume it might explain stories like this: Recently an extremely disordered man brutally murdered his ex-boyfriend in Minneapolis. As both men had long hair and liked to wear women’s clothing, almost the entire US media reported the story as if a woman murdered her lesbian partner. Here are the two ‘lesbians’:

And finally

There were much bigger stories than this, this week, such as JK Rowling calling Emma Watson ‘ignorant’, and Netflix seeing its shares slide after Elon Musk called for it to be boycotted due to its trans propaganda.

But neither of these are as funny as the Labour Party conference, which has just taken place, so that’s what we’ll end on. The party is extremely unpopular at the moment, and therefore a couple of leading figures have worked out what they need to do to win back trust - keep saying that men are women.

At one fringe event, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy said the issue of men competing in women’s sports is not clear cut, despite the Supreme Court ruling, adding: “There are some sports where we need to put energy and ambition so the trans community can fully participate.”

At roughly the same time, and speaking at another fringe conference event, the favourite to be Labour’s new deputy leader, Lucy Powell, said guidance that UK workplaces must offer single-sex toilets is “not right” and she wants the opportunity for her and her colleagues to veto it.

The party’s members, meanwhile, might be abandoning this issue now, even if the politicians aren’t just yet. This is the view from the back of the room at the conference for a Stonewall event, and then a Labour Women’s Declaration event.

See you next week!