Nutmeg's week: Claire Maugham; Zoe Watts; Nicola Sturgeon.

The Mystifying Mystery of The Maugham Misgendering

Anyone who can recall its coverage of the Wi Spa incident in 2021 knows that The Guardian under Kath Viner does not have a track record of honesty or fairness when it comes to the trans issue. However, it might have just published its worst article on the topic to date.

This week, The Guardian wrote about women who’ve been challenged in women’s spaces for looking male. According to Jolyon Maugham, this happens in the UK to ‘thousands of women every day’. The Guardian must have spoken to several women, and a real cross-section of society, then? Not quite - the journalist Libby Brooks, a trans activist who in 2019 blamed Julie Bindel for her ‘transphobia’ after she was attacked in the street by a cross-dressing man, spoke to just four women. Three of them were trans activists (which isn’t mentioned) and the other is anonymous. And none of them have a story that seems plausible.

One of the four women interviewed is ‘Claire Prihartini’. Claire uses at least three different surnames all at the same time - on LinkedIn, for example, she is ‘Claire Hibbitt’ while on other social media she goes by the name ‘Claire Maugham’. She is the wife of Jolyon, and while this is mentioned in the article, it’s not stated that she pretends that one or both of her children are the opposite sex to what they are, or that she has a history of trans activism.

Claire wrote twice on Bluesky in April that the Supreme Court ruling has meant she could be at risk of being told she’s not a woman because she had had a double mastectomy following breast cancer.

A few days later, her husband posted on X that the highly unbelievable thing she had predicted might happen, had just happened! A ‘vigilante’ in the changing room of a swimming pool had challenged her.

“Always tell the truth, it’sx easier to reemember.” David Mamet

Back on Bluesky, was Claire posting links to her bizarre prediction that had somehow come true, to show how right she was? No, without explaining why, she deleted all the posts she’d made stating that this might happen.

She then deleted her entire Bluesky account.

Despite widespread ridicule in May, The Guardian decided to publish her account of it, mentioning none of this. Initially stating that it happened ‘last month’, the paper later corrected this to say it was in May after all. Libby Brooks blames the error on ‘family matters’ and then being ‘out of the country’.

Claire gives little extra detail about what happened. She says she was in the changing room “standing with my top off in front of the mirror putting on my swimming cap” - (several female swimmers have posted on social media that they’ve never seen another woman put their cap on in front of a communal mirror while topless before). Then, another woman looked at her petite body, including the scars where her breasts were, and shouted: “There’s a man in here.” Claire claims she responded in a friendly way, assuring her she is female. But the woman aggressively replied: “You look like a man.” Claire then fled the room.

The Guardian helpfully added this picture so we can see how manly she looks, and how believable this story is.

The other three stories all read like male sexual fantasies. You might have noticed the first, by Caz Coronel, before, about a man poking her in the queue to the women’s toilets at the Royal Festival Hall, and telling her to go to the men’s toilets, as it was featured in the Metro in May. And you might have noticed it at other times - as it appeared in a story by trans activist Sophie Molly a few weeks before that. And even that wasn’t original - Caz had initially posted it on Facebook. It was there that she made it obvious that she is a highly confused trans activist, but still clearly a woman. She states she offered to show her breasts to the man, and after he left, a woman in the queue came up to her and said: “You are welcome here”. This makes no sense and reads like a cross-dressing man’s fantasy. Funnily enough, she also says she believes she is partly male and partly female but hasn’t “earned the right to call myself trans”.

Unsurprisingly, all of these suspicious details were left out of The Guardian’s write-up, although it does include a bizarre quote by Caz, in which she compares herself to black and brown women, who, she says, also don’t feel safe in women’s toilets because they don’t fit a ‘European version of female’.

The final two women featured are Nikki Lucas and ‘Dee’. Nikki, a butch woman who says her name is actually ‘Nikki Nathan Lucas’, says women have spat at her in toilets before - it’s not mentioned that she campaigns for ‘queer women’s spaces’. Dee (no surname is given) says she was in the changing rooms at Marks & Spencer when a woman challenged her - she responded by getting her breasts out. The other woman apparently accepted she was a woman at that point, but added: “Well, you should be careful these days”.

Even if all four of these stories had happened, it wouldn’t mean that women should be forced to share their spaces with men. The fact that The Guardian has almost certainly published at least partly and probably fully made-up stories, and/or omitted relevant details, shows how desperate they’ve become. And this was published in the same week that The Guardian reached a settlement with Akua Reindorf KC, after the paper admitted that its report that the barrister had ‘publicly called for trans people to accept reduced rights’ was not true.

No-one could have seen that coming.

The BBC continues its torrid affair with sex clowns

Meanwhile, one week after the BBC platformed a cross-dressing man to talk about issues affecting blind people, this week the BBC talked to two drag queens about issues affecting deaf people.

Another week of cross-dressing men in court

Zoe Watts is the man who posted videos of himself smashing watermelons, with pictures of feminists such as Germaine Greer on them, with a baseball bat. He worked for years at Lincolnshire Police, as a community support officer among other roles, including ‘equalities’. He was jailed in 2021 over his obsession with weapons and explosives, and he’s now been jailed again, this time for eight and a half years, for similar offences.

The judge said his “identity” would make custody “difficult”, adding he was “incredibly courteous”. Lincolnshire Police’s report on his sentencing refers to him a “woman” in the headline, at no point says he’s actually a man, doesn’t mention that he worked for Lincolnshire Police and buries a picture of him at the end which is not included in its social media tagging.

BBC News did, for the first time in five years of reporting about him, prominently state that he is ‘transgender’ in its article about his sentencing. And then just a few minutes later edited the piece to take it out.

On the same day, a ‘diaper fetishist’ with a history of more than 90 convictions avoided jail despite repeatedly dumping soiled nappies outside nurseries. The judge said “she” has a “difficult time” in custody and the BBC referred to him as a woman throughout. (At least one day later, the BBC edited the article to remove all pronouns).

Meanwhile, a cross-dressing Metropolitan Police officer also appeared in court this week, where he denied several counts of sexual abuse against a child and a woman, spanning six years.

The court is referring to this man as a woman when talking to him in the present tense. But is referring to him as a man when discussing the rapes he is accused of carrying out, because he didn’t ‘identify’ as a woman at those times. While completely absurd, this is perhaps some improvement on calling him a woman throughout.

Speaking of child sexual abuse trials, it’s now been two months since the founder of Pride in Surrey, Stephen Ireland, was jailed for numerous paedophilia offences. Pride in Surrey has launched its ‘Image Pack’ for the media to use to promote the 2025 event, which is due to go ahead next month. It features just 12 images, one of which is a picture of Stephen Ireland.

Look who’s back in the news

Nicola Sturgeon launched her autobiography, Frankly, this week amid inevitable questions about her role in eroding women’s rights in Scotland while she was first minister. Sturgeon now concedes that she should have moved more carefully in trying to launch ‘gender self-identification’ in Scotland and that rapists probably ‘forfeit’ the right to identify as women.

Her book, however, implies rapist Adam Graham (‘Isla Bryson’) was the only ‘vivid’ real-life example of the ‘abstract’ claims being made by women about the dangers of allowing men to self-identify as women. She still can’t bring herself to call them men and continues to blame women for making the debate ‘toxic’.

The book also includes the accusation that ‘there was another agenda at work’ when women campaigned and protested for their right to single sex spaces. It’s worth reading the whole of the For Women Scotland thread to see just how disingenuous Sturgeon has been.

Coincidentally, Sturgeon’s legacy in suppressing women’s freedom of speech was especially visible this week. It was reported that the award-winning book of gender-critical essays, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, had been removed from a National Library of Scotland exhibition due to complaints by its LGBT staff network. These accusations were refuted in a video posted by the National. It was claimed in the ‘fact check’ that the book had simply not been selected for this particular exhibition, ‘Dear Library’, which celebrates books that ‘shaped the nation.’ A freedom of information request had already revealed that the book had initially been included but was withdrawn due to concerns about the ‘potential impact on key stakeholders’ of the content, which it was claimed, ‘essentially promotes hate speech to a particular group.’ The National’s ‘fact check’ was duly community noted.

Also in Scotland, women attending a Let Women Speak social event were accused of making staff feel unsafe and kicked out of a private room they had booked. After protesting the erosion of women’s rights by ‘trans’ activism outside the university and a branch of Marks and Spencer, Kellie-Jay Keen and others gathered at the Glasgow University union for drinks.

The manager quickly told them that the bar was closing due to the threat they posed to staff with banners which bore slogans such as ‘We Are All Sandie Peggie’, and, particularly offensive to the manager, ‘I’m Not a Vet But I Know What a Dog is’. The latter was inspired by Kellie-Jay’s famous retaliation when challenged about her opposition to William ‘Lia’ Thomas competing in women’s swimming.

Footage taken in the venue shows the manager smirking while accusing the women of being threatening to bar staff and another staff member filming the women in what appears to be a clear breach of GDPR. A police officer called to the venue was also recorded telling one of the Let Women Speak attendees that the manager had admitted they would not have taken the booking if they’d known it was a ‘women’s rights’ event. Kellie-Jay plans to sue for direct and indirect discrimination.

He’s baaaaack

‘Veronica Ivy’ (formerly ‘Rachel McKinnon’, actually Rhys McKinnon) congratulated himself on his performance in the 2025 Canadian Mid-Amateur women’s golf championship. The one-time women’s cycling world champion was on Team British Columbia, which won the Margaret Todd trophy at the event. Ivy says he ‘can’t wait’ to win more trophies in women’s golf. At least it gives us an excuse to play this again.

And finally

Mayfair Witches is a supernatural US TV show that the BBC has acquired the rights to air for an undisclosed amount. Here’s one of the main female characters, Jojo Mayfair. Can you spot anything odd about her? (Incidentally, the show is based on a book - but there’s no Jojo Mayfair or any ‘trans’ characters in the book).

See you next week!