The Cheap Detective
Update 808. Trans Violence Special. #BeMorePorcupine.
Dusty Towers is still being swamped with news and views but I am determined to squash everything into one part, dear readers, so this is a very long one!!!! I am aware that draft statutory guidance for schools in England has just been published today. I will be looking at this in the next update.
We recently had a detective film competition won by Petal. Petal is a paid subscriber and, instead of choosing someone she knows to get the ‘prize’ of a free paid subscription, she kindly said that I should offer it out to free subscribers. So….. another competition, but this time just for free subscribers ( sorry, paid subscribers). If you would like to win a free paid subscription (names will be drawn from a hat as previously), please let me know your favourite Western before Update 810 and the winner will be announced in that Update ( you can e-mail me your nomination at Dusty1958@protonmail.com if you prefer). You may have noticed I am beginning to do more one off pieces for paid subscribers so there will hopefully be more of an advantage from being a paid subscriber. Get thinking about your nomination!
Meanwhile 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:
The Cheap Detective is a 1978 American film written by Neil Simon and directed by Robert Moore.
It stars Peter Falk as Lou Peckinpaugh, a parody of Humphrey Bogart. The film is a parody of Bogart films such as Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon.
In the clip, Louise Fletcher is Marlene DuChard ( a parody of Ingrid Bergman).
Thanks to four wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
The Canadian Shooting - ‘Gunperson in a dress’!!!???
Most readers will be aware that, on Tuesday 10 February, a larping man in a dress called Jesse Strang shot nine people including children and injured more than two dozen others at the small town of Tumbler Ridge in British Colombia, Canada before turning the gun on himself. By coincidence I cover the increase in ‘trans violence’ in a piece below. The local police decided to describe Strang as a ‘gunperson’ and a lot of the media proceeded to either do likewise or to call him a woman! Reduxx reported very swiftly that it was a man but still incorrect reports were published. For a bit of accurate reporting here is Tousi TV.
SEEN In Journalism look at the shameful response from much of the media.
‘Reducing a murderous tragedy to pronouns’
Coverage of the Tumbler Ridge murders - just give us the facts.
Feb 11, 2026
Updating this because of the shameful behaviour of a number of outlets which insisted on described Jesse Strang/Rootselaar as a woman, even after the [ police press release?] which made it clear he’s a male.
The Guardian buried the lead, and our comment on it is here. Reuters tries to pass its lie off by attributing the police: when it should have been at the front asking questions about why they’re so determined to affirm, and whether they knowingly misled the school in its security alert about a ‘woman’. Reuters is bought by almost every newsroom, and has been seen as a ‘one-stop’ resource. It’s trusted. Sky News - its International Correspondent no less - dares to explain how rare it is that a woman committed this crime. ITV News adopts the killer’s pronouns.
You can watch the relevant portion of the police press conference here.
Time was that this affirmative grip on the news cycle would have been watertight. That’s no longer the case. The more outlets refuse to comply - the BBC among them - the more these outlets stand out as recalcitrant, unrepentant, untrustworthy and activist sources.
Our original piece starts here
Don’t mistake us. Those of us who called for the authorities and the media for clarity on the sex of the killer at Tumbler Ridge are not minimising the deaths of nine people in one of Canada’s deadliest mass shootings. We’re saying it’s what happens when the information is withheld.
As Gerald Posner clarifies:
‘This is not a minor semantic dispute. In high-profile crimes, accurate reporting matters. Biological sex is a data category used in criminology, public policy, and statistical analysis. Erasing it, or substituting identity categories without clarity, distorts public understanding’
It means that instead of analysing - again - what leads people to commit heinous crimes like this, and whether sex, or factors around trans identification could have been a driver, we are wasting time trying to find out whether the killer was a man at all, never mind whether he identified as the opposite sex. Legacy media will address neither.
We don’t know that there’s a facet of trans identification which finds an outlet in violence. If there is, it’s terrifying, and it’s important we find it, and talk about it, and hunt mechanisms or solutions to address this frightening possibility. It could save lives.
If there isn’t, we need to know that too. But nothing is more likely to arouse suspicion than a complete shutdown of public discourse on the issue. Sex is of course a factor: men and boys commit the majority of violent crimes. But here, we weren’t allowed to know it - contra all reporting conventions around major crimes.
Nine people were killed in Tumbler Ridge in remote British Columbia: six at the Secondary School, one en route to hospital, and two at a connected residence. The shooter - called a ‘gunperson’ and ‘a female in a dress with brown hair’ by the authorities - then shot himself, or herself, as the police would have it. More than two dozen people were injured.
Reduxx posted at 7.16 am UK time that the shooter was a trans-identified male called Jesse Strang. Reduxx doesn’t have a safety net, it lives and dies by the old reporter maxim, you’re only as good as your last story. At least three of its senior reporters worked on it for hours and they didn’t publish until they believed it was watertight. At time of writing, it has just been officially confirmed. If they’d been wrong, there would be vast reputational consequence for Reduxx. So they’re not in the business of making baseless accusations. There’s a reason they’re trusted.
The full piece is here:
https://seeninjournalism.substack.com/p/reducing-a-murderous-tragedy-to-pronouns
I commented on SEEN’s first report:
Thanks for an excellent and very swift report.
The Canadian police started the hare running. They had a dead shooter. They also had what JK Rowling has described as ‘the superpower of eyesight’! Of course they knew it was a man but they virtually invented a word ‘gunperson’. The media should have had their antennae alerted by the use of this weird made up word. Then they could have dug further and found, for example, the great work of Reduxx.
All thoughts gratefully received.
Of course, satire was required. Over to Babylon Bee:
Canadian Reporterperson Announces Policepersons Have Identified Gunperson
https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/status/2021703099707003245
Stop The Clinical Trial
Our old friend Nutmeg reports:
The Telegraph has revealed that children, including ones with learning difficulties, have been promised up to £500 in vouchers, which can be redeemed at retailers like XBOX & Uber Eats, if they take part in an NHS ‘transgender’ trial to block their puberty
https://x.com/ripx4nutmeg/status/2021929552692367669
The For Women Scotland Judgment and Single Sex Spaces
Michael Foran on his substack, Knowing Ius, in an extremely detailed piece, explains (basically) why, in the light of the FWS Judgment, single sex spaces mean what they say! This is despite a couple of recent bizarre tribunal judgments ( Sandie Peggie and Maria Kelly).
Free Speech
EDI Jester reports on the US Government saying they will fund groups who are fighting for free speech in Europe and the UK!! Excellent!!!!
Ireland - Louth County Council
Jason Osborne in Gript News reports:
C: Unsplash
Louth County Council to spend €100,000 on LGBTQ project
February 9,2026
Louth County Council are offering over €100,000 to deliver a cross-border LGBTQ+ project in the hope of effecting “attitudinal” and “behavioural” change in border villages and towns.
In a notice posted on Government procurement platform, eTenders, Louth County Council said that the ‘PEACEPLUS LGBTQIA+ Capacity Building Programme’ is a “cross community, cross border programme with a focus on improving the understanding of and respect for members of the LGBTQIA+ community”.
In the tender documents included in the post, applicants are told that the project objective involves the delivery of the programme to 106 people involving “two main activities including an outreach project in rural and cross border areas that will raise awareness, understanding and respect for the LGBTQIA+ community”.
The programme is described as having a focus on “increasing understanding of and respect for members of the LGBTQIA+ community in Louth”, which is considered to involve ‘attitudinal change’ in those it engages.
It is similarly described as promoting “greater inclusion of members of the LGBTQIA+ community in the design and access of LGBTQIA+ services, mainstream services, and visibility within County Louth”, which is considered to involve ‘behavioural change’.
Delivery of the programme involves engaging with “10 different villages / rural hamlets and towns” in rural and cross border areas in County Louth and into Newry, Mourne and Down to “increase awareness of issues and challenges for LGBTQIA+ people living in these areas”.
Another element of the programme involves the provision of four “dialogue events of an hour’s length each covering “good relations, anti-discrimination and anti-racism workshops, ‘New Ireland’ and what this could mean to Louth in the future, the Good Friday Agreement and Co Louth and the Troubles”.
The ‘indicative budget’ for the contract is €102,991 including VAT, the document reads, the contract expected to be in place for a duration of two years.
PEACEPLUS is a cross-border funding programme supported by the EU, the UK, the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland administration, intended to enhance “peace and prosperity across Northern Ireland and the border counties of Ireland”.
Dusty - beam me up, Scotty!! I’d like to be at one of these ‘dialogue events’. I hope some Terfs attend!!
Ireland - The X Confiscation
Paddy Manning reports on the Irish Government suggesting they might take over X 🤣
C: PeopleImages / Shutterstock
Paddy Manning: X The X Confiscation
February 10, 2026
Bad ideas are like Zombies, they keep on coming back but you have to behead them. The latest clutch of Bad Ideas come all wrapped up and travelling together.
The Zombie Collective of “Lets Nationalise or Ban X” needs beheading not because the politicians talking about doing so are in anyway serious; the state could neither afford the trillion euro financial cost of compensating X’s shareholders nor the reputational cost of of a ban but because a bad idea repeatedly unanswered pollutes public discussion and becomes, in part, an accepted belief. We should not let anti-freedom rhetoric be normalised.
X is a private property, belonging to its shareholders and neither its size nor their wealth changes their entitlement to own it and retain it. Private property rights are the very basis of a successful economy; nobody invests or works where the fruits of their efforts are likely to be confiscated. Ireland has a successful economy precisely because we have strong private property protection, attracting inward investment (like X) and retaining businesses and wealth in ways countries like South Africa and Russia which have regimes actively hostile to private property cannot.
The 20th Century’s disastrous experiment with Communism proved that the theories of Mises were right in practise; private property allocates resources far better and to every bodies’ ultimate benefit in a way the cloying hands of government and its bureaucrats simple cannot.
The argument for private property is not just an economic case, strong as that is but also, most importantly, a moral one; we have a natural right to be free and that means not to be prevented from owning property as part of our human rights and freedoms. The government, no more than your local mafia coven, is not entitled to steal from you what you have because you are a free human. If the powerful can take what you own then you are a slave. The mafia coven would, at least, be more honest in not pretending their theft was for your own good.
Wrapped up in the Zombie Idea Bouquet is the notion that people politicians do not like can be treated differently, less favourably than others. Our rights, economic or otherwise, do not and cannot depend on us currying favour with the local Don Corleone despite the recent remarks of a government TD. That would be to reduce the country to Putin’s Russia without the Bolshoi, Baba Yaga or the nukes. Irish politicians dislike of Elon Musk would not make expropriation of X any more moral or legal, merely more palatable to people who think the state is an arm of politics. Law either applies to everyone or it applies not at all, it is not whimsically selective. What happens when you fall afoul of your local party apparatchiks? Are your house or car up for grabs?
Free Speech has become the most traduced of rights, with everyone from university freshman to senior politicians reassuring us that without strict limitations on what can be said we will be drowned in a tsunami of Hate Speech, without ever telling us what Hate Speech is. In the UK police forces & the judiciary have taken this idea more seriously than that of mass gang rape, prosecuting for social media posts with the fervour of a Salem witch-finder smelling sulphur. Free Speech is the underpinning of all other rights but it is its own enemy; its necessary freedom provides its enemies with ammunition. It is the speech that offends that needs protection: nobody comes after the emollient sentence.
Musk’s X has annoyed the censorious not just by denying the Government and GANGOs (government affiliated non-government organisations) the power they had under its former Twitter incarnation to have content that displeased them removed but by allowing speech as free as the laws of individual countries will bear: even helping posters fight the lawfare unleashed upon them when law was not adequate for the silencers. Allowing politicians for any reason to intimate that their taking over or banning X would be in the public interest adds to the dangerous and stupid diminishing of Free Speech in the public forum.
Underpinning much of the noise about X has been the allegations that its AI, Grok, has produced child porn and non consensual nude images of real people. Oddly as a ferocious consumer of X I have never seen such images but the uses to which Large Language Models can be put are many & humans are polymorphously perverse. These things do not require an LLM nor are they legal. The state & the individual is more than well equipped to counter such image manipulation without the nuclear option of confiscating or banning a single company. One might take the complaints from concerned politicians more seriously if any one of them had ever moved to have the derisory sentences for possession of child abuse images increased in legislation.
Allowing politicians to bloviate may seem harmless, even a better use of their time than time spent persecuting us – but all to easily anti-freedom sentiment is normalised. Answering bad ideas like the X Confiscation is a vital part of political hygiene in a country where the ideas of the free market has little real support. Head them off at the pass now lest they create a stampede in the future.
https://gript.ie/paddy-manning-x-the-x-confiscation/?ct=t(EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_5_17_2022_13_19_COPY_01)
UK - Erasure of Language and Pregnancy Checks
Biology In Medicine report on what happens when you can’t just say ‘pregnant woman’!!
Pregnancy checks in medical imaging: what NHS radiographers are reporting
Jan 13, 2026
In recent months, NHS radiographers have raised concerns with Biology in Medicine about how pregnancy enquiries are now being carried out in clinical practice. Their accounts describe patient distress, compromised care, and professional uncertainty about how to identify pregnancy risk safely, lawfully, and compassionately in real-world settings.
The following analysis and anonymised accounts have been submitted by radiographers based on their direct clinical experience. They are presented to illustrate recurring patterns rather than isolated incidents, and to highlight unintended consequences arising from current pregnancy enquiry procedures.
Regulatory background
The Ionising Radiation (Medical Exposure) Regulations (IR(ME)R) provide the legal framework governing the safe use of ionising radiation in medical imaging. A core safeguard within IR(ME)R is the requirement to establish pregnancy status where relevant, in order to avoid inadvertent exposure of a developing foetus to ionising radiation.
Until 2017, this safeguard applied to females of reproductive age, reflecting the biological reality that pregnancy is a sex-specific condition.
In 2017, Schedule 2(c) of IR(ME)R amended this wording, replacing “female” with:
“individuals of childbearing potential”
The stated intention was to recognise that not all females identify with the term “female”. However, the amendment did not alter the underlying biological basis of pregnancy. Nor did it provide guidance on how healthcare professionals should identify which “individuals” have childbearing potential.
Clinical uncertainty and system-level consequences
In modern NHS systems, sex markers in medical records can be changed to reflect gender identity. As a result, clinicians can no longer reliably infer biological sex from the medical record. Radiographers report that they were left without a clear, consistent, or clinically workable method for determining pregnancy risk under IR(ME)R.
In response to this uncertainty, many departments introduced so-called inclusive pregnancy enquiries, often under regulatory or organisational pressure. This was intensified following the reporting of a radiation incident involving a pregnant trans-identified female.
Professional bodies and charities attempted to address the issue, but without resolving the core clinical problem: how to identify pregnancy risk accurately while maintaining clarity, proportionality, and patient trust.
The Inclusive Pregnancy Status (IPS) guidance
In 2021, the Society and College of Radiographers (SCoR) published Inclusive Pregnancy Status (IPS) Guidelines, accompanied by a structured checklist. Radiographers report that use of this checklist is now mandated by employers as part of local IR(ME)R procedures.
The IPS checklist:
• requires use of preferred names and pronouns
• is lengthy and complex
• requires a high reading level
• asks patients to declare their registered sex at birth
• requires disclosure of disorders of sexual development
• and, where “female at birth” is indicated, proceeds to a series of intrusive and confusing pregnancy-related questions
Radiographers report that this process frequently causes confusion, distress and delays, while leaving staff unsure whether they are adequately fulfilling their legal duties.
The full piece is here;
The States - A Round Up
A great round up by Kara Dansky of events in the States with the exception of the first report:
A larping Swedish skier in the Winter Olympics; a male wrestler sexually assaulting a woman wrestler ( see further below); a billboard campaign in California highlighting men in women’s prisons; T shirts including one with a Kara Dansky quote!; and (behind the paywall I’m afraid) a detailed report on the Federal Trade Commission taking action against the American Academy of Pediatrics ( which we reported on here: https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-end-of-gender-medicine).
Trans and Violence
Fascinating examination of the disproportionate numbers of larping men (and the occasional larping woman) involved in mass killings by Brooke Laufer in Reality’s Last Stand. Or maybe they are ‘killerpersons’!?
Gender Nihilism and the Revolutionary Impulse
Why the breakdown of meaning and an embodied identity fuels extremist violence..
Feb 10, 2026
About the Author
Brooke Laufer, Psy.D. is an independent scholar, writer, and clinician with a group practice in Evanston, Illinois.
The nature of political violence has changed. What once looked like moral struggle—however misguided—has increasingly given way to something more chaotic and disturbing. Among many young adults, a powerful “revolutionary impulse” has taken hold: not just the urge to protest, but the belief that one is personally called to carry out sweeping, often violent acts in the name of social change. In a growing number of cases, individuals drawn toward extremist violence also identify as transgender. This is a pattern that warrants careful examination rather than reflexive dismissal. [ Dusty - my emphasis of this and the next paragraph is excellent as well]
To be clear, identifying as transgender or exploring the concept of “gender identity” does not cause violence or criminal behavior. But the pattern raises important psychological questions about identity and instability. For some individuals, a fragile or fractured sense of self—often shaped by a felt conflict between biological sex and gender identity, and reinforced by narratives of constant threat or victimhood—may intensify alienation, urgency, and emotional volatility. When a person’s identity becomes detached from embodied reality, personal history, and stable relationships, it can drift toward nihilism: the belief that life itself has no inherent meaning or value. In that state, ideology can rush in to fill the void. For a small but notable subset of radicalized individuals, the combination of identity instability, existential fear, and moral absolutism can make violence feel not only permissible, but purposeful.
Friedrich Nietzsche described nihilism as the collapse of a society’s highest values—its moral frameworks, religious beliefs, and metaphysical assumptions—once they no longer command trust or authority. When those structures dissolve, what replaces them is not liberation but disorientation. The familiar landmarks that once anchored meaning disappear, leaving behind anxiety, emptiness, and a deep uncertainty about how to live or who to be. It is within this vacuum that destructive ideologies—and destructive acts—can take root.
This internal collapse is starkly visible in the manifesto left by Robert Westman, the shooter who opened fire at a Catholic school and identified as a transgender woman named Robin. “The message is that there is no message,” Westman wrote—a line that captures the nihilistic void Nietzsche warned about. In this worldview, meaning itself has evaporated. Violence becomes a grotesque substitute for communication: a way to project inner emptiness outward, replacing empathy, faith, and human connection with destruction and chaos.
For violence to override moral restraint and the sanctity of life, something must first give way internally. Meaning must collapse. Despair must set in. The world must come to feel irredeemably corrupt. For some individuals, gender ideology may deepen this void by undermining psychological grounding, weakening trust in reality, and fragmenting the self. Over the past five years, the emergence of violent actors who identify as transgender has formed a troubling and complex pattern—one that remains largely unexplored in mainstream discourse, in part because of the understandable discomfort around acknowledging it. But when patterns appear, especially in matters of violence, they demand examination. From a psychological perspective, these acts are best understood as symptoms signaling deeper disturbances that require careful interpretation.
The full piece is here:
Girls and Fanfic
Fanfic or fanfiction is fiction written by a fan of, and featuring characters from, a particular TV series, film, etc. We previously featured Helen Joyce writing about fanfic:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-bicycle-thieves?utm_source=publication-search
The substack Fairer Disputations has an excellent new contributor, namely Jo Bartosch and Jo looks at how girls reading fanfic begin to identify with gay men:
Introducing Featured Author Jo Bartosch
Feb 10, 2026
……………………………..
From Lost Girls to Fictional Boys: How Fanfic Leads Girls to Identify as Gay Men
At eight years old, when most girls are turning the pages of Harry Potter, Rebecca was watching hardcore pornography. A year later, she began consuming yaoi or Boys Love (BL): Japanese illustrated fiction centred on romantic and sexual relationships between men. Once she reached her teen years, Rebecca says, this material “became tangled up with my trans identification.” For nearly a decade, Rebecca believed herself to be a homosexual male, running from the fate of women in pornography into the fantasy of gay male relationships.
Criticism of straight or bisexual men identifying as transgender lesbians (“transbians”) is now well rehearsed. Anyone equipped with eyes and critical faculties can see what is at work: a fetish, swollen by pornography until it spills offline. Far less examined, however, is the inverse phenomenon: straight or bisexual women coming to identify as gay men. This, too, can be traced to pornography and, more controversially, to erotic media produced by women for women. In addition to BL, this media includes fanfic stories written by fans of popular franchises and slash, a genre of fanfic that centres on imagined sexual or romantic relationships between well-known male characters, such as Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock.
Rebecca believes that the fascination some women have for gay male relationships is merely the mirror of men’s interest in lesbians. Psychotherapist Joe Burgo has a different understanding. From treating teenage girls who identify as gay boys, including some he says are “obsessed with gay male relationships,” he says:
“I think it’s driven by a fear of their own burgeoning sexuality, which in our pornified culture feels scary and vulnerable. Early exposure to porn seems unavoidable these days since it’s ubiquitous. These girls then “identify out” of their sex into an imaginary sexuality that feels safer.”
The full piece is here:
The States - Women’s Wrestling
It’s bad enough men with their superior strength, power and speed invading women’s sport and stealing their trophies, places and records but when one of them adds in sexually assaulting a woman!!! JDhillon reports;
Olivia Coleman and John Lithgow
Normally on this substack we feature films which we would recommend but, for a change, we are definitely not recommending a new film called Jimpa starring Olivia Coleman and John Lithgow and we’ll let Kellie-Jay Keen explain why that is:
Terf Island Discs
Thanks to all readers ( and me 😀) who have made suggestions and we still have lots of songs to go that will take us well into 2026. It’s been great (I think anyway 😊).
We will then be reverting to Endpieces.
Endpieces, as regular readers will know, consisted of comic pieces, animal videos, songs etc to provide a bit of relief after some of the horror stories we detail on this substack. Endpieces was run by Tenaciously Terfin, Liz Parker and myself and we are delighted to now have been joined by Becca Shambles, Petal and Jeremy Wickins. Please let us know if you want to join the Endpieces Club 😊
I have an Endpieces folder so Endpieces suggestions can be sent to me at any time from now even though Terf Island Discs will be continuing for the moment as explained above 😊
Onwards with Terf Island Discs.
Next up!
Chosen by: Lynn Genevieve
‘Ecstasy of Gold’ by Ennio Morricone
#BeMorePorcupine
#KeepTerfing
#StandWithSandiePeggie
#PubertyIsAHumanRight
#AdultHumanFemale
#LetWomenSpeak
#LGB✂️TQ
#KeepBoppingTerfs
#HoldTheLine
#StopTheBlockersTrial
#NeverSurrender
#NeverForget
#TruthWillTriumph
#WeWillWin
A little before midnight Feb 11th I wrote to The Guardian:
"Whatever happened to “facts are sacred”?
A community in Tumbler Ridge experienced senseless violence when a troubled young man killed eight people and himself. But The Guardian seems to be more interested in ideological obfuscation than factual reporting; by describing him as “an 18-year old woman with a history of mental health problems” the paper does no service to either the victims, the traumatised community, or to the truth."
When I looked at the on-line report at breakfast, 8 hours later, without any flagging of their correction, the report had been changed to:
"as an 18-year old with a history of mental health problems."
Still slipped a "her" (possessive adjective, by the way, NOT a pronoun).
The editor did NOT flag the correction, though a footnote did point out a correction of a different aspect of the report.
WTF is WRONG with The Guardian?
Dear readers, please note that , in the piece above abut the FWS judgment, I wrongly said that the two bonkers tribunal judgments were Sandie Peggie and Jennifer Melle. That should be Sandie Peggie and Maria Kelly. Jennifer's case has not yet got to a hearing.
Dusty