The Bearded Lady of Oxford

Back when Britain was a serious country, there were bearded ladies in the Whitechapel freakshows and stuffed shirts in Oxford. The wildest thing the Dons would do might be an extra sherry or two on Rag Week.

Now, Whitechapel is thoroughly gentrified, where the average price of an apartment is well north of a million quid. And the bearded ladies are parading their perversions for all to see in Oxford.

Specifically, in St Hilda’s College, where Matt Rattley, a biochemistry lecturer appointed in 2023, has attracted online notoriety for wearing women’s clothing, makeup, and, most distinctly, enormous prosthetic breasts into the lecture theatre and the staff room. Three college graduates, including the distinguished clinical psychologist Dr Lucy Johnstone, have written to St Hilda’s over what they say is a violation of ‘women’s dignity’. Two further formal complaints have followed, one from the parent of a current undergraduate.

To be scrupulously fair and because the modern left has trained us to reach immediately for the demographic explanation: nobody has suggested that Mr Rattley is not even pretending to be a ‘trans woman’, and nothing in the material suggests he is. This is not a story about a person in the wrong body. It is a story about a man who just gets off on being as publicly degenerate as he can get away with: a lecturer who dresses as a caricature of a woman, brings the costume into the workplace, and does so with a cohort of female staff members who reportedly ‘fawn over him’. The grievance is not that a woman wore a dress. The grievance is that a large, imposing man in a miniskirt and prosthetic cleavage has made it impossible for women to work in the room without being sexually harassed by the sight of him.

That distinction matters, and the college’s response makes the failure more damning, not less.

“It does feel like sexual harassment. You feel as though you’re being forced to participate in someone’s sexual fetish without being given a choice.”

Because that’s exactly what it is. The only difference between this pervert and an old-school creeper waving his John Thomas from under his plastic mac is that at least the creeper wasn’t pretending to be anything other than a disgusting fetishist.

A colleague who sat through staff training alongside him describes the first session: he was in the front row, so the prosthetics were, in the phrase used, “in my face”. She found the sessions so distressing she skipped most of them. During a summer heatwave he sat with his legs apart in a miniskirt with his underwear visible, flanked by two young women in long dresses. Her most telling observation, though, is about the silence:

“The worst part was that other people were behaving as though he was dressed normally.”

That is the whole story, really. Not a lone crank with a costume box. A pervert with costume box and a fan club, and a faculty full of colleagues who have collectively decided to behave as though nothing is happening, so that anyone who objects is the one who is the problem. It is the same mechanism that runs through every other institutional embarrassment of the last decade: the offence is deemed progressive, therefore nobody may name it, therefore the offender becomes unimpeachable and the objectors become reactionaries.

The former student put it more bluntly:

“At first, I thought it was a joke – fancy dress. But this is everyday attire. His prosthetic breasts are enormous, exaggerated and cartoonish.”

She also noted the trap: any complaint “would inevitably be received as bigotry”. This is the standard deflection and it works. Nobody at a British university with a reputation for preciousness is going to be the person who writes the email saying a colleague’s enormous prosthetic knockers are too much. So the email is never written and nothing happens, and the grievance is instead aired anonymously to the Mail, which is the only outlet with the profile to carry it.

This is how we arrive at the college’s position, as reported by the distinguished psychologist:

“If accepting an offensive behaviour is presented as progressive and open-minded, it is even harder for women to name what is really going on and speak up about it.”

St Hilda’s was founded for women’s education, and it is failing at the one thing it exists to provide: a place where women can be left alone. An employment barrister, Naomi Cunningham, is blunter still, and identifies the type of collusion the psychologist described:

“The fact that no one has yet complained is testament to what a toxic environment has been created for women (in particular) who stand up to this kind of misbehavior.”

The University of Oxford, for its part, has responded with the finest available Oxford formula: it is committed to being “inclusive and welcoming”. Except, apparently women. Even more hypocritically, it “expects everyone involved in teaching to maintain appropriate professional standards”. Which these days apparently includes dressing up like a particularly grotesque music hall drag act.

Finally, Oxford piously announces that it does not comment on individual personnel matters. Which is an HR way of saying it has done nothing, will do nothing and just wants women to shut and let the pervert get his jollies in the classroom.