The Lion In Winter
Update 526. Destiny Church Special. #BeMorePorcupine.
I am working with reader Siobhan on bringing you information on the latest position with regard to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Watch this space! However there is plenty for you to get your teeth into in the meantime, dear readers!
This substack is read across 22 countries and 23 US States.
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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 The Lion In Winter (1968).
The Lion in Winter is a 1968 film centred on Henry II and his attempt to establish a line of succession during a family gathering at Chrsitmas 1183. His efforts unleash both political and personal turmoil among his estranged wife Eleanor of Acquitaine, their three surviving sons, the French king, and the king's half-sister Alais, who is Henry's mistress.
In this scene, Katharine Hepburn is Eleanor and Anthony Hopkins, in his first major film role, is their eldest surviving son, Richard the Lionheart.
Thanks to three wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
UK - The Sandie Peggie Case
I reported that last Friday was the last day of the tribunal that we have been following on this substack, but, in fact, due to the failure of NHS Fife and Dr Upton to comply with directions for the disclosure of documents, the case will now be adjourned to two further days later in the year. Anyway, Sandie Peggie was piped into court on Friday and met by lots of supporters.
Legal academic, Michael Foran was interviewed by Times Radio and he is confident that NHS Fife and Dr Upton have the law wrong. Here’s hoping!!
Good News From Argentina
On his substack, Gender Clinic News Bernard Lane reports on some excellent news from Argentina.
Gender stronghold in revolt
Argentina's leader moves to suppress paediatric gender medicine
Feb 15, 2025
President Javier Milei of Argentina, the nation that claimed to be the first in the world to enshrine the concept of gender identity liberated from biology, has issued a decree to prohibit gender medicalisation of minors.
The February 6 decree invokes the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and says that hormonal and surgical interventions to adapt the body to a self-perceived gender identity “can put [a minor’s] physical and mental integrity at risk and have irreversible effects.”
Last month, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Milei, a libertarian economist, denounced gender ideology as part of the woke corruption of liberalism and equality before the law, turning rights into privileges and requiring ever greater expansion of the coercive state and the penalising of dissent.
In an interview last week with LN+, Mr Milei said it was “an atrocity” to subject still-developing minors to irreversible gender medicine beyond their capacity to consent, “while filling their head with the idea that it is something other than what their biology says—well, that separating of gender from biology, it’s not cost-free.”
“I think they should let time run its course and let them make the decision [whether to be medicalised] as responsible adults,” he said.
Announcing the decree on February 5, Mr Milei’s presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni said: “Countries that pioneered gender reassignment, such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland and recently the United States, are turning back and prohibiting minors from undergoing these processes, considering them irreversible and with devastating long-term consequences.”
It was not clear whether existing treatment of minors would continue unaffected in Argentina.
The full piece is here:
https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/gender-stronghold-in-revolt
The US - Challenges to the Executive Order
Unfortunately it was predicted that the (very rich) gender ideologue organisations would seek to challenge some or all of the wonderful Executive Orders in the courts. For full details of the Executive Orders we are discussing, see here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/a-manifesto
Ute Heggen on her substack provides us with a report from Leo Sapir concerning the first such challenge to the Mutilation and Sterilisation of Children EO by the totally captured American Civil Liberties Union and others.
We now have ACLU, GLAAD and all the others joining in a splashy lawsuit that includes the 12 year old boy who got unscheduled from a puberty blocker implant at NYU-Langone.
Feb 15, 2025
~my second son, a few days old, after the speedy 5 hour labor, male at conception~
Published in City Journal, researcher Leor Sapir puts forth the details on the lawsuit filed to challenge the executive order defunding federal monies from hospitals or clinics engaging in these treatments with minors. The main characters are all here: Edwards-Leeper, Olson-Kennedy, Chase Strangio, Annelou DeVries. They glibly make claims contradicting positions from two decades ago with nary a pause. My only bone to pick with Sapir is that he didn’t give the details on the Dutch Study, meaning the fact only 33 subjects completed it and half were lost to follow up years later. DeVries’ hubris is stunning. I hope some Dutch detransitioners make public statements. There are some.
The full piece is here:
Northern Ireland - Equality Legislation
One piece from the latest Women’s Rights Network newsletter (15 February).
Stormont Not All Happy to Hear Facts from WRN NI
Women telling politicians that women need female spaces and legal recognition distinct from men branded “Disgraceful”
On 12 February, WRN’s Northern Ireland contingent (WRN NI) gave evidence to the Executive Office (TEO) committee on its inquiry into gaps in equality legislation.
The women said that they opposed the effective introduction of self-ID by public bodies and wanted to stop the erasure of their sex-based rights and of women’s spaces. Their testimony reported that women had been forced into silence both in public and the workplace for challenging gender ideology, and called for a clear definition of sex in law – and a proper gathering of data that reflected biological reality rather than someone’s chosen gender.
Mr Gaston, a Member of the Legislative Assembly, recalled receiving “quite a bit of criticism” from the TEO committee when he said that there are only two sexes. He asked WRN why there are those in public life who are “hostile” to that idea.
Marianne Buchanan Stewart, WRN Policy & Engagement Officer, said that in her view it was because there was no “reality” to gender ideology.
The Alliance Party’s Stewart Dickson objected to the use of the word “pretend” being used to describe men who identify as women – saying that trans people would be “traumatised and offended” by the language.
Marianne said, “They could define themselves as a horse and I wouldn’t care, but I’m not going to feed them hay and put a saddle on them and ride them round a field.”
This coverage in the Belfast News Letter is clear and balanced, but for an immersive experience of the “tense” (clear and honest) representation, the whole session is viewable here.
Sex Matters
Two pieces from the latest Sex Matters newslettr (14 February).
Poll: public is gender-critical
Recent YouGov research indicates that over the past two years the British public has become increasingly gender-critical and sceptical about the demands of transactivists.
Most Britons (55%) say they believe that allowing “transgender women” to use spaces reserved for women, such as toilets or changing rooms, “presents a genuine risk of harm to women” and 74% are opposed to allowing men to identify into women’s sporting categories.
YouGov’s head of data journalism, Matthew Smith, wrote: “Notable in this most recent study – conducted in mid-December – is the growing resistance on transgender rights among those groups that are typically more permissive on the issue, like women and young people.
“In fact, the only question on which women now take the permissive view on transgender rights is saying that people should be able to change their gender socially, although at 55% this still represents an eight point drop since the 2022 survey.”
The public remains particularly cautious about medical interventions for children: 75% say puberty blockers should not be allowed, with 78% saying the same of hormone treatments and 87% opposed to surgeries.
Only 19% of Britons believe getting a gender-recognition certificate should be made easier, compared to 63% who say it should not.
These findings suggest that people are increasingly rejecting policies that compromise sex-based protections for women and girls. The results reflect increasing recognition that sex, not self-declared identity, should determine access to single-sex spaces and categories.
Athletes to be sex-tested
World Athletics is set to introduce a swab test for elite athletes seeking to compete in the women’s category at international events.
The test, which detects the SRY gene found on the male Y chromosome, is part of stricter regulations on athletes who identify as transgender, and those who have differences of sex development (DSD).
Male athletes who have undergone puberty were banned from female competition in March 2023. However, new evidence suggests a “significant performance gap before the onset of puberty”, prompting further rule revisions. World Athletics now proposes the same regulations for DSD and trans-identifying athletes, stating that testosterone suppression “can only ever partly mitigate the overall male advantage.”
World Athletics president Lord Coe emphasised the need to “preserve the integrity of competition”.
A consultation period runs from 10th February to 5th March, but only athletes’ feedback will be considered. A final decision is expected at a council meeting next month.
New Zealand - Destiny Church
Katrina Biggs on her substack, A B’Old Woman reports on a protest against a drag king story time for children in Auckland. And see videos below.
Does depravity come under the ‘diversity’ umbrella?
Is anything even depraved anymore, or is everything now just diverse?
Feb 16, 2025
There was a bit of a ‘to do’ in Auckland this weekend. Te Atatu Library hosted a drag king storytime session for children, and the Destiny Church chaps and gals protested it. From what I can gather via the media and online videos, they stood outside the venue with signs, and then some – mainly men, I think – went inside to attend the session. What they intended to do once there, I don’t know, but they weren’t there to take their own kids to it. Three library staff tried to stop them, by physically standing in front of the stairs which lead up to the room where the session was being held. The Destiny Church boys pushed – not shoved - on past them, did a haka (war dance) outside the shut room, and then dispersed. The ‘storming’ reported in the mainstream media all seemed very controlled.
The drag king storytime session was subsequently abandoned. According to reports, a few children inside the room got a bit upset by the noise outside. The extent of that wasn’t elaborated on, except to say that a wall was banged a couple of times – an understandable occurrence from doing a haka in a confined space - which startled some of them. Not knowing what was going on would have been the anxiety-point, I expect, because, as one commenter on X so eloquently said, “If a child in New Zealand is frightened by the haka, they’re screwed”, meaning that the haka is regularly performed here.
The mainstream media swung into outraged action about the incident, and sought comment from those certain to voice the approved opinion. So far, I’ve read what the Prime Minister, the leader of the Opposition, the co-leader of the Green Party, and the Mayor of Auckland have said. I’m not going to bother referring to any of it here – it’s an easy online find, if anyone so desires to do that – but it all went along the lines of “shocking … bad boys … thuggery … not real men … unacceptable … diversity is cool”. This from the very ones whose lips were firmly glued shut about the worst mob violence perpetrated against women in NZ’s history in Albert Park on 25 March 2023. And they remain firmly glued shut about that, including the mainstream media’s.
Destiny Church, led by Brian and Hannah Tamaki, is controversial, to put it mildly. I myself definitely have some opposing beliefs and opinions to them. However, damn them all we want, if we want, but harming women and children is not part of their programme. The reason they protested the drag king storytime at the library on the weekend just gone, is because they want to save children from exposure to inappropriate adults. Brian Tamaki has been very clear that, after exhausting all other options to get libraries and Councils to cease contracting drag queens and kings to read to children, Destiny Church will physically protest the events. Many of us have also exhausted the proper avenues to get through to our Councils and libraries to cease drag queen/king storytelling, but they remain obdurately ‘progressive’ in celebrating ‘diversity’. So, Destiny Church have begun doing what they said they would do.
Whenever Destiny Church’s name crops up, they are automatically the villains. It’s like a divine command in the ‘progressives’ bible. I’m not a Destiny Church champion, but once their name crops up, all critical thinking stops. Let’s look at exactly what they were protesting on the weekend.
The full piece is here:
https://aboldwoman.substack.com/p/does-depravity-come-under-the-diversity?r=7ogxh&triedRedirect=true
Thanks to my wife for locating two videos, one of the ‘storming’ of the library (most peaceful storming I’ve ever seen) and one of Destiny Church performing a haka in front of a Rainbow Pride Parade ( you know the kind of parade - celebrating the TQ+ etc and force teaming it with the LGB). I don’t know anything about Destiny Church but …based on these two incidents…and albeit I wouldn’t normally advise pushing past people who stand in your way…well done to them! They did temporarily stop and drown out (with the haka) the pride parade but then they peacefully dispersed. Unlike the TRAs at the Nottingham LWS. And the haka may seem very aggressive to us non-Kiwis but, for example, it is performed at the beginning of every All Blacks rugby game.
All thoughts, especially from my Kiwi readers, gratefully received.
https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1890753554802962753
https://x.com/BGatesIsaPyscho/status/1890718785214075220
OK, ok I’ve found a video of the All Blacks doing the haka at the 2023 World Cup semi-final 😃
Stop Press
Our great friend in NZ, Rex Landy has now reported on this on her substack, Reality Bites.
Truth Crimes and Hate Facts
(The ONLY Thing Believers in Reality Are Guilty Of)
Feb 16, 2025
And there it is.
The legal Unholy Troonity as I think of it are the introduction/passing of: hate speech laws, making gender a legally protected fiction via self-ID, and conversion practice laws. That way you can’t talk about what’s happening because plod will come and arrest you for truth crimes and/or hate facts. You can’t talk to your gender-confused child or they’ll be taken away to the Gender Abattoir because talk therapy has been demonised as conversion. You know narcissist’s accusations are confessions because that’s exactly what the sociopaths with scalpels are doing to children: making meat quilts of gay children, transing the gay right out. Round that out with allowing a social fiction to become a legal reality and here we are.
I’m sure someone’s said these before but I haven’t heard them. The truth crimes are calling a man a man, a woman a woman and trying to protect children’s innocence. That men should never be allowed in women’s spaces based on their feelings, beliefs or fetish. The hate facts are nobody is born in the wrong body, your fetish is not a human right and sterilising children is wrong.
Denton’s law firm (UK) formulated a document/plan of attack to have legislative capture a fait accompli before the public were even aware that their laws had been changed. The trannys have been canny, not gonna lie - that’s easy when you have the backing of troon billionaires with deep rot pockets. Legislative capture is near-complete in the west: most countries have one or more of these ricockulous laws being rammed through the house, or already law. If you want a deep dive on this, Still Tish is the go-to. Check her substack here, meticulous records of all the troonacy, but there’s a great dive on Denton’s and their perfidy. Among other things. I love Tish.
Gender is part of the ‘transgender’ medical cult. It’s legislating for feelings.
Transing the gay away conversion legislation makes talking about it a crime or your child will be removed.
Hate crime laws make it illegal to call a giant manslab tranny a man. What an absolute farce the world has become.
47 and his EOs restoring reality isn’t coming easy. As we’re cheering on his efforts, judges are defying his orders, police and teachers protecting illegal aliens, libtards sterilising themselves. I’m on board with the last one.
Bishop Brian Tamaki is a holy roller man of God from NZ. Jesus is his main man, and he’s open and committed about it. I’m being cheeky, because I used to believe the Lamestream once, and thought he was a troublesome time waster. Then covid hit, and he showed us his principles and mana. He was jailed for meeting while in lockdown, and once the scales fell from my eyes, I had to recant my intolerance. Bishop T has taken up the fight with the rainbow groomers in NZ and has brought the fight to them more than once.
The full piece is here:
Tim ‘Sarah’ McBride
Yet another amazing investigation by Malcolm Clark on his substack, The Secret Gender Files. The small State of Delaware is famous for its business and legal elite and also its extensive corruption and tax evasion ( the ‘Delaware Way’). It is also home to two major American ‘political’ families, the Bidens and the McBrides. And the most famous McBride is a certain raging narcissist called Tim ‘Sarah’ McBride. Read on! The piece is in two parts and here are some extracts.
For four decades Biden and his circle disguised a system of wealth-protection that is utterly cynical and often immoral behind performative evocations of traditional values. The Democrats in Delaware lied about their priorities and their behaviour. Proclaiming their defence of ordinary voters when they really focused their efforts on wealthy donors and their vested interests.
This instinct to deceive, to disguise and veil the unsayable in the worn platitudes of the progressive Left explains, I suspect, why Sarah McBride was embraced so enthusiastically.
In McBride …Delaware’s elite saw a candidate whose whole identity was an elaborate disguise. And based on a lie. He mirrored their own moral crisis. And their own self-deception.
And what about Nancy Mace and the bathrooms?
As I mentioned last time McBride has largely tried to ignore the high-profile debate in Congress about single sex spaces, loftily complaining that it’s the Republicans who are “obsessed with bathrooms”.
His track record tells a very different story. For over a decade McBride championed the LGBTQ+ lobby’s most aggressive efforts to undermine women’s rights and to silence opponents of those efforts. Truth is McBride has been making an unholy fuss about bathrooms for as long as he’s been in the public eye. To a degree that suggests some unprincessy misogyny might be at work.
Take 2016 when North Carolina introduced the first bill to defend women’s single sex spaces including bathrooms.
As the National Press Secretary of the giant, trans-parasitised ex-gay organisation Human Rights Campaign (HRC) it was none other than Sarah McBride who led the campaign against the bill. He even travelled to North Carolina …to take a selfie in a women’s toilet. As you do.
On his instagram post he complained,
“They say I’m a pervert.
They say I’m a man dressed as a woman”
Malcolm quotes extensively from a seminar give by McBride:
The most revealing moment in the seminar is when McBride offers an explanation of why his opponents are so exercised by deluded blokes like him hanging out in women’s bathrooms. He doesn’t entertain for a moment that women might have genuine concerns. Instead bathrooms, he declares, are a silver bullet that transphobes are using to enforce other types of ‘discrimination’.
“If you cannot easily and safely access a restroom that makes sense for you, it becomes much more difficult to go to school, to go to work, to leave your house for more than two or three hours.”
The irony that he is essentially making the argument for women’s single sex spaces is lost on him. McBride doesn’t bother his coiffured head about the fact that if he gets his way females will be less able to go to school, to go to work, to leave the house for more than two or three hours.
Is it merely misogyny that explains why women’s bathrooms have been such a consuming interest of McBride’s? I think not.I suspect his desire to be seen in women’s spaces is more than everyday autogynephilia fetishism. For this is a guy who has a hunger for attention that is galactic in scale. And nothing gets attention more than being somewhere you know people think you should not be.
Malcolm concludes:
Yet the truth is Tim McBride represents everything that has gone wrong with the American Left. A delusional individual, driven by egotism and an almost pathological hunger for attention, he was propelled upwards by a dysfunctional elite in a tiny corrupt state in order to deflect attention from their own complacence.
By poisoning the political culture of the sleepy little state he now represents he also prepared the ground for an epic confrontation between the richest man on the planet [ Elon Musk] and the sleaziest, most corrupt state in America.
The full two parts are here:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154786697
https://substack.com/home/post/p-156057722
Endpieces
By Tenaciously
By Liz
#BeMorePorcupine
#EndGenderAffirmingCare
#AdultHumanFemale
#LetWomenSpeak
#GrassrootsArmy
#FightForFreeSpeech
#ByeByeStonewall
#GenderEnders
#NeverSurrender
Dear readers
A heads up that Mr Menno is doing a live chat video about the Sandie Peggie case at 21.00 GMT this evening. Hope to see some of you there😁
I may finalise the next update tonight - I'll see!
Dusty
Thanks for cross posting my blog about the legal challenge to the executive order banning "affirmative care" (that is dangerous hormones and damaging surgeries) in the States! I'm glad my now 34 year old son got in, at the age of 2 days! For some reason there was dust on the photo. I love those guys doing the Haka, thanks for all these writings in one place, Dusty.