Get Carter Part 1
Update 517. Down Under Special. #BeMorePorcupine.
There is so much stuff I want to bring you at the moment, dear readers, that I am splitting this into two parts. The second part will just contain very brief extracts and links so you can decide what you want to read plus, of course, links to any videos etc.
Now that I am retired and (obviously) without a salary any longer, it would greatly assist my hard work in putting together these updates if you could consider becoming a paid subscriber or else buy me a coffee. Thanks to my paid subscribers and to those who donate via buy me a coffee. Thanks to all subscribers for your support. There are always good discussions in the comments so please get involved in those.
As we move into 2025 I will be featuring, to start with, and in alphabetical order, those Readers’ Choices for best film ever that did not make the top seven ( see Update 500 for the top seven).
Next up is Get Carter (1971).
Newcastle-born gangster Jack Carter has lived in London for years in the employ of organised crime bosses Gerald and Sid Fletcher. Jack is having an affair with Gerald's girlfriend Anna and plans to escape with her to South America, but he must first return to Newcastle and Gateshead to attend the funeral of his brother, Frank, who died in a purported drink-driving accident. Jack's bosses warn him not to stir up trouble, as they are friendly with the Newcastle mob. Unsatisfied with the official explanation, Jack investigates for himself.
Spoiler alert: the scene below gives away some of the plot.
Michael Caine is Jack Carter.
Glynn Edwards is Albert Swift.
Michael Caine really ought to be speaking in a Geordie accent. Not many people know that 😄
Thanks to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a pawall.
The States - The Executive Orders
I gathered all the relevant EOs for our purposes together here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/a-manifesto
The lead behind the three EOs relating directly to gender ideology is May Mailman and Meghan Murphy interviews her here. May explains how important Federal funding is and also the long reach of the Executive arm which may make it very difficult even for blue (Democrat) states to hold out against these orders.
There is an interesting discussion about the Executive Orders on Ben Appel’s podcast. I disagree with the feeling expressed that the Orders are too forcefully worded. I think the wording is perfect. However by the end of the discussion they seem to come around to the view that perhaps the forceful wording doesn’t matter. A child who has been deluded into thinking that they are born in the wrong body will probably hate the Executive Orders whether they are worded forcefully or not. It will be for parents and/or therapists to try and explain the delusion to the child in question. Interestingly they mention the power of federal funding and the fact that several hospitals have already said they will stop ‘gender affirming care’. There is a suggestion that some hospitals will be happy to have the ‘excuse’ to stop it.
All thoughts on this gratefully received.
Sandie Peggie v NHS Fife and Dr Upton
Most of you will know, I think, that Ms Peggie’s tribunal case is in progress. To quote Rex Landy: ‘Sandie Peggie: Hero. 'Beth' Upton: Zero.’ https://rexlandy.substack.com/p/sandie-peggie-hero-beth-upton-zero
I understand that Dr Upton does not have a support dog with HIM. If I end up in Tribunal I will be bringing a Support Porcupine 😁 - see further below.
Jo Bartosch reports on the case in The Critic.
Describing reality is not “harassment”
It is absurd that women are being persecuted for defending the truth and their basic freedoms
6 February, 2025
You’ve probably seen pictures of Sandie Peggie, the nurse taking on her employer at court after she was forced to share a changing room with a trans-identified male colleague. Her face has been splashed across the papers and social media, and shockingly misleading headlines have claimed that she “harassed” the trans identified doctor. Meanwhile, Dr Upton, the man who insisted on inserting himself in the women’s changing room, has been afforded the dignity of privacy.
Peggie was suspended and investigated by her employer after she objected to Upton’s presence in female changing rooms at Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy. She is now suing both NHS Fife and Dr Upton.
During the hearing, which commenced on Monday, Peggie has been repeatedly forced to justify why as a woman she doesn’t want to undress in front of a man, and why she was distressed by the idea of him taking his clothes off in front of her. Under hostile questioning, paid for by the taxpayer, the nurse has been forced to disclose everything from a childhood abuse by a general practitioner to details of her menstruation. She has even been quizzed about her husband’s Facebook posts.
The hearing has been a showcase of male power
During an acrimonious exchange on Tuesday, NHS Fife’s lawyer, Jane Russell, told Peggie that she “could’ve chosen not to say anything” when she was confronted three times by a man in the women’s changing room. The barrister went on to add that calling the male doctor “a man” was “likely to cause immense distress” and was “offensive.” In response, after explaining that she had been feeling “intimidated and embarrassed”, Peggie dismissed the suggestion that it was rude to refer to Upton as a man, answering simply “It’s the truth.”
I enjoyed Jo Bartosch, later in the piece, referring to a ‘boner of contention’ 😂
The full piece is here:
https://thecritic.co.uk/describing-reality-is-not-harassment/
New Zealand - Hate Speech Laws
Free Speech Union NZ have sent out a message on 05 February about a consultation on proposed hate speech laws.
If Paul Goldsmith Asks Dumb Questions...
Despite canning unworkable and incredibly unpopular 'hate speech' laws at the beginning of their term, the National Minister of Justice, Paul Goldsmith, has instructed the Law Commission to prepare advice on creating 'hate crime' laws in New Zealand. Yesterday, they released the consultation document.
It baffles me as to why this Government would pursue such a fool's errand.
You likely don't need me to tell you, the inherent weakness of 'hate speech' laws is also found in 'hate crime' laws: it's impossible to objectively decide what 'hate' means.
Put simply, there is no logical reason to support ‘hate crime’ laws, but reject ‘hate speech’ laws. They both come from the same faulty assumption that the government can simply make ‘hate’ illegal.
When Canada passed C-250, a ‘hate crime’ law in the mid-2000s, the bill’s sponsor MP Svend Robinson argued that it did not go far enough as it did not include ‘hate speech.’ Subsequent laws in Canada have fulfilled Robinson’s wish.
Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia have each shown the folly of trying to address division in this way.
… if this Government accepts advice to create ‘hate crime’ laws, ‘hate speech’ laws will be passed within the next five years, and NZ Police will be mandated to suppress ‘wrong speech'. (Our opponents even explicitly say that is the goal).
Together, tens of thousands of Kiwis pushed back against the Government trying to outlaw 'hate' previously. Up against a majority Government (the first in a generation), we defeated laws that would have been a death knell for free speech in New Zealand.
And that's exactly what we have to do again.
My team has gone to battle stations, and we will give everything we've got between now and March 13 (when the consultation ends) to convince this Government it's not a fight worth having. But to do that effectively, we need resources.
… tomorrow my team will launch a website we're working on right now to help facilitate tens of thousands of submissions on this consultation. We have already started fronting with media, and will be contacting every stakeholder we know to get them in the fight.
Would you join us now and ensure that we have the ability to fight back: a $100 donation today (or even better, joining as a member), will mean we're able to save free speech.
If we don't win this one, the implications for tomorrow are clear. Just look at what 'hate crime' laws have done in Canada, what non-criminal 'hate' incidents have done in the UK, and how the Government has regulated online speech in Australia.
We have stood in their way to accomplish the same in New Zealand; let's do it again.
New Zealand - Lesbian Legal Challenge
On her substack The Ministry has fallen, Garwhoungle continues her discussion of Lesbian Action for Visibility Aotearoa’s (LAVA’s) human rights claim that Wellington Pride discriminated against them.
We’re on to Part 5 of my series on Lesbian Action for Visibility Aotearoa’s (LAVA’s) human rights case. LAVA members claim that Wellington Pride discriminated against them by refusing them a stall at the annual Out in the City event. It was denied because of their political opinions including the idea that humans can’t change sex and men can’t be lesbians. Discrimination on the grounds of political opinion is prohibited by the Human Rights Act 1993. LAVA has announced that their lawyer has been informed of the dates for the hearing. It’s happening later this year: 21-25th July, 1-5 September and 15-19 September at the Wellington District Court, and 6-10 October at the Wellington Tribunals Unit.
Catch up on previous articles in the dedicated The Curious Case section of my Substack.
Buckle up for this edition where I recap the precedent-setting discrimination case won by UK gender-critical feminist Maya Forstater, discuss how it relates to the LAVA case and mention Whitmore vs Palmerston North City Council, a local case, which might have some bearing on matters.
Garwhoungle continues:
Shining the bright light of legal opinion on whether it’s okay to believe in scientific consensus could be a wonderful thing.
New Zealand’s radical moves in the gender space have happened because of murkiness, shade, speculation and outright bullying. In a world of social media, people can say all sorts of utterly nasty tripe and get away with it. Working in grey areas has been such a successful tactic that our mainstream media, bureaucracies and policymakers have capitulated. Policies that undermine gay rights, remove sex-based protections for females, dismiss medical safeguarding and facilitate gender faith-based teaching in our schools are upheld as examples of human rights.
Hopefully, the slurs, trans activist tantrums, abject supplications of allies, sanctimonious soliloquies and straight-out lies will not hold the same weight in a Tribunal as it does in political party press releases, social media and high circulation media.
The case is coming to trial over several days later this year. The full piece is here:
Australia
On her substack, Culture and State Edie Wyatt discusses a shocking Australian case where a paedophile who had abused his own daughter was given a vastly reduced sentence due to now ‘being a woman’ and being under the influence of another paedophile!! She says how Trump has brought her hope.
Can Pedophilia be Gender Affirming?
& Will Trump crush GI insanity?
Feb 05, 2025
I’ve been writing about gender identity in relation to women’s rights now for four years, and I’ve only seen things get progressively worse, hitting a low point for me a few weeks ago when I almost let the despair get the better of me. But something has happened to my little area of politics, and his name is Donald Trump.
My low point came on the 16th of January, I read a story in Reduxx that shook me to my core.
Edie concludes:
What will the Australian government do?
In Australia in the last few years we have seen The Age journalist Julie Szego sacked for gender-critical views, Moira Deeming endure unimaginable vilification and harassment from her own party for being an active TERF, psychiatrist Dr. Gillian Spencer stood down from Queensland Health for failing to participate in untested medical experimentation on gender non-conforming children, Sall Grover fight court battles to ask for the right to make an app for women, the Lesbian Action Group recently denied, on appeal, the right to have a single-sex lesbian social event. All this while conservative men ask where the feminists are.
Many other legal cases have been engaged in by women and in all of them the Australian Human Rights Commission has been on the side of men pretending to be women.
In my opinion, gender-critical feminists in Australia don’t have the luxury to be precious about Trump when courts are accepting pedophilia as gender-affirming care for the pedophile.
The only significant win we have had is Moira Deeming V John Pesutto, and that just means some people with money in this country won’t stand by and see a gender-critical woman being sacked from a conservative political party on the charge of being a Nazi.
IF the Liberals win the upcoming federal election, and that’s a big IF, we may see some follow-on from the US hurricane, but Peter Dutton is not showing the same courage as Trump on gender identity, and rooting out the noxious weed of gender identity in Australia will need an all-guts and no-glory approach.
The full piece is here:
https://msediewyatt.substack.com/p/can-pedophilia-be-gender-affirming
On the substack Gender Clinic News, Dianna Kenny discusses previous medical scandals and then examines so called ‘gender affirming care’.
Disoriented doctors
Trans social contagion affects not only teenage patients but the medical profession
Feb 04, 2025
She concludes:
The 2018/2020 WPATH copy-cat Australian standards for transitioning young people, including when to commence puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, issued by Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) were hailed by Victoria’s centre-left government as “the most stringent safety standards” for children and adolescents, as well as “the world’s most progressive.”
However, the AusPATH/RCH standards are not evidence-based. Rather, they invoke “clinician consensus” and “increasing evidence” for “gender-affirming care,” flag the need for more research but warn that withholding treatment is not “a neutral option,” assert that gender-affirming care is “lifesaving” and that failure to provide it may increase suicide risk.
In the recently published Cass review (2024), this RCH treatment guide scored 19 out of a 100 for rigour and reliability, compared with the Swedish guidelines that scored 71 out of 100.
Yet these same RCH standards, which were published as a peer-reviewed paper in the Medical Journal of Australia and praised by The Lancet, claiming international consensus, make no mention of a Dutch study (Vrouenraets, Fredriks, Hannema, Cohen-Kettenis, & de Vries, 2015) showing a worrying level of medical uncertainty and diametrically opposed views among 36 gender clinicians in 10 countries.The Dutch paper highlighted seven areas of disagreement, including the cause of gender dysphoria, consent, infertility, the risks to brain development and cognitive function of interrupting puberty, and whether gender dysphoria is a mental illness or just a normal gender variation of human sexuality pathologised by culture-driven treatment.
This study underscored the lack of consensus regarding the safety, ethics, and benefit of the global trend to prescribe puberty blockers to increasingly younger patients predicated upon the unfounded assumption that pausing puberty affords time for them to “decide their true identity,” while reducing suicide risk.
Although the internet is replete with such claims, there have been blistering critiques showing that puberty blockers convey no benefit in reducing suicide.
British sociologist Michael Biggs examined data from the London-based Tavistock gender clinic between 2010 and 2020 and calculated that the proportion of patients who died by suicide was 0.03 percent.
Another register study of all-cause and suicide mortality among young people aged under 23 years who contacted specialised gender identity services in Finland in 1996–2019 (n=2,083) attempted to disentangle the role of gender dysphoria and other psychiatric morbidities on mortality (Ruuska, Tuisku, Holttinen, & Kaltiala, 2024).
There were 55 deaths, of which 20 (36 per cent) were suicides. All-cause mortality did not differ between the gender dysphoria group and controls (n=16,643), but the proportion of suicides was higher in the gender dysphoria group (0.3 per cent vs 0.1 per cent).
However, when psychiatric morbidity was controlled, neither all-cause nor suicide mortality differed between the two groups.
The authors concluded that gender dysphoria and medical gender reassignment do not predict all-cause or suicide mortality when psychiatric morbidity is controlled. They concluded that psychiatric co-morbidities, frequency of psychiatric contact, and male sex were the only predictors distinguishing between those who committed suicide and those who did not. In the gender dysphoria group, 0.3 percent died by suicide.Equally concerning because they form the foundation of psychiatric assessment and treatment are the changes to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5 (2013) and DSM-5-TR (2022), in which the diagnosis of gender dysphoria focuses on distress and discomfort that accompanies being transgender, rather than on gender identity itself.
Similarly, in the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases, ICD-11, the gender incongruence diagnosis is placed in a chapter on sexual health that focuses on the person’s experienced identity and the need for gender-affirming treatment that might arise from that identity.
These changes have been hailed as a victory for “depsychopathologisation” of transgender identities, but they constitute nothing more than a sycophantic obeisance to the collective madness of gender ideology and its proponents.
This is an edited extract from Professor Kenny’s new book, Gender Ideology, Social Contagion, and the Making of a Transgender Generation, published by Cambridge Scholars Press. Professor Kenny, formerly at The University of Sydney, is a psychologist and psychotherapist whose clients include gender-questioning young people
OMG, another book to add to the list.
The full piece is here:
https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/disoriented-doctors?r=7ogxh&triedRedirect=true
Surrogacy
From paedophilia to surrogacy - actually both at the same time!! I know many readers are, like me, utterly opposed to surrogacy so, though this is not the main subject matter of this substack, of course, I thought readers would be interested in this shocking story from wonderful Genevieve Gluck on Reduxx.
Convicted Pedophile Who Owns Multinational Surrogacy Empire Charged with Sexual Assault of Young Employee
Feb 03, 2025
A prominent surrogacy agency in Europe is under investigation following accusations that its pedophile owner sexually assaulted an employee. José María Hill Prados, 63, is being accused of forcing a young employee to perform sexual acts as part of his employment with Gestlife.
Gestlife is one of the largest surrogacy firms in Europe, operating offices in 11 countries dedicated to facilitating child exchange contracts. On its site, it boasts that it has helped “2100 children be born,” and that over 55% of its clientele are “LGBTQIA+ couples.” But authorities in Barcelona are now investigating the company after an employee came forward to accuse the owner of sexual assault.
According to the complaint, the 20-year-old victim, who will be referred to as Alejandro, was in a precarious financial situation when he came upon a job advertisement on Instagram which promised regular work with a stable income. His confidence was bolstered by the fact that he knew the job offer to have associations in the “gay world.”
The full piece is here:
https://genevievegluck.substack.com/p/convicted-pedophile-who-owns-multinational
Let Women Speak
I hope to be at the Nottingham rally. Let us know if you are coming. 😃
Endpiece by Liz
Our Substack Mascot Animal
For new readers who don’t know why we keep mentioning Porcupines, here are the (Terf) Porcupine parents defending their children from the (Gender) Leopard 😄
#BeMorePorcupine
#EndGenderAffirmingCare
#AdultHumanFemale
#LetWomenSpeak
#GrassrootsArmy
#FightForFreeSpeech
#ByeByeStonewall
#GenderEnders
#NeverSurrender
I’ll be writing a submission against a hate crime law in NZ. It won’t be very sophisticated, but silence is taken as permission, so even if speaking up gets us nowhere, it’s better than staying silent. I know we can’t spend all our time speaking up about everything, but we should choose at least some things to be heard about.
Cheers Dusty , and Liz , see now I want a wee porcupine , can thinks of loads that I want to stick a long sharp stick in !