Nutmeg's week: Felix Winter, Noa Van Leuven, Danielle Muscato

’Danielle’ Muscato and one of his marks

Just a normal day in Scotland 2025

On Wednesday, the High Court in Edinburgh heard a case in which a 47-year-old man attacked an 80-year-old man with a chainsaw. The victim, who is lucky to be alive, lost two fingers.

The court heard that the attacker, Donald Sandilands, who had previously suffered brain damage after being hit by a tree, now calls himself ‘Donna’.

At the same time, the High Court in Glasgow heard a case that should be front-page news but isn’t. In 2022 and 2023, ‘Felix’ Winter, now 18, put together a ‘graphically detailed plan’ to carry out a massacre at a school in Edinburgh. Fortunately, Winter was stopped by police under the Terrorism Act.

Winter is a girl who identifies as a boy, and the BBC article about the crime refers to her as ‘he / him’ throughout. In fact the only way a reader would know that she’s a girl is because her lawyer said that her transgender identity should be taken into account when it came to sentencing. There is no mention of what, if any, cross-sex hormones she may have been on, or why they might have made her more aggressive. The story is similar to the case of Audrey Hale, a ‘trans man’ who killed six people in a Nashville school in 2023. Winter has been jailed for six years.

Mean/while, the Scottish Employment Tribunal venue in Dundee was hearing its final day of statements in the latest phase of the Sandie Peggie / NHS Fife / Dr ‘Beth’ Upton drama.

Speaking of which

The second phase of the Sandie Peggie hearing came to an end this week. The entire affair remains extraordinary.

In fact, one newspaper has compiled a top ten ‘most jaw dropping points’ from just the first two weeks of the July resumption. This includes NHS Fife’s equality and human rights lead saying she didn’t know her own sex; Dr Upton’s supervisor admitting she’d both breached confidentiality rules and ignored HR advice due to ‘patient safety’ concerns that she had never raised; an IT expert revealing that Dr Upton had altered notes about patient safety; and NHS Fife issuing, and then repeatedly editing, a mid-tribunal statement about the tribunal.

Part of Dr Upton’s problem has been that his case has seemingly been based on a) his assertion that he is a woman and b) his claims that Sandie Peggie bullied him and put patients’ safety at risk in doing so. However, during the pause in the hearing, the Supreme Court clarified that men like Dr Upton are not women and NHS Fife cleared Sandie Peggie of misconduct allegations, due to a lack of evidence.

This week, we got to see what their case is now based on - and we were treated to an unedifying spectacle of out-of-context and irrelevant text messages Sandie had privately written to friends years ago, in which she had made jokes that some people have deemed to be ‘racist’. Perhaps worse, she even referred to the cross-dressing man who was hanging out in women’s changing rooms and keeping notes on, and allegedly bullying, women, as a “weirdo”.

It’s worth noting that most of the messages, spanning many years in WhatsApp chats, were handed over by her colleague Lindsay Nicoll, who was so offended on initially receiving them that she proceeded to go on several foreign holidays with their author.

Incredibly, just like other female NHS Fife employees, such as Dr Searle, Nicoll has risked her own career in an attempt to discredit a female colleague at the expense of a cross-dressing man. Some of the messages she handed over included her - and not Sandie - breaching patient confidentiality. She admitted that she had acted “unprofessionally” and that she comes across as someone “who didn’t respect their patients”.

Unsurprisingly, the media, and particularly the BBC, ran headlines suggesting that Sandie is racist. On one day this week, two witnesses, who were previously too frightened to speak about a male doctor using the women’s changing room, said they will now give evidence. While BBC News did report this, it’s headline for that story didn’t mention it, and instead went with hearsay - which was denied - that Sandie had said she wanted to post bacon to a mosque.

Another tactic NHS Fife used this week was to claim, again without any evidence, that Sandie was ‘faking’ her menstrual flood in an attempt to confront Dr Upton. As Jill Foster says: “We are meant to believe a man who says he is female but not a female who says she was on her period.”

And in another development, Jamie Doyle, NHS Fife’s head of nursing for acute services, did not testify at the tribunal, even though he pre-populated the risk assessment used to suspend Sandie. It’s not known why he chose not to testify but a former nurse, who is allegedly his partner or ex partner, is a convicted paedophile. This comes one week after a board member at NHS Fife was convicted of sexual offences against a teenage girl.

Meanwhile, a Freedom of Information request has found that the NHS spent more than £1.8 million on more than 1,000 staff networking ‘diversity’ events in the last two years. The work time events included meetings based around themes such as ‘embracing asexuality’ and ‘embracing your afro hair’.

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Darts and golf

It was a bit of a mixed week for Noa Van Leuven, a man who plays in women’s darts competitions. He made headlines after winning 4-0 in the quarter-finals of the Women’s World Matchplay Championship, which was broadcast live on Sky Sports. Women who protested his participation were forcibly removed from the arena. However, not only was he then beaten in the semi-final, but members of the World Darts Federation then voted to ban men, including him, from their women’s tournaments. (A second darts organisation is still allowing him to play in women’s events). He released an ‘emotional statement’ in response.

Meanwhile, in Canada, a man with an uncanny resemblance to Van Leuven is preparing to represent his province competing as a ‘female’ golfer. ‘Veronica Ivy’ (previously ‘Rachel’ McKinnon, actually Rhys McKinnon), formerly a women’s world champion cyclist, will take a woman’s place in a national competition in the next few days.

Good Grift!

The Good Law Project has raised several hundred thousand pounds to fight the Supreme Court’s ruling that men are not women. This week, the initial hearing of the GLP’s application for a judicial review of the EHRC interim update took place, and it was objectively embarrassing.

The court told the firm it wasn’t even clear what they were challenging or on what grounds, and gave them a few months to to figure it out and return . Undeterred, the Good Law Project spun this as a victory and used it to ask for more money. Thank goodness for Community Notes on X.

The usual BBC round-up is back

A new series of University Challenge has started on the BBC. One of the team’s contestants are all men - and we all know what that means.

Officially, June is Pride month and July is ‘Disability Pride’ month, but you certainly wouldn’t know that if all your information came from the BBC.

In July, BBC News published, on average, more than two stories a day about Pride. Many of the stories are riveting - for instance, we were treated to a gem in which someone found a scarf that was made for Norwich Pride 2009, and washed it, and took it to Norwich Pride 2025. BBC News also published its fifth article (and entire podcast episode) about a banner at Congleton Pride getting slightly torn. This month, we found out that it had been turned into a handbag. BBC journalists also started compiling ‘What You Need To Know’ guides to various Pride events around the country in July (it didn’t provide a guide to a single Disability Pride event in that month).

It wasn’t just Pride stories, though. Liberate Guernsey might be a tiny charity with just one full-time employee, but, because it exists to fight for transgender activism, the BBC profiled it three times in one month.

The BBC also keeps running in-depth interviews with cross-dressing men if they have some connection with sport.

Last week, for instance, Adrian Chiles talked at length on Radio Five Live to cyclist Pippa Yorke about when he wore his sister’s clothes.

This came just a few days after racing driver Charlie Martin talked about his gender identity.

Football referee Lucy Clark also recently spoke to the BBC. He didn’t talk about his friendship with child rapist Stephen Ireland, but instead about how inspirational he is, because he is also a manager of a women’s football team while pretending to be a woman.

Rally driver Rowena Purdy has been on the BBC to discuss how he didn't realise he was a woman while he was growing up.

Cyclist Paeton McGuire talked at length about how he was born in the wrong body.

And football writer ‘Emma’ Smith had a 30-minute interview, half of which was about his gender identity.

And finally

In 2019 trans activist Danielle Muscato was lauded by liberal feminists for talking about the rape of his sister when he was five years old. It then emerged that he doesn’t have any sisters and he didn’t live in an apartment when he was a child. He did, however, once stalk the singer Fiona Apple, who WAS raped in exactly the circumstances described. Despite this, the post celebrating his story, by Kildare Feminist Network, was never deleted.

See you next week!