The Dig. Part 1
Update 637. What Big Teeth You Have Special. #BeMorePorcupine.
The news and views are still flooding in to Dusty Towers so this is another two parter, dear readers.
Now we are back 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 had got to D prior to Terf Month.
Next up is The Dig (2021).
In 1939, Suffolk landowner Edith Pretty hires local self-taught archaeologist Basil Brown to tackle the large burial mounds at her rural estate in Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge. At first, she offers the same money he received from the Ipswich Museum, the agricultural wage, but he says it is inadequate; so she increases her offer by 12% to £2 a week (approximately £120 in 2020), which he accepts.
On one of the sites, it began to appear that they had found something very significant…
Carey Mulligan is Edith Pretty
Ralph Fiennes is Basil Brown
Archie Barnes is Robert Pretty
Thanks to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
Scotland - National Health Service Fife
It is amazing that NHS Fife have not caved in following the Supreme Court judgment. The case is to resume on 16 July. But apparently they are still worthy of an award!!?? Go figure!!
NHS Fife have announced that: ‘NHS Fife has been formally granted University Health Board status. The prestigious designation recognises our commitment to education, research and innovation.’
https://x.com/nhsfife/status/1942193045681696794
UK - Free Speech
As we jostle with Nigeria and Colombia for a position in the Free Speech League Table, following an enormous response to a petition about sending people to prison for online posts ( see Lucy Connolly as an example) - the petition had 181,026 signatures - the Government has responded. Blahhhh. All thoughts gratefully received.
The Government has responded to the petition you signed – “Review possible penalties for social media posts, including the use of prison”.
Government responded:
The government is committed to ensuring penalties are proportionate and uphold freedom of expression.
Freedom of expression is a cornerstone of our democratic society. It is a long-standing tradition in this country that people are free to demonstrate their views, however uncomfortable these may be to the majority. The government is committed to protecting this right while also ensuring that laws are in place to address harmful, criminal behaviour.
The UK’s Online Safety Act 2023 (“the Act”) reflects this careful balance. It requires platforms to take proportionate steps to tackle illegal content and protect children from harmful material. At the same time, it has been designed to safeguard legal free speech, uphold privacy, and support innovation. The Act does not prevent adults from accessing legal content, nor does it restrict people from posting content that others may find offensive. It is not about individual posts. Instead, Ofcom will assess the systems and processes platforms have in place to manage risks and respond to harm. There are also protections against the over-removal of content, ensuring that lawful speech is not wrongly taken down.
Where an individual is convicted for an offence related to opinion-based online speech, the independent judiciary are responsible for determining appropriate sentences based on the facts of each case and the relevant sentencing guidelines. The sentencing framework provides courts with a range of sentencing powers alongside imprisonment, including fines, community sentences, and suspended sentences. The law also makes clear that imprisonment should only be imposed where no other sentence would be appropriate.
We are committed to ensuring that our justice system protects the public, upholds fundamental rights, and uses custodial sentences only where they are necessary and proportionate.
Ministry of Justice
Click this link to view the response online:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/728715?reveal_response=yes
This petition has over 100,000 signatures. The Petitions Committee will consider it for a debate. They can also gather further evidence and press the government for action.
The Dutch Protocol
On her substack, gender: hacked Eliza Mondegreen reminds us that the Dutch Protocol, which started the whole puberty blocker ball rolling, was always built on sand.
Telling people what they want to hear
Jun 11, 2025
As anyone who has followed my work knows, I don't tend to run a high emotional temperature. But sometimes I am just electrified with rage at how this has happened and watching the Dutch praised for their sobriety has really done it.
The Dutch embarked on a dangerous experiment on children, all to validate a hypothesis they ought to have rejected when adult patients treated under the same rationale continued to struggle post-transition.
They took healthy Dutch teenagers, all but one of them gay or bisexual, and turned them into guinea pigs. When one teenager died as a direct result of transition-related interventions, they tried to conceal his death by tinkering with the inclusion criteria, as documented in The Myth of Reliable Research in Pediatric Gender Medicine:
‘Fifteen subjects were dropped from the study and relabeled “nonparticipants.” This subset, however, was not random, but instead heavily skewed toward subjects who experienced serious problems, including 3 who developed severe diabetes and obesity and 1 death following surgical complications. There is also considerable uncertainty about the outcomes of the 5 of 70 subjects (refusal, failure to return questionnaire, and dropping out of care) who, after several years of close contact with the research team, were unwilling to engage further:
‘Nonparticipation (n = 15, 11 transwomen and 4 transmen) was attributable to not being 1 year postsurgical yet (n = 6), refusal (n = 2), failure to return questionnaires (n = 2), being medically not eligible (e.g., uncontrolled diabetes, morbid obesity) for surgery (n = 3), dropping out of care (n =1), and 1 transfemale died after her vaginoplasty owing to a postsurgical necrotizing fasciitis [emphasis added]. (de Vries et al., 2014, p. 697)’
Rather than be transparent about how these young people are faring today, the Dutch researchers have taken every opportunity to obscure their fates: construing their samples in ways that excluded negative outcomes, mixing the initial cohort up with other patient cohorts, lumping together every shift in gender self-identification under the heading of "attenuations in gender identity," so they would have no numbers on detransition to share with the world.
The full piece is here:
New Zealand - Women’s Sport
On her substack, A B’Old Woman Katrina Biggs reports on Sports NZ still failing to address the question of men in women’s sport in NZ.
Nine months down the track, Sports NZ have made no visible signs of updating their ‘trans inclusion’ guidelines as instructed.
When comparing like for like, men consistently outperform women at sports, whether we like it or not. Elite female athletes can sometimes even be outperformed by both younger and older male athletes!
Jul 08, 2025
Sports NZ appears to be playing the age-old game of dragging the chain. Despite being directed nine months ago from the Minister for Sports and Recreation to update their guidelines about allowing men who say they’re women to play in female sports, there are no visible signs that Sports NZ has even begun.
I would go so far as to surmise that behind closed doors, the only sign they’ve made is to flip the finger at the Minister about this.
The aim of the dragging-the-chain game is to hope that by dragging the chain, whatever it is the player doesn’t want to do will eventually go away. However, like many other organisations which have blithely prioritised men who say they’re women over actual women, Sports NZ have underestimated their opponents.
Save Women’s Sports Australasia are not going away. They have written an open letter to the Hon Mark Mitchell, Minister for Sports and Recreation, pointing out that the only action by Sports NZ to his directive seems to be to have been to ignore it. The time for niceties is over – now there’s no call to ‘update’ the guidelines, but to dump them.
The full piece is here:
The States - Newspeak
Anita Bartholomew on the substack, Good Question looks at recent examples of Newspeak.
Paging Dr. Orwell
(Or, The Very Real Risks of Adopting Gender Newspeak)
Jun 28, 2025
Congressman McBride
In Orwell's 1984, the goal of Newspeak was to so control and restrict the language that any fact the leadership found ideologically troublesome “ …should be literally unthinkable.” Forget saying it. You would no longer have the vocabulary necessary for the idea to form in your mind.
I was reminded of Orwell’s passage about “literally unthinkable” facts (it’s in the book’s appendix) when reading an essay published by STAT and authored by a pediatrician named Candice Mazon:
“Recently, I prescribed estrogen to a young woman with primary ovarian insufficiency — a condition in which her body doesn’t make enough estrogen naturally. This hormone replacement is standard care, medically necessary, and entirely uncontroversial.
“Yet if I were to prescribe the identical medication to a transgender girl experiencing gender dysphoria, I could face felony charges in six states. The medication is the same. The careful medical evaluation is the same. But one is celebrated while the other is criminalized — with devastating consequences for the children whose futures hang in the balance.”
The Newspeak trick of calling a gender-confused boy a “girl” can change our thinking processes profoundly, yet many of us will barely notice. Thanks to the good(?)doctor’s rhetorical trick, the reader pictures, first, a young woman, next, a teen girl, and a medication that is unfairly denied to one of them.
Maybe Dr. Mazon is unaware that a new paper—a review of previously published research—shows that large, repeated doses of estrogen can increase a male’s risk of cancer, heart disease, stroke, autoimmune diseases, and dementia (that’s the short list) and can shorten his overall lifespan. The paper shows that, contrary to the claims that these drastic interventions are worth it because they prevent suicide, suicides actually increase among males on estrogen, most likely because the mental illnesses that underlie their gender confusion are never treated.
“Devastating consequences,” indeed, but if the reader is persuaded that the boy in the second paragraph is a “girl,” the dangers to males can be ignored.
Today, influential people everywhere are doing their best to persuade you that conversing in “Oldspeak” (i.e., using the plain English meaning of everyday words) is somehow evil, bigoted, rude, or ignorant.
Around the same time that Mazon was Newspeaking away the dangers of using chemicals to help boys mimic girls, journalist Matthew Yglesias was busily gushing on Substack about how much he admired Delaware Congressman Tim McBride’s approach to pushing the transgender agenda. Except, of course, that he called Tim “Sarah,” because Tim wears women’s clothing, make-up and hairstyles, and pretends to be a woman.
Yglesias agreed with McBride that, instead of shoving gender ideologues’ demands down everyone’s throat all at once, the trans lobby should ease the public into transferring all the rights previously reserved for women and girls to men. This, Yglesias called “true political leadership.”
The reason Yglesias’s piece caught my eye is that its preamble was quoted on X by another journalist, Ben Ryan. Here’s the quote:
‘Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that in accordance with our policy that comments must be civil and constructive, anyone who misgenders Congresswoman McBride or Chase Strangio will get an automatic 24-hour ban.’
By “misgenders” Yglesias meant that their correct sexes must not be mentioned. That’s Oldspeak. Anyone who refused to refer to Mr. McBride or Ms. Strangio by their Newspeak pronouns and other Newspeak identifiers would be punished.
But we can still think and write and talk in Oldspeak. Men are men. Women are women. No one gets to choose his or her sex.
Don’t let them ease you or shove you into saying otherwise, because the goal is to eventually make the understanding of these facts “literally unthinkable.”
That a journalist would oblige his readers to either respond in Newspeak or be censored is astounding.
The full piece is here:
The States - Antifa
Here’s a lovely example of an Antifa ( should really just be Fa!!) member in action care of Andy Ngo:
Trans Portland Antifa member allegedly assaulted minor and others on Fourth of July rampage; required sedation to be arrested
Ngo Comment reports on the identity of the violent suspect, who was booked into jail as a female 'Jane Doe'
Jul 06, 2025
As Fourth of July revelers gathered in downtown Portland, Ore. on Friday, a hulking, heavyset person in fuchsia hotpants allegedly went on a violent rampage, punching and attacking people with a knife and stick. One victim was a minor. The attacker was so violent and out of control that a team of police officers had to use sedation to make the arrest.
The five feet ten inches tall, 260-pound suspect was booked into jail by Portland Police as an unidentified “Jane Doe” “female” after the suspect was released from hospital on July 5.
Ngo Comment can exclusively report that the suspect is a transgender Antifa member (“Trantifa”) named Trever Eugene Osterhout, who has a history of alleged domestic violence. The 42-year-old satanist and LGBTQ+ activist uses the name “Trish Elizabeth Osterhout.”
Local Portland broadcaster KATU first broke the story about the assaults in downtown, publishing bystander video of the then-unidentified trans person repeatedly punching and kicking a man on the street.
Osterhout’s transgender friend, Jennifer Dieringer told KATU: “I saw her come by. Her words were, and I quote, ‘I’m going to go to prison for killing somebody.’”
The full piece is here:
Men In Women’s Prisons
In case you missed it, Mr Menno has done an excellent video of his attendance at a rally in Leeds outside the Ministry of Justice offices about men in women’s prisons. Some trans rights activists were present trying to drown out the women and Menno attempted to talk to them.
Little Red Riding Hood
A very interesting piece by EDI Jester on the history of this children’s story and its importance and meaning for children. This includes a short essay by EDI on the subject:
https://x.com/HeadWarriorTWM/status/1942472534135353380
Terf Island Discs
Thanks to an excellent suggestion from Tenaciously Terfin, we are pausing Endpieces for the time being and giving Tenaciously and Liz a well earned rest from their hard work. So welcome to Terf Island Discs. Please let us have four of your favourite songs or pieces of music and provide a link if possible ( we have increased this from three choices to four so those who have only so far sent in three choices, please send in a fourth 😊). 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. Obviously, the choices don’t actually have to be from Terf Island - anywhere in the world! We will feature one piece of music in each general update. Thanks to all those readers who have already sent in their choices.
Please send in your choices via the comments section at this link: https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/terf-island-discs
Next up!
Chosen by: my wife.
‘Sisters are doin’ it for themselves’ by The Eurythmics (with guest appearance 😊)
#BeMorePorcupine
#ThePorcupinesWillWin
#AdultHumanFemale
#LetWomenSpeak
#LGB✂️TQ
#JoinFreeSpeechUnion
#LeaveKidsAlone
#NoSelfID
#NeverSurrender
#NeverForget
#TruthWillTriumph
#WeWillWin
Thanks for two excellent updates as ever Dusty. Not much I can say apart from 🤬 Will it ever end?
Fun fact: Johnny Flynn, the folk singer who does the Detectorist’s theme is a digger in the film the Dig.