Ben-Hur
Update 708. Stand With UK Jews. #BeMorePorcupine.
Well, here I am again, earlier than expected. I was going to go into Birmingham ( Brum) tonight to meet some former work colleagues which would have involved a 25 minute train journey from where I live in the Black Country to Brum. Then I saw a report from British Transport Police that they had intercepted messages from a pro Palestinian group who were aiming to disrupt the rail network by trespassing on the train tracks in Brum ( eventually they settled for a sit down protest in the concourse at B’ham New Street station). So I adjourned my visit until next week. But it leads quite nicely into tonight’s update. So not only do they want to cause problems to commuters but they also want to, effectively, support Hamas ( well known as supporters of women’s and children’s rights and very fond of gays and lesbians) and to do this immediately after the horrific terrorist attack against a Synagogue in Manchester yesterday. Lovely people, eh? So I trust Terfs will stand with UK Jews in the face of this attack. I kick off below with four pieces on this awful incident: from Radical Cartoons (incorporating a piece from Kellie-Jay); from EDI Jester; from Raja Miah who has campaigned relentlessly against the grooming gangs; and from Andrew Doyle. All thoughts gratefully received.
By sheer coincidence tonight’s film choice is quite apposite!!
Onwards with the Dusty, Nicola and Moodie Film Series. Please keep the suggestions for films coming in but please check the list first which I am updating as we go along. Please send suggestions in the comments here at this link:
Ben-Hur is a 1959 American film directed by William Wyler and starring Charlton Heston as the title character.
In AD 26 Jerusalem, Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Jewish prince and merchant, lives with his mother, Miriam, and younger sister, Tirzah. The family’s steward, Simonides, has a daughter named Esther. Judah grants Simonides’ request for Esther to marry a freeman and grants Esther her freedom as a wedding gift. Apart since childhood, Judah and Esther quickly fall in love.
Judah’s Roman childhood friend, Messala, returns to Jerusalem as commander of the Fortress Antonia. He fully embraces Rome’s imperial power while Judah remains devoted to his faith and the Jewish people’s freedom. When Messala demands that Judah surrender potential rebels to Roman authorities, Judah refuses and cuts all ties.
And for the rest of the plot, if you haven’t watched it, you’ll just have to watch it!
A clip? Gotta be the chariot race!!!!!!!!
Charlton Heston is Ben-Hur.
Stephen Boyd is Messala.
Frank Thring is Pontius Pilate.
Thanks to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
Stand With UK Jews
Here is Radical Cartoons:
And here is Raja Miah:
And here is Andrew Doyle:
UK - Free Speech
Barrister Adam King, who represented Lucy Connolly, writes in Unherd:
Britain’s free speech shame. I’ve seen liberty on trial
2 Oct 9
In preparation for Lucy Connolly’s Court of Appeal hearing earlier this year, I did what a good brief should, and worked out near-verbatim answers to the trickier questions the judges might fire at me. Fat lot of good it did us in the end, of course, but Starmering beats stammering: the Prime Minister is fond of this technique, unsurprisingly given his background. The trouble is, it only really works once.
In February, in response to Vice-President Vance’s criticism of the British State’s suppression of free speech, Sir Keir managed to get his bit out: “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time […] I’m very proud of our history there.” Is he very though?
Is it pride he feels when he looks at the history of the Paul Chambers case, for instance, when the CPS, under his leadership as Director of Public Prosecutions, pursued a young man through the Magistrates, Crown, and High Courts, for a harmless piece of flippancy, an obvious joke about blowing up an airport, which none of the relevant authorities took seriously? If there’s any truth to the Guardian’s report of his personal intervention to continue fighting Chambers’s appeal “to save face” (and it is inconceivable he wasn’t aware of the matter) then he must have had in mind a different pride, and a different history.
But his answer flew well enough, and the discussion moved on. A few months later, in Scotland, the question was again raised in front of the US President. Dusting his cuff and pulling a grin as if in dad-like apology for an overused joke, he parried with, “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time here, so we’re very proud about that and we’ll be protecting it,” before being interrupted. Indoors later that day, he again stuck to the script — “Free speech in this country has been [sic] for a very long time, and we’re very very proud of it, we will protect it forever.”
The fourth outing of the very-very-long-time-very-very-proud defence came at Chequers the other week. “It’s one of the founding values of the United Kingdom, and we protect it jealously and fiercely, and always will, and we will bear down on any limits on free speech,” he began. And to conclude, “We have had free speech in this country for a very long time and we will always protect it.” But sandwiched between these two pieces of now familiar pabulum was something with a new flavour: “I draw a limit between free speech and the speech of those that want to peddle paedophilia and suicide social media to children.” The Paedo Pivot. They should teach it at Bar school.
Over the two months since Trump’s Scottish visit, something in the order of 2,000 people were arrested in the UK for online communications offences, including, most publicly, Graham Linehan. In an attempt to deflect the backlash from the comedian’s detention, the PM said the police should “focus on the most serious issues”, while the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley put out a statement asserting that it’s not the police’s fault as they have no choice but to investigate reported hate crimes, and the law needs to be changed.
Clearly, then, there is defensive anxiety among the new Establishment about restrictions on free speech in the UK. But whose fault is it, and what can be done?
My own experience of the senior ranks of the police, which comes mainly from defending officers in their disciplinary tribunals, often for speech transgressions of one kind or another, is that the Force has been more thoroughly captured by extreme progressive zealotry than any comparable institution.
The full piece is here:
UK - Tribunal Case
One piece from the latest Sex Matters newsletter ( 03 October) about the hearing of a recent tribunal case ( judgment awaited):
Maria Kelly v Leonardo UK
Women forced to use “secret toilet” to avoid dealing with menstrual blood in front of trans-identifying male colleagues
Summary of events
Maria Kelly is an engineer employed by Leonardo UK (LUK), a defence and security company. Defence is a male-dominated industry and 80% of Leanardo’s UK staff are men. Like all employers it is required to provide suitable and sufficient toilet facilities, generally separately for women and men.
In 2019, a colleague of Kelly’s expressed distress on encountering a visiting male staff member using an onsite female toilet. Kelly wondered if there had been a change in policy at LUK but did not raise the issue at the time in fear of being labelled transphobic.
In March 2023, having just washed menstrual blood from her hands, she encountered a different male member of staff entering the female toilets. This left her feeling vulnerable and upset. She decided from then on to use a “secret” toilet facility accessible through a cleaning cupboard door, which was known to women but not men and valued for its privacy.
In 2021, the Employment Appeal Tribunal had confirmed in the case of Forstater v CGDE that it is unlawful for employers to discriminate against or harass employees because they do not believe that men can be women. This gave Kelly the confidence to ask about LUK’s policies on toilet provision. In April 2024 the EDI lead confirmed that the toilets were designated for use on the basis of gender identity rather than sex. Kelly raised her concerns at meetings with the HR department. During one meeting Kelly thought that a member of staff referred to her concerns as a possible “hate crime”.
Kelly subsequently began grievance proceedings during which she met with two male managers and was accompanied by a male colleague. She was required to explain the specific privacy needs of women dealing with menstruation and menopause, which made her feel humiliated.
Kelly proceeded to lodge a claim of direct discrimination, harassment and indirect discrimination against LUK.
Next steps
The full merits hearing was heard at Edinburgh Employment Tribunal from 30th September 2025 to 3rd October 2025.
England and Wales - MoMa Breastfeeding
We have just reported on La Leche League, once proud breastfeeding charity which now includes larping men!!! Thanks to Ruth Lewis for reminding us that she and others have set up a new organisation in England and Wales just for women.
About MoMa Breastfeeding
MoMa Breastfeeding is an entirely voluntary organisation dedicated to supporting mothers who wish to breastfeed their children.
Mothers and children benefit from skilled support and information from breastfeeding counsellors who are experienced breastfeeding mothers and have been trained in providing mother-to-mother support.
All support is free at the point of access. We rely on donations to provide our services.
Full details are on their website and congratulations to them for setting up this excellent service:
https://momab.org.uk/meetings/
Scotland - Education Guidance
EDI Jester looks at how the adjusted Scottish Trans Schools Guidance, despite the clarity provided in the For Women Scotland judgment, is still failing to properly apply the judgment:
UK - The Red Flag Campaign
One piece from the latest Women’s Rights Network newsletter (03 October):
Red Flag Flying
WRN group raises alert to leisure centre’s mixed-sex changing rooms – police needlessly called
WRN North East, North Yorkshire and Teesside members raised the red flag about the dangers of mixed-sex changing rooms at Gosforth leisure centre, which previously had single-sex changing facilities.
It is well known that predatory males seek out easy access to their victims and there’s nowhere easier to commit crimes of voyeurism and sexual assault than in a changing space. WRN wants to know why local authorities are putting women and girls at risk.
The group’s eye-catching Red Flag message caused a member of staff to panic and call the police. WRN members were operating within the law and exercising their legal right to peaceful protest. The attending police officers agreed.
Details of the WRN Red Flag Campaign are on WRN’s website, with local groups arranging specific actions to alert the community and councils to the dangers of mixed-sex changing rooms.
Ireland - Barbie Kardashian
We reported some time ago about Kardashian finally being moved from a women’s prison to a men’s prison! https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-rose-of-tralee?utm_source=publication-search
He has just been released from prison in Ireland as reported by Paddy O’Gorman in Gript News:
I met Barbie Kardashian on release from prison
October 2 2025
Barbie Kardashian was released from Limerick Prison on Wednesday morning this week having served five years inside; he did the first three years in the women’s section of the prison and the last two in with the men. Barbie, 23, is a trans-identified man with a Gender Recognition Certificate that says he is a woman.
When Barbie saw the media presence outside the prison (myself and two others) he came over and started posing for the photographer. He was wearing thick, female-type make-up and was sporting an impossibly large pair of false boobs under his top. Barbie told us he loves media attention.
We spoke for about an hour. Not all of that footage can be released, but Gript subscribers can watch twenty minutes of our conversation here. It gives you a sense of this young man that cannot be conveyed in print.
We asked Barbie about his crimes. He had no remorse. He would now like to kill his mother who, along with his father, is in the top two of his kill list. His third intended murder victim is a prison official he named whom he intends to stab to death.
Barbie had picked up further charges while in prison; he was accused of four counts of making threats of rape and harm against two women in the prison, one a prisoner and the other a prison officer. When that case came up in Limerick Circuit Court in October of 2024, Barbie gave testimony about how he had told the women he would like to rape them using an object “so as to leave them unable to ever have children”. When asked by Prosecution what instrument he had in mind he replied that he would use a mop or possibly “an electric rod with which to sexually electrocute their genitalia”. Barbie was acquitted on all counts.
When I asked Barbie about that verdict this week he said he was glad he had “got away with it”. So any regrets? “I’m sorry I didn’t get to carry out my threats”, said Barbie, because “they deserved it”. The reason they deserved it in one case, that of the female prisoner, was that she had repeatedly accused him of leaving the shower she shared with him in an unhygienic state. (He gave the same explanation at his trial last year, which I attended, and which I have written up elsewhere).
Barbie says that, out of prison, he poses no danger to the public, other than to the three people he wants to murder and to the two women who he regrets not yet having raped. All others are safe. He intends using female public toilets and women should know they have no reason to be afraid of him. Just as he was telling us this, a woman called out “Hi Barbie” from a passing car, causing Barbie to erupt in anger saying he knew her as an ex-prisoner and he intends to “rape her with an object”. (The audio of this exchange, with the woman’s name edited out, is on my podcast just published).
For the future, Barbie now intends to get the surgery he says he “needs”. He has been getting hormone treatment in prison which has caused, he says, his breasts to swell but he has a whole catalogue of other body modifications he wants done. “I hate my male genitalia”, he says. Barbie wants to become like the doll that he has named himself after. This is what he craves. Barbie says he is sexually attracted to men and that, after his surgery, heterosexual men will come to be attracted to him. He intends becoming a porn star and a “sex worker”. He then did various poses for the press photographer there present. He begged us journalists not to go as, he told us, he loves media attention.
Then two men from the prison after-care service, who had been keeping a discreet distance, collected Barbie to take him to wherever is to be his new home.
I feel angry after talking to Barbie. I’m angry at all the people who have lied to him. I’m angry at the politicians who have told him that he can change sex if he wants to, and that everyone will come to accept him as a woman. I’m angry at the doctors who have put this gender-confused young person onto body-altering drugs, telling him that, with enough surgery, he can eventually have the body of woman.
I’m angry at the educators who would have told him, from an early age, that children can be born in the wrong body and that he could really be a girl. I’m angry at the homophobes who have told him that, with surgery, he can be converted into a heterosexual person, that is, a woman whom straight men will fancy. And most of all, I’m angry at the journalists who have broken their necks looking the other way when violent, women-hating men such as Barbie have been inflicted on vulnerable women in prisons and domestic violence shelters.
I want all these people to listen to Barbie. You wanted gender self-ID with all that that entails. Now listen to Barbie and see what you have done.
https://gript.ie/i-met-barbie-kardashian-on-release-from-prison/
Postscript: I understand that, following the threats he made in this interview, he has now been taken back into custody. Throw away the key!!
Europe - Athena
Faika El-Nagashi on the substack, Other Side of Politics reports on the setting up of a Europe wide organisation called Athena. Thanks to reader Tenaciously Terfin for this summary:
This is a new organisation set up to fight the huge part the EU is playing in pushing gender ideology through all its institutions, not just in Europe but around the world (using grants/money- in order to get grants you have to be gender ideology and DEI compliant). The video discusses this and how the EU based its agenda on the Yogyakarta Principles over a decade ago. As with everything in the EU, it’s being done on the quiet so it’s not well understood. Athena appears to be well organised but if the EU brings in its new ‘internet dome’ over Europe (supposedly to filter out misinformation) this could get blocked. I knew the EU was bad but I didn’t realise how thoroughly gender was being pushed across the world by its institutions. How far will Labour attempt to comply on the quiet? Combine all this with the WHO and the UN …..
Athena
Oct 02, 2025
Are you daydreaming about Roman amphitheatres and debating philosophers in togas, or do you prefer the slow-motion spectacle of Brussels bureaucrats issuing their final edicts as their world crumbles?
As much as I like both, over the past months I’ve been drawn into the machinations around gender identity ideology within European institutions, particularly the European Union and the Council of Europe. For some time, I tried to get others‘ attention focused on the immersive world of European agencies, institutes, units, recommendations, guidelines and strategies. I’ll admit, it’s all a bit nightmarish.
But it‘s what we‘ve got. Every tale has its own village, villains and story to tell. This one is ours. Across Europe, grassroots groups – radfems, parents, lesbians and gays – and many outstanding individuals have been fighting a brand of gender identity ideology that is backed, enforced and spread by institutional European politics.
The full piece is here:
https://faikaelnagashi.substack.com/p/athena
On his substack, Gender Clinic News Bernard Lane also discusses Athena and provides a useful example ( concerning ‘conversion practices bills’) from their report:
https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/capturing-europe?publication_id=627677&r=1v403b
Australia - The Desexing Society Podcast
On the Glinner Update, Jenny Nabben recommends the excellent podcast created by Stassja Frei Desexing Society ( we have previously featured a couple of episodes of this):
The Stanley Milgram Experiments
On her substack, A Dead Daughter or a Live Son, a novel Kassandra Stockmann discusses the Stanley Milgram experiments and their relationship to so called ‘gender affirming care’.
Stanley Milgram and the Trans Medical Scandal
How uncritical trust in experts has misled good people into perpetuating moral atrocities
Sep 29, 2025
Even before I studied psychology in college, I had heard about the Stanley Milgram experiments. After WWII, people wondered how mass genocide could have happened. Were Germans irredeemably evil? Were they worse than people in other European countries who did not send their Jewish neighbors to extermination camps? A researcher named Stanley Milgram devised an experiment in which participants would administer electric shocks to an actor (without knowing the other person was an actor) every time the “actor” answered a question incorrectly. When participants hesitated, a man in a white lab coat, a position of authority, would tell them it was morally right to continue, that it would help people learn better. And the participants kept administering electric shocks that, had the simulation been real, would have been lethal. According to Milgram, Germans were not more evil than anyone else; all of us are vulnerable to losing our moral center if an expert tells us it is acceptable to perpetrate harm.
Coming from a liberal, progressive background, the people in my orbit who knew about Stanley Milgram believed that history would repeat itself, with the government going after a vulnerable minority and exterminating them. We planned for that. We imagined that we wouldn’t be the people who administered electric shocks or turned our minority neighbors over to the police. Yet, as others before me have observed, history doesn’t repeat, but it echoes in strange ways. Progressives were so primed for a repeat of what happened in Nazi Germany that we were blind to what I believe will be the true scandal of the 21st century: pediatric gender modifications.
Once I started seeing this through the lens of Stanley Milgram, I could not stop. In progressive spaces, lived experience is treated as the gold standard of evidence rather than one of many ways of understanding the world, each with its own strengths and limitations. Blinded to those limitations and eager to correct past wrongs, media and medical organizations allowed activists to set the agenda, letting lived experience trump evidence-based research. The relationship between the NHS and Mermaids is the best-documented example of this. Suddenly, all of society, including expert medical and psychological associations, was saying that pediatric gender modifications are good and necessary, and progressives did not question it even though good science demands rigorous questions. The number of people who believe this is right simply because experts say so is a chilling example of Milgram’s findings in action.
The full piece is here:
https://kassandrastockmann.substack.com/p/stanley-milgram-and-the-trans-medical
Kelly Dougall’s Adult Colouring Books
Kelly Dougall, former Party of Women candidate, host of an excellent podcast and a therapist has created some colouring books for adults:
Terf Island Discs
Thanks to an excellent suggestion from Tenaciously Terfin, we have paused Endpieces for the time being and we are giving Tenaciously and Liz a well earned rest from their hard work. So , since 07 July, we have been running Terf Island Discs.
Several readers have chosen up to 4 songs or pieces of music each and we are going through those one at a time in each update. This is going so well that I am going to continue it a bit further and you can now choose up to 6 songs or pieces of music each. They need to be reasonably short. We can’t expect to have readers listening to the whole of Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto in B flat minor, albeit it is magnificent.
They don’t have to be from Terf Island BTW - anywhere in the world 😊
Please send links as well if you can.
So for those who have already chosen 4, please choose 2 more and, if you have not yet taken part, please choose 6!! If you repeat a song or piece of music that has already been chosen, I’ll let you know and you can choose another one. Please let me know your choices in the comments at this link:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/beware-of-the-flowers-terf-island
Next up!
Chosen by: my wife.
‘Ave Maria’ by Maria Callas.
#BeMorePorcupine
#KJKForPM
#AdultHumanFemale
#LetWomenSpeak
#LGB✂️TQ
#TransIsACult
#HoldTheLine
#BeMoreDissident
#NeverSurrender
#NeverForget
#TruthWillTriumph
#WeWillWin
Thanks , Dusty ,and yes ,I absolutely stand with the Jews as all right thinking people should. They have never been a threat to the world or to this country ,despite the many "blood libels" levelled against them. Something goes wrong in your Society ? Blame the Jews ,the eternal scapegoat !! Antisemitism has never made any sense and it's well past time that we ALL stand up against it. The Jews in this country ,and everywhere else ,deserve to live their lives without fear ,as we all do and therefore they need their ancestral homeland ,which should be a safe place for them to live their lives but their neighbours ,with their pathological hatred of Jews , won't allow that !! Thanks ,Dusty.🇮🇱🇮🇱🇮🇱🏴🇬🇧
I know I ought to have a lot to say, but my cumulative anger and sorrow leaves me without words.