Nutmeg's week: FiLiA, Jake Graf, Keira Knightley

Riot Women is a new feminist BBC drama about ‘the resilience of women who refuse to be silenced by age or expectation’, after they form a punk-rock band. Can you spot something quite predictable about one of these women?

To make it a little easier, here’s one of them, the ‘actress’ Macy Seelochan (formerly Jacob Seelochan) on Instagram in August.

And in an interview for the show, Amelia Bulmore joins the long list of people who worked with Graham Linehan yet are prepared to smear him on behalf of the new sacred class.

FiLiA: A series of unfortunate events

For once, violent troons trying to silence women (and being backed by sitting MPs) weren’t the only disturbing feature of a large feminist gathering. FiLiA, the biggest feminist event in Europe, took place in Brighton last weekend and ‘trans activists’ had smashed windows and sprayed graffiti at the conference venue before it even began. They seemed to have no fear of repercussions and proudly posted videos of the attack, thanking those who interacted with horror to those posts for the ‘promo.’

Once the conference began, more angry men were present outside the venue to intimidate women trying to enter. Trans Bash Back, the group which claimed responsibility for the criminal damage, promised ‘FiLiA was just the start … we demand nothing short of total liberation.’ So far there have been no known arrests of those involved in the criminal damage or intimidation.

Sian Berry, the Green Party MP for Brighton, sided with the men, claiming the choice of Brighton as a location ‘was clearly provocative from organisers and the problems caused predictable.’

More shocking, however, were reports that some of the attendees had distressing experiences when some of the speakers conveyed anti-Israel sentiments and dismissed the horrors of the October 7 atrocity. Nicole Lampert’s report on the conference details evidence of anti-Semitic attitudes from the opening plenary onwards. Chair of Black Southall Sisters, Rahila Gupta, refused to condemn the Palestinian terrorist organisation, Hamas, in her speech. She referred to the ‘fascist government’ of Israel and ‘Zionist agendas’, and alluded to the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’, which calls for the eradication of Israel and all Jews from the Middle East. She also led an audience chant of ‘free Palestine’.

Author Sathi Patel was also an invited speaker with what appears to be a history of anti-Semitic social media posts which express ‘love’ for Hamas. An attendee, who claims to be a communist ‘comrade’ of Patel, alleges the CEO of FiLiA, Lisa-Marie Taylor, ‘co-signed our radical pro-Palestine politics and agreed to sponsor some of our travel + accommodation.’

Julia Long, the prominent writer and women’s rights advocate, walked out of the plenary and spoke to Josh Howie on GB News about her experience. She also highlighted some of the attendees’ apparent denial or minimising of the mass rape of Israeli women by Hamas on October 7.

Lucy Masoud, an organiser of FiLiA, carried out a display outside the event about what she called the ‘genocide’ being carried out by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza. Participants wore keffiyehs (a Palestinian headdress which is now a fashionable feature of middle class anti-Israel protests in the West) and chanted ‘free, free Palestine’. Masoud wore a t-shirt with an image of Leila Khaled, a Palestinian terrorist.

Fashion items connected to Islam were even on sale at the venue on a stall selling modesty garments such as hijabs. Another stall offered a pamphlet which contained what Bev Jackson called ‘some of the most virulent anti-Jewish tropes I’ve ever seen.’

The FiLiA disco on Saturday night became the focal point of tensions between women who had brought keffiyehs and Palestine flags with them to the party and those who objected to this. Reports suggest a Jewish woman was deliberately surrounded by women dancing and waving these items in order to intimidate her.

Punches were allegedly thrown and there was an attempt to confiscate attendee Jean Hatchet’s phone, which she was using to record the flag waving. Hatchet and her partner were ejected from the disco and banned from the conference.

When Aja (‘the Empress’, poet and women’s rights and free speech campaigner) and her partner DJ Lippy tried to attend the final day of FiLiA after the disco, they discovered they had also been banned, despite having had nothing to do with the outbreak of aggression. It has since emerged that Aja was banned because her presence made FiLiA speaker Milli Hill feel ‘intimidated’, even though she admits Aja had not done anything to warrant this reaction. Aja is mixed race and the incident has led to accusations of racism and classism within FiLiA at an organisational level.

Since the event, FiLiA has apparently blocked polite questions about speakers who have posted on X that Jewish women have never been welcome at FiLiA. No public statement has been made by FiLiA specifically about anti-Semitism at the event or the treatment of Aja. FiLiA supporters have been reflecting on the Actual Gender Critical Left Facebook page about the weekend, in which most of the threads seemed to turn into a discussion about whether women really were raped on October 7, typically involving the spreading of misinformation. Ali Ceesay, a regular FiLiA speaker, wrote that October 7 was a ‘miniscule event’. None of these comments were censored by the site’s administrator, BBC radio producer Jayne Egerton, but she did ban … Julie Bindel from the group just before the FiLiA conference started.

Trend has stopped being trendy

There’s all sorts of evidence at the moment that shows that it’s no longer fashionable to pretend you’re the opposite sex. An annual poll of over 60,000 US students has found that the number of trans-identified respondents has almost halved in just the last two years. It was 6.8 percent in both 2022 and 2023, 5.2 percent in 2024 and 3.6 percent this year. This rapid trend is likely to continue for at least another year as the data finds that the majority of the trans-identified respondents are now older students, whereas three years ago the majority were in their first year.

Similarly, last month we reported on Shon Faye moaning that financial opportunities for him talking about his gender identity have started to dry up, and others are saying the same. Jake Graf, a woman who’s appeared in at least nine films and five television shows, including, of course, BBC’s Doctors, simply because she says she’s a man, has said that her “path as a speaker and creator has narrowed”. Katie Neeves, a man who was named a UN Women’s UK delegate despite the fact that he crowdfunds for children to get puberty blockers, has said he’s also seeing fewer financial opportunities to talk about his ‘transition’.

Unfortunately, some people haven’t quite got the message that employing cross-dressing men for virtue signalling points isn’t a good idea. The 1,400-year-old Canterbury Cathedral has allowed an ‘agender’ man to cover it in graffiti stickers for the next three months, apparently in an attempt to make God appeal to marginalised communities.

The bigotry of low expectations

the artist

“I had an oopsie”

These are the words of a cross-dressing man about him beating up his wife so severely that she was hospitalised.

In a shocking Reddit post, the Australian man reveals quite a bit about his disordered and narcissistic mind. The post is clearly written in an attempt to minimise the legal punishment he is set to receive for the attack, in which he states that while he physically did beat her, and seemingly left her for dead, “someone else was driving my body”. He adds that he attempted suicide immediately after the attack, and by chance managed to catch the failed attempt on camera, which, he suggests, hopefully proves that he was in a terrible mental state that day (two weeks prior to the Reddit post).

His first two paragraphs aren’t even about the assault but are an irrelevant story about a man looking at him and him wondering if the man was sexually attracted to him. He then gets to the attack, but talks about everything else that happened to him that day, and just adds “I had hurt her”. After being arrested and charged, he talks more about himself, and in particular his bra, and his only mention of his wife is that she was well enough to give the police his handbag. He then proceeds to talk in detail about how he’s the real victim because he says he’s transgender.

His entire post is about how he’s so depressed that he’s capable of doing things he isn’t aware of, such as beating up his wife. Except this is slightly undermined by the fact that he was posting at the same time about how much he loves his “boobs”.

Back Britain’s Crossdressers

We had a good example of how dangerous the BBC’s trans activism can be this week. The corporation has written several articles about teenage Reform councillor George Finch, because he stopped the Pride flag from being flown on Warwickshire County Council’s offices. Finch has revealed that last week he was attacked in the street by a man calling him a ‘fascist’. BBC News responded by not covering the story, but still used his picture as the main image for a different article about administrative changes at the council.

BBC News did cover the sentencing of Ciara Watkins, a man who sexually assaulted a man by tricking him into believing he was a woman. But despite his transgender identity being central to the story, it failed to tag the article in either its ‘LGBT’ or ‘Transgender people’ sections. It also covered the story of a pub in Scotland cancelling a Harry Potter-themed event after receiving ‘a deluge of hate’ by trans activists. However, it failed to mention who sent the abuse, what they sent or why.

And a report has found the National Library of Scotland’s decision to ban a book of gender critical essays was ‘based on inadequate evidence’. BBC Front Row discussed the story with... the librarian who excluded the book, who talked at length about the book’s “violence and aggression”.

And finally

If you haven’t seen this, or if you’ve just read or only heard Keira Knightley’s answer to a question about Harry Potter and transphobia, then you’re in for a treat.

She might not be remotely gender critical - although that hasn’t stopped trans activists trying and so far spectacularly failing to get her cancelled - but she was asked about working on a Harry Potter audiobook amid calls for a JK Rowling boycott. All she actually said was “I was not aware of that, no. I’m very sorry.” However, it’s extremely funny because she bursts out laughing while she apologises, suggesting that she might not be THAT sorry after all.

See you next week!