News and views continue to flood into Dusty Towers so this is another two parter, dear readers.
We are continuing with Dusty’s film series and the latest version of the list is here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/empire-of-light-dustys-film-series
Please let us have your suggestions for films but please check the list first to see if it is there already. I am updating the list as we go along. We are going through them alphabetically and have got to H.
Hostiles is a 2017 American film centring on the so called Indian Wars.
In the New Mexico Territory in 1892, settler Rosalee Quaid and her family are attacked by a Comanche war party, who kill her husband and three children. Rosalee escapes by hiding under a rock outcrop.
At Fort Berringer, soon-to-retire US Army Captain Joseph Blocker is ordered by President Harrison to escort the cancer-stricken Cheyenne war chief Yellow Hawk and four members of his family back to their tribal lands in Montana. Blocker initially refuses, as Yellow Hawk and he are old enemies from the Great Sioux War of 1876, but accepts under the threat of court martial and loss of his pension. Blocker sets out for Montana.
The group comes across the destroyed Quaid house and Rosalee's dead husband. They find a traumatised Rosalee and her deceased children. After some convincing, Rosalee agrees to join the company.
After many adventures (!), Yellow Hawk dies just as the group arrives at the tribal lands in Montana, where he is buried. As Blocker and others prepare to leave, a rancher, Sirus Lounde and his three sons arrive and declare that they own the land, and order Blocker and the rest of the group to leave with the chief's body. Blocker informs them of the president's orders, only to be threatened at gunpoint. Blocker refuses, and a shootout ensues.
Christian Bale is Captain Blocker
Rosamund Pike is Rosalee Quaid
Scott Wilson is Sirus Lounde
Xavier Horsechief is Little Bear
Thanks to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
UK - Equality and Human Rights Commission
After the For Women Scotland judgment, Kellie-Jay Keen ( and me 😇) said that the EHRC should take action against some of the public bodies and organisations who were failing to implement the judgment. So it is great news that they are now doing just that! Well done, EHRC!
Geraldine Scott in The Telegraph ( Equalities watchdog tells organisations to change single-sex space rules 28 August) reports:
HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP
Policies allowing trans people to enter same-sex spaces in policing, education and health and social care must be rewritten, Britain’s equality regulator has said, as it launched action against 19 organisations it found to be breaching the law.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) will demand that the organisations withdraw and rewrite their policies, and could ultimately issue uncapped fines if they are not changed.
It follows a review launched in May last year by Kemi Badenoch, then women and equalities minister, who asked for examples of confusion in the law.
Kemi Badenoch launched the review that led to the EHRC investigation into single-sex space policies
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
Some 404 examples of “concerning” policies were passed to the EHRC, which will now tell 19 organisations to withdraw them or face further action.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine, the EHRC chairwoman, said the policies “mispresent the law” and “contain specific language that wrongly suggests there is an automatic legal right to access single-sex spaces based on self-identification”.
She said: “Organisations need to ensure their policies accurately reflect the law as it stands.
“This is proportionate regulatory action affecting a small number of organisations across different sectors as part of our statutory duty to promote compliance with equality law. We remain committed to supporting both women’s rights and trans people’s rights within the existing legal framework.”
• Organisations ‘must revisit policies’ after Supreme Court trans ruling
A Supreme Court ruling in April said the words “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex. Despite the judgment, which clarified the law, some organisations, including Whitehall departments and hospitals, had failed to withdraw their policies.
The EHRC did not reveal which organisations it would be writing to but said they spanned policing, education, health and social care and the public sector. It would not confirm whether this referred specifically to schools, universities, hospitals or care homes.
The organisations must respond with assurances that the policies will be withdrawn and outline any proposed timetable for revising them. If they do not do so, the EHRC can take further action, which could ultimately end in unlimited fines.
Badenoch said: “When organisations ranging from the NHS to trade unions have made it clear they won’t respect the Supreme Court ruling that sex is biological, the Labour government is kidding itself if it thinks these 400 breaches are the end of the issue.”
The full piece is here:
Taking Over The World
EDI Jester reports on Wide Awake Media asking Chat GTP about what the aims of transhumanism might be!!!
England - Trafford Council captured by the Gender Woo
Shelley Charlesworth of Transgender Trend reports on Trafford Council being entirely captured by the Gender Woo!
Trafford Council: a network of gender ideology
August 27, 2025
Ideologically-captured local authorities across the UK promote a political, social justice approach towards children experiencing gender-related distress. In this essay Shelley Charlesworth examines the example of Trafford Council to see how their activist agenda is created and maintained.
A seven page report written for Trafford Council’s Children’s and Young People’s Scrutiny Committee is a damning document, showing that activist gender ideas permeate every aspect of the Council’s work, potentially exposing children, especially the most vulnerable, to the harms of gender ideology.
The report is titled Support for LGBTQ+ young people in Trafford but for ease of comprehension we will refer to it as the LGBTQ+ Report. We’ll shorten the Children’s & Young People’s Scrutiny Committee to simply the Scrutiny Committee.
It’s the work of various teams in the council reporting to the Scrutiny Committee and indicative of the views of those who actually work with and provide services for children in the borough.
The staff teams who authored the LGBTQ+ Report are Public Health, Education, Youth Engagement Services and Commissioning Teams. The process is entirely circular. Those providing the unevidenced background for the Scrutiny Committee are the same groups and charities charged with providing advice and support on the ground.
Citation cartel is a useful term describing the academic practice of citing only work that agrees with your argument in a circular way thus reaching a predetermined conclusion. This is what is happening in Trafford. But unlike most academic work this cartel has real life effects on the lives of children with gender-related distress and their families.
The dangers of a citation cartel were underlined in the Cass Review’s rejection of the treatment guidelines of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health. The final report said:
“WPATH 8 cited many of the other national and regional guidelines to support some of its recommendations, despite these guidelines having been considerably influenced by WPATH 7…The circularity of this approach may explain why there has been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice despite the evidence being poor.”
The Cass Review itself was subjected to attacks using the source laundering method, described here by researcher Dave Hewitt. Citation cartels may fail in their objectives, in this case to discredit Cass, but cause real harm in spreading disinformation.
The Citation Cartel: Stats
The LGBTQ+ Report claims “A higher proportion of people identifying as LGBT+ were living in Old Trafford and the North of the borough.” According to the Council’s website Old Trafford, the north and Partington in the west are the most deprived parts of the borough.
“Within Trafford, five small areas (called Lower Super Output Areas) rank in the 10% most deprived areas in the Income Deprivation Affecting Children, in the whole of England”
This tallies with peer-reviewed research published by the BMJ which shows a correlation between areas of social deprivation and people identifying as transgender. The report authors show no evidence of understanding this link. This blind spot is compounded by an over-estimation of the numbers of trans identifying children and young people in the borough which is based on its own survey.
“The Trafford Youth Offer Survey 2025 is currently live and includes the option for young people aged 11-19 to self-identify their gender. 36 young people out of a survey size of 1339 (as at 7th March 2025) identified their gender as Trans/Transgender (12) Gender Fluit [sic](9) Non-Binary (9) Other (6). This represents 2.7% of the total responses received. If this proportion was extrapolated on a whole Trafford population, there could be over 500 young people who would identify their gender in these categories. There is likely to be a much larger group who identify as LGBT+ as the survey reflects their reported gender identity rather than their sexual orientation.”
This is how Trafford arrives at a much higher rate of trans identifying children and young people than other surveys. The LGBTQ+ Report authors really should have asked if the figure of 2.7% is believable. After all, the Council is to base its services and priorities on this data.
The 2021 ONS figures note
“People aged 16 to 24 years were the most likely age group to have said that their gender identity was different from their sex registered at birth (in this article we refer to people in this category as being trans), with 1.00% (63,000) identifying as such.”
It is just not credible that Trafford has over double the national average of young people saying they are trans.
The Citation Cartel: activist students
A week earlier the Scrutiny Committee had heard from students from Trafford College who called for more support in schools for trans and queer+ students, and for more training for teachers and staff. A student called Silas made the unevidenced claim that “a recent study had found that 76% of transgender youth had experienced gender dysphoria by the age of seven and 96% had by the age of thirteen.”
Councillors at that meeting were quick to endorse the message.
“The Chair agreed with everything Silas had said. The Chair was pleased to hear that LGBTQ+ education was now on the curriculum but agreed that work clearly needs to be done in supporting the training of staff to greater understand the issues faced.”
Councillor Shirley Procter said she was “appalled around the Government decision to no longer provide medication to suppress puberty for trans children, which would make transition much harder for young people. Councillor Procter offered for Silas, and any other young people, to reach out to her if they needed any support.”
It’s hard to believe that councillors tasked with the welfare of children in Trafford are so ill-informed about the harms of puberty blockers and their almost inevitable pathway to irreversible cross-sex hormones. They should know that puberty blockers have been banned by government and the NHS because the evidence for their use is weak.
They are not helped by the LGBTQ+ Report authors who only looked at evidence which called for an affirmative, experimental approach to children with gender-related distress.
The full piece is here:
https://www.transgendertrend.com/trafford-council-gender-ideology/
UK - The Good Law Grift
Jolyon Maugham. A fox.
Jolyon Maugham and the Good Law Project have complained to the Bar Standards Council about Sarah Phillimore, barrister and director of Fair Cop for alleged harassment of a larping man. Sarah picks up the story on her substack:
Here we are now: Entertain us
I have had now 7 years and counting of the various tactics used to 'silence' those who won't comply with prevailing orthodoxy. How are those tactics holding up?
Aug 27, 2025
I asked AI to give me Jolyon Maugham sitting in a big pile of money waving a trans flag and I am afraid this was the best it could do
In November 2020 I wrote for the Critic about the effective embrace by various authoritarian regimes of ‘Zersetzung’ (‘decomposition’ or ‘biodegradation’). It’s aim is to destroy the psychological integrity of an individual, by gathering information to damage their reputation and their personal relationships. This is part of the broad aim to make people afraid to speak; save money on bullets or bricks by making people their own jailers.
Matters were rather more terrifying in 2020 as these were dark pre Miller and pre Forstater days and I was battling my own local police force who had unlawfully recorded me for ‘hatred towards transgender individuals’ by publishing on social media a picture of my dog. I am not joking, you can see the police recordings here.
The police have now been put back in their box, not least thanks to Linzi Smith’s comprehensive victory in judicial review against Northumbria police who were found to be acting unlawfully by marching under Progress Pride flags.
But those trans activists who had gleefully made the most of their private militia do not seem to have got the memo that their party is over. One might have thought that not only the appellate court decisions in Miller and Forstater would have sounded the alarm, but also the cascade of Tribunal victories that followed regarding the right of those who believe sex is real and it matters to have and express that belief - or as I prefer to call it ‘that fact’. We had Bailey, Adams, Meade, Fahmy, Phoenix, Frances, Pitts, Higgs v Farmor - and I very much hope soon we can add Sandie Peggie to the list.
If Employment Tribunal decisions about ‘manifestation’ of belief were a bit dry for the crack legal team at the GLP, one might have reasonably hoped they would have noticed the Supreme Court decision in April 2025 that made it clear that sex was biological sex for the purposes of the Equality Act. Or they could have considered the continued success of Article 10 ECHR protections to call a man, a man - see here just one among many of transvestite disgraced ex copper Lynsay Watson’s doomed attempts to bring the Evil Gender Crits to heel R (Lynsay Watson) v The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police [2025] EWHC 954
The Good Law Project haven’t got the memo. I should not be surprised; the GLP appear to have parted company with any rational analysis of evidence and law a long time ago. It must surely be a matter of public interest now to note that its founder Jolyon Maugham has two daughters who consider themselves to be his sons. He is obviously heavily invested in gender identity ideology - the alternative is of course that he has to accept what he has allowed to happen to his children may not be something unambiguously wonderful and life affirming.
Best of luck, Sarah! The full piece is here:
UK - Women’s Wrestling
In a recent update we reported on a larping man winning a women’s wrestling tournament.
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/hobsons-choice-the-moon-in-a-puddle
Reader and (amongst other things) women’s wrestling afficionado, Nicola Bell remarks:
Don’t even get me started on Nyla Rose - my old man ran a wrestling company so I know all about it. People dismiss the trans issue in women’s wrestling because it’s not considered a real sport and is just ‘entertainment’/choreographed etc. But it’s exactly the same as a male performer being nominated for the best actress award at the Oscars - they’re not women therefore it’s not their category. Playing dress up doesn’t change that. Wrestling is misogynistic enough for Women (see Chyna’s story; she also had bouts against men) but to think that Nyla might be sharing the locker/changing rooms and toilets with the female wrestlers also sends a shudder. In addition to this of course Tony Khan the CEO of All Elite Wrestling (AEW) is a useful idiot and massive ally promoting the nonsense too (Ka-Ching!).
Nyla and other pretenders’ representations in Wrestling do absolutely matter because it normalises the entire facade for the audience and children watching in the arena and back at home. Yes, admittedly the female wrestlers are already very unfortunately hyper-sexualised/pornified (look like drag queens themselves) and as the recent scandal shows have been seriously sexually demeaned and assaulted many times over (see Vince McMahon) but men larping in drag receiving awards reserved for women? Pantomime historically meant we were all in on the joke that the men in dresses are very obviously not women, but categorising them as actual women goes way beyond that.
I loved British wrestling as a kid and am just so grateful I got to witness the balding Big ‘Daddy’ rather than a larping Big ‘Mummy’ in an unconvincing wig…
Thanks, Nicola.
UK and Ireland - Women’s Science Award
Feminist Legal Clinic reports:
Women’s science award ‘unlawfully accepting trans applicants’ (28 August)
The organisers behind a women’s science award supported by the Royal Society have been warned they may be acting unlawfully by allowing males who identify as women to enter.
The L’Oréal-Unesco For Women in Science UK and Ireland Young Talent Awards give £25,000 grants to five “outstanding early-career women scientists” to encourage them to pursue research careers and boost female representation in the sector. Notably, the annual prize benefits from the backing of the prestigious Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy.
The awards have been running since 2007, honouring female postdoctoral scientists in the fields of physical science, engineering, mathematics and computing, life science and sustainable development.
Source: Women’s science award ‘unlawfully accepting trans applicants’
https://feministlegal.org/womens-science-award-unlawfully-accepting-trans-applicants/
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: Katrina Biggs
‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ by Marianne Faithfull
#BeMorePorcupine
#DontFollowTheHerd
#AdultHumanFemale
#LetWomenSpeak
#LGB✂️TQ
#KeepSpeaking
#LeaveKidsAlone
#JustSayMen
#NeverSurrender
#NeverForget
#TruthWillTriumph
#WeWillWin
I remember being a bit fixated on the Ballad of Lucy Jordan when I was 37, and experiencing a significant change in my life - lol!