Nutmeg's week: Simone de Beauvoir, Caster Semenya, Waterloo Road

AI simply could not create an image that sums up both the BBC and the Liberal Democrats in 2025 better than this. More on both shortly.

Nobody could have predicted this

The former operations lead at Newbury Pride, a man who pretends to be a woman, has appeared in court facing multiple charges related to child sexual abuse. ‘Kizzy Lavender Lee’ (real name Samuel Wimbridge) has been charged with several offences against an alleged female victim under the age of 13. A Reduxx investigation discovered that Wimbridge was a prominent activist in Newbury and featured as a speaker for Reading Pride’s Trans Day of Remembrance event in 2022. He identifies as a ‘trans intersex poly lesbian’ and member of the Romani traveller community, despite also claiming to be of white European descent elsewhere. His online fetish account lists interests in ‘age play’ and ‘schoolgirl’ role play as well as BDSM and ‘human toilet’. Reduxx believes Wimbridge’s chosen name is inspired by female porn star Kizzy Lee.

Wimbridge is at least the third former senior UK Pride organiser to be tried for offences relating to child sex abuse this year. The founder and director of Pride in Surrey, Stephen Ireland, was convicted of multiple charges of child sex abuse, including the rape of a 12-year-old boy, in March. His former partner, Pride in Surrey organiser David Sutton, was also convicted of multiple offences connected to Ireland’s crimes. They are serving 30 years and 4.5 years in prison respectively.

In 2023 a convicted paedophile who was also a Pride organiser and drag queen was jailed after he was caught trying to make sexual contact with a child.

The BBC initially reported that Andrew Way was an ‘ex-drag queen’ but quickly edited their headline to refer to him simply as a man. They then deleted all evidence that they had ever connected him with drag or Pride. And this is entirely separate from the Pride in London CEO, who’s just been ordered by a court to hand over access to all his organisation’s bank accounts to independent investigators. The order follows allegations that donated money—including taxpayers’ funds—was embezzled.

As a reminder, BBC News promoted Windsor and Eton Pride by getting an old man to cuddle a 14-year-old ‘drag queen’ on a sofa, who talked about homosexuality in Ancient Greece. However, it hasn’t mentioned that the operations lead at neighbouring Newbury Pride has been charged with numerous paedophile offences.

One is not born, but posthumourly declared, a Judith Butler fan

Simone DeBeauvoir

An established academic has been unable to find a publisher for her book on Simone de Beauvoir because her gender critical approach was deemed ‘too controversial’. Susan Pickard’s Beauvoirian Feminism was rejected by all but one major academic publisher, but even then, the publisher asked 26 academics to review it, but they all refused. The publisher then gave feedback from one of the academics to Pickard that in order to proceed, she needed to ‘be more positive about [Judith] Butler’, one of the architects of gender identity theory. Pickard had written the book over the course of ten years partly as a retort to Butler, who she says strips Beauvoir’s work of its ‘materialism, her focus on the sexed body, and her clarity about what it means to live as a woman.’

Beauvoir’s work has been distorted by readings which stem from the premise that the line in The Second Sex, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes a woman’, supports the idea that men can become women. Butler, Pickard suggests, takes that line ‘to mean that gender and sex were wholly constructed.’ Pickard argues that Beauvoir’s answer to the question ‘what is a woman?’ does not support Butler’s reading: ‘What is a woman? [Beauvoir’s] answer was clear — a human being of the female sex, whose body is marked by culture but not erased by it.’

Finding herself without a publisher, Pickard has decided to use Substack to release the book and laments the ‘hardening of attitudes’ and ‘doubling down’ on gender identity theory she has seen in her field of research since the Supreme Court ruling.

The Guardian has effectively admitted it lied about Caster Semenya

New evidence has intensified scrutiny of what must be the biggest cheating scandal in elite athletics, revealing widespread participation by men in women’s events. Even The Guardian now recognises the undeniable scale of this controversy.

The director of the health and science department at World Athletics gave a presentation in which he confirmed there were 135 cases of men competing as female finalists in international events in the years since sex testing was not carried out. He reported that, between the years 2000 and 2023, approximately 50 to 60 male athletes with differences of sexual development (DSDs) competed regularly in these events. World Athletics stopped sex testing its athletes in 2000, against the wishes of 80 percent of female athletes at the time. As a result, men, who may have been misidentified as female at birth due to a DSD, were able to compete as women. The data presented by Dr Stephane Bermon showed that there were 151.9 times more ‘DSD individuals’ with XY chromosomes in elite female athletics than in the general population in the years after sex testing ceased. Sex testing will now be restored and is seen by Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, as a vital measure in protecting the integrity of women’s athletics.

The Guardian, like many other publications, has spent years trying to convince its readers that men like Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya are merely women with high testosterone levels. Now they have been forced to admit Semenya is male and has no place in the female category. In 2016, female runner Lynsey Sharp tearfully complained when she lost out to three male athletes, including Semenya, who were competing as women in the Rio Olympics. Sharp was labelled a sore loser and even accused of racism for pointing out that it was impossible to compete against runners with an unfair advantage. Semenya himself said she had looked upon him as ‘less than human’ and Sharp received death threats at the time. Sharp and many of her contemporaries now have to live with the fact that, under today’s rules, they would probably have far more illustrious careers and many more medals.

The Lib Dem conference went as expected

A transvestite

The same transvestite

The Liberal Democrats have held their annual conference, and it pretty much went exactly as expected.

The party’s policy is to support self ID, which was also in its last manifesto, as well as legal recognition for anyone who says they are ‘non-binary’. However, as we now clearly know, men can not legally become women in the UK. Dr Zoe Hollowood, a member of campaign group Liberal Voice for Women, therefore wanted a debate - and then a binding vote - on updating party policy in light of the Supreme Court ruling that a woman should be defined by biological sex. Her motion stated: ‘Returning males into vacancies expressly reserved for females would be unlawful’. She also cited Graham Linehan’s recent arrest when speaking to the conference, amid ‘shouts and groans from the audience’.

Unfortunately for her, Lucas North, treasurer of LGBT+ Liberal Democrats, argued that even discussing this issue would mean “that trans identities are up for debate”. Every single Lib Dem MP left the conference hall and the remaining party members voted by two-to-one to not debate the topic.

This, incidentally, is Lucas North (they / them).

Unsurprisingly, Lib Dem leader Ed Davey’s media interviews were then dominated by questions about what a woman is. He continually failed to answer the question, and even stated that his party is the only one that’s properly debated the issue.

This then became one of the prevailing images of the conference.

This chap was then interviewed live on BBC television. The cameraman’s timing when panning out so that all three Lib Dem activists are included in the picture is pure comedy gold.

And then the conference ended with the party awarding the ‘Patsy Calton award for exceptional women’ to … another cross-dressing man. Chris Northwood (seen here on the right) won the award, named after a woman who campaigned relentlessly for improvements in breast cancer research, for 'standing up for equality, affordable housing and for women’s safety’.

It turns out Northwood ran in men’s competitions up until two years ago, when he switched to the female category. As Mara Yamauchi says, “I would ask the Lib Dems spokesperson for sport if they support males in women’s sports, but [that’s] Max Wilkinson, who dismisses women’s rights and the Supreme Court judgment as the ‘issue of genitalia’”.

So far we’ve only had one ‘transgender’ MP, and he was a Conservative, and things haven’t exactly worked out well since he ‘came out’ in 2022 either.

Jamie / Katie Wallis is to stand trial yet again, after being charged with the possession of a false identity document. It’s not clear what, if any, link there is between the allegedly fake passport and his gender identity. In the last three years, his ex-wife has been granted a restraining order against him and he’s been found guilty of driving offences. His father was also cleared of obstructing police in 2022 after the CPS failed to supply paperwork in time for his hearing.

Meanwhile, while our male law-makers are being celebrated for pretending they are women, Kellie-Jay Keen has been told by police that Susie Green’s t-shirt, which has her’s, and other’s, names on it crossed out with the word ‘dead names’ underneath, is fine and doesn’t break any laws.

How is this not a threat?

Blokes Borrowing Clothes

The BBC One school drama Waterloo Road received international mockery earlier this year when it featured an episode in which a ‘schoolgirl’ (played by a man in his mid 20s), was ‘deadnamed’ by his grandmother, who was dying of dementia. We were meant to believe that he was the victim, but it all worked out OK because after she died, he found evidence that she really believed he was a girl.

The new series started this week and the first episode was about … radicalised Christian bigots vandalising a rainbow crossing.

Waterloo Road, which is broadcast on prime time on BBC One, has been running for 19 years and used to secure audiences of about five million people. Today it runs in a slot that, on average, gives the BBC about 1.7 million viewers. However, the last series hit just one million viewers for its opening episode. Despite this ratings disaster, the BBC ploughed ahead with another series of it, and continued with the LGBT storylines. This time the opening episode secured just 674,000 viewers, narrowly beating an episode of Married At First Sight on E4. It’s all reminiscent of Doctors, which was cancelled last year after a quarter of a century, and chose to bow out with a storyline about a ‘transphobic’ GP called ‘Graham’.

Incidentally, Waterloo Road’s creator was Ann McManus, who died suddenly last month. Given that she was a supporter of the LGB Alliance, we can only wonder what she would have made of what her creation has become.

And finally

The latest ‘Gaza Freedom Flotilla’, this time known as the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), has descended into farce due to differing views on ‘LGBTQ+ inclusion’.

The flotilla of around 50 vessels carrying ‘aid’, and Greta Thunburg, aimed to symbolise the ‘resistance’ to what organisers call Israel’s ‘illegal siege’ and ‘on-going genocide’ in Gaza.

Unfortunately, it all went wrong when the Tunisian coordinator of the convoy complained on Facebook Live about the inclusion of ‘queer activists’ on board, which he said ‘betrayed the sacred Muslim-led Palestinian struggle.’ Another Muslim activist on board denounced LGBT involvement as ‘taking advantage’ of the cause. She wrote ‘being a queer activist means taking a path that risks placing my children in a situation we reject. I refuse to have my son offered a sex change at school.’

Several Muslim participants withdrew from the ‘mission’ in protest before Greta Thunburg and another eco-activist stepped down from their leadership roles on the flotilla. Thunberg stated that the aim of the ‘mission’ was to draw attention to ‘genocide in Palestine’, not to their own internal affairs. She has been accused of being ‘in cahoots’ with bigots due to her total lack of opposition to those who reject her progressive values.

This also comes just a few days after news organisations like the BBC took GSF’s claim that it had been attacked by a drone seriously. Video footage then revealed a crew member had just misfired a flare, which landed back on the same boat it was fired from.

See you next week!