Nutmeg's week: Grayson Perry, Professor Simonoff, Jammie Booker

This was a BBC News story previewing the Budget

The entire article was about potential changes to business rate relief - and in particular how this might affect drag queens.

In fact, since two of the most senior members of staff at the BBC quit amid allegations of systemic bias, the number of stories about drag queens has dramatically INCREASED.

A news story was devoted to the shocking revelation that a poster promoting a drag show in a market town in Somerset has been vandalised.

BBC Radio 4 has a new play out, about an ageing war hero. The plot revolves around the fact that he is now a drag queen.

And the residents of Christian Malford, a village in Wiltshire, regularly work together to raise money for charity without their projects ever being mentioned on the BBC. This year, they’re making a drag queen calendar, so they have been profiled on BBC radio and the BBC website.

It’s not just drag queens though. BBC Radio Scotland platformed Sandie Peggie’s lawyer, Naomi Cunningham, but, incredibly, issued a trigger warning before she was allowed to speak.

As SEEN in Journalism pointed out, the same show recently interviewed two trans activists, but provided no trigger warning.

This week’s BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read talked at length, and thoroughly recommended, the biography of this man, seen here at a children’s cancer charity event, which he turned up to dressed as a girl and wearing a strap-on dildo.

The presenter talked about the “joy” of Grayson Perry’s story, even though he admits to having a fetish for dressing up as a female toddler.

Even though there’s been a surge in extreme violence carried out by ‘trans’ people in the last year, nobody in the UK has been killed because they say they are ‘trans’. Despite this, BBC Sounds broadcast a programme about why ‘Transgender Day of Remembrance’ is so important.

And in BBC entertainment, we had this bizarre article about Bafta naming 20 young people for its ‘Breakthrough’ list for 2025. Because two of the 20 describe themselves as ‘queer’, the entire article is about ‘queer representation’ in entertainment, and even says the Supreme Court ruling has ‘rolled back years of understanding’. Plus, the BBC has said it is ‘redeveloping iconic kids show Grange Hill’. ‘It has huge scope to be refashioned to deal with topics that chime with today’s youngsters,’ says a spokesman, ‘from trans issues to online trolling’.

This is actually happening

The NHS is about to give dangerous and unnecessary drugs to children to see if giving dangerous and unnecessary drugs to children might harm children. And the British taxpayer is paying for this at a time when there’s not enough money to make childcare affordable.

The £10.7 million clinical trial will recruit nearly 250 boys and girls aged between 10 and 15 who have been diagnosed with ‘gender incongruence’ and give more than half hormone-suppressing drugs that pause the physical changes of puberty.

The new trial, called Pathways, commissioned by the NHS and to be run by a team at King’s College London, has been granted ethical approval and is due to begin early next year.

The trial is set to go ahead because the Cass review found ‘very weak evidence’ for the benefits of giving children puberty blockers, and even found that, for some children, they led to more negative than positive effects. You might think the obvious conclusion is to scrap them altogether. However, Dr Hilary Cass recommended a trial, on the basis that some people, such as ‘parents of transgender children’, ‘believe passionately in the beneficial effects’ of the drugs. She has since welcomed the news that there will be a trial, leading to criticism of her from women like Kellie-Jay Keen.

Keira Bell and James Esses have said they will start judicial review proceedings at the High Court to stop the trial, which will be carried out by Professor Simonoff (below).

The world’s strongest woman was a man

The 2025 ‘World’s Strongest Woman’ contest took place this week in Texas, and was (initially) won by a man.

Cross-dresser Jammie Booker, a man who makes porn of himself pretending to be a woman, narrowly defeated British strongwoman Andrea Thompson by a single point. However, within hours, explicit images and videos of him surfaced online, which showed that he was a man, something organisers had apparently not realised.

The governing body behind the Official Strongman Games then issued a statement announcing he’d been disqualified and would not have been allowed to compete if his sex had been known. All official results from the competition have since been revised — Andrea Thompson has been elevated to 2025 World’s Strongest Woman.

Videos from the initial podium ceremony captured Andrea mouthing “this is bullshit”, before storming off in protest, which rather suggests some people might have had a clue about the cheating.

Not the best of weeks for the US ‘trans community’

There was a major story in the US last year, which was pounced on by both the Democrats and much of the mainstream media, that ‘transphobic’ bullying had killed the young girl Dagny ‘Nex’ Benedict.

The only problem with it was that it was completely untrue. And it’s now emerged that her father, who had raped her, has legally changed his sex to female.

Nex, who said she was ‘non-binary’, committed suicide last year, five years after her father, James Everette Hughes, had been sentenced to just five years in prison for repeatedly raping her.

She died, aged 16, after an overdose of Prozac and Benadryl. Her death followed a physical altercation in a girls’ restroom at Owasso High School, where she poured water on three students after overhearing them mock a friend, leading to a fight in which she was knocked to the ground and suspended for two weeks. She collapsed at home the next day and was pronounced dead later that evening.

National outlets, including The Washington Post, and politicians such as Nancy Pelosi, framed Nex’s death as emblematic of rising ‘transphobia’ in Oklahoma, particularly following a state executive order defining sex as biological.

However, the new reporting highlights that Nex had a documented history of severe childhood trauma linked to her father’s sexual abuse — a detail largely absent from earlier media narratives. In fact, just 13 days before Nex died, Hughes - by then, incredibly, already released from jail - was arrested for failing to comply with sex-offender registration requirements.

Hughes has moved to California and is not currently in custody, but any future incarceration would likely take place in a women’s prison under California’s current policies.

And another high profile criminal case involving a ‘trans’ person also took a twist this week. This involved Morgan Geyser, a woman who says she’s now a man. She famously nearly stabbed a girl to death with an accomplice to appease the Slender Man fictional horror character. This week she cut off her monitoring ankle bracelet and briefly disappeared.

She was later caught. It then emerged she is now in a relationship with a much older man who says he’s a woman. ‘Charley’ (below), who helped her escape, has a prior conviction for domestic violence and last month had a restraining order filed against him for domestic abuse.

This is what those tax rises are paying for

The Cabinet Office paid thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to four different Pride events this year, just so its civil servants could take part in official parades, even though they could attend for free anyway. The largest amount went to Manchester Pride, which shortly after entered liquidation.

This comes as we now know there have been at least four major financial scandals involving Pride or similar LGBT events just this year in the UK.

And finally

Dr Helen Webberley went on Reddit’s ‘transgender UK’ sub to show off the interviews and debates she did for ‘beautiful trans people and fantastic allies’ over the last couple of weeks.

She ended up deleting her post. See if you can spot why.

See you next week!