OPINION
Steven Tucker
Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest is Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past.
Scarlet Blake is a 26-year-old female British murderer who was jailed for life in an Oxfordshire courtroom on February 25 for the heartless killing of a random stranger, Jorge Martin Carreno, whom she hit over the head with a vodka bottle, strangled, and then left in a local river to drown one night back in 2021.
Or so the vast majority of the mainstream British media (even the BBC) would have you believe. In fact, there are a few minor inaccuracies to this particular narrative.
For example, Scarlet Blake is not actually the murderer’s true name as recorded on her birth certificate at all. The killer’s real name was Alice Wang. Or – wait, no, actually that isn’t true, either. Her genuine real name, at birth, was Alice Zang. Except, no … that also isn’t quite right. Alice Zang’s real real name at birth was actually Fangze Zang … or possibly Fangze Wang. Sometimes Fangze even prefers to be referred to as Candy. It’s all very confusing indeed.
But why? Possibly because “Scarlet Blake” was neither British nor female at all, but was in fact a profoundly disturbed Chinese man who had moved to the UK aged nine, coming out to his shocked parents as being transgender three years later whilst still a schoolboy, before later dropping out of education altogether and deciding to become a cat instead.
The morals of an alley cat
As is the way of our enlightened, trans-sensitive era, in The Times, supposedly Britain’s centrist paper of record, Mr Zang (let’s just call him that) was throughout referred to under his current false adopted name of “Scarlet Blake” and via the wholly inaccurate pronoun “she”, when reporting on his guilty verdict. Most other UK news outlets – even less PC right-wing ones which happily referred prominently to Zang’s transgender, trans-species tendencies, like the Daily Mail – compliantly referred to him throughout as a “she”, and using his current chosen name of “Scarlet Blake”.
The Times’ headline did specifically refer to Zang as a “Cat-Killer”, but not in the sense that he was a cat who killed. Prior to murdering his human victim, Zang had livestreamed the slow torture of a neighbour’s cat to his online boyfriend – a firearms-obsessed and Nazi artefact-collecting Texas-based transgender prostitute who also enjoyed dressing up in cat-ears and feline facemask.
Supposedly, this entire sick stunt was intended as a sexually-motivated Valentine’s Day gift to Zang’s online lover, who was operating under the falsely female name of Ashlynn Bell (or “Ms. Bell”, as even the Mail acquiescently called him). It was only once Zang and Bell had a lovers’ tiff that Bell tipped off the UK police about Zang’s later murder of Jorge Martin Carrero – prior to that, a coroner had wrongly concluded Zang’s victim had probably just drowned whilst drunk.
No British newspaper had any compunction in prominently including graphic details of subjects like animal-torture in their reports and headlines – many even provided photos of the cat itself in the blender.
Certain other politically sensitive matters, however, were treated with rather more restraint and discretion. It was only once you got to the very end of The Times’ report – which, as is well known by editors, most readers won’t have done at all – that you learned the following arguably mildly salient facts about the case:
The trial was told that Blake, previously known as Alice Wang, came to Britain from China at the age of nine, and told her parents she was transgender aged 12 [prior to this point, Zang was spoken of in the report purely as if he was a real woman]. She said it had “caused a large emotional rift” between them. She claimed to have a fragmented personality, which included being a cat, and miaowed at the jury to show how she would interact with friends. “There’s a part [of me] that is just a cat, which is strange and that seems to me what the happy part of me is, in that they [the cat-parts of her personality] come out when I am happy,” she said. “With friends I know quite well who are aware of this part of me, I miaow at them in greeting.”
If I was a court-reporter who wanted to immediately grab the attention of my readers, I’m pretty sure those are the kinds of details I would have opened my story with, not closed it with! Some outlets, like the local Oxford Mail, did indeed lead on such sensationalist parts of the story, reporting that, when arrested, Zang truthfully told officers he had a pet-microchip implanted in his chest – when scanned, it buzzed. “My details are registered on an [online] animal database,” Zang added, before adding in mitigation of his murder that “At least it’s not genocide,” which seems a rather low bar to clear. And yet, as their headline “Oxford murder trial hears woman had pet microchip in her body” shows, this local newspaper too still colluded in the demonstrable fiction Zang was a woman. So why not also collude in the fiction he was a cat?
Caught in the act, or an act in the court?
Speaking in “a flat, almost robotic voice”, part of Zang’s defence in court relied on the idea he suffered some sort of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) – a controversial condition which many clinicians do not believe even really exists. During proceedings, Zang’s own chosen pronoun was not necessarily always the “she” sycophantically used for him by the UK media, but “us” and “we”; he claimed to have several competing “fragmented” personalities living inside his head, like a “pie-chart”. Other personas included an online pseudonym named “Blood Moth”, who was drawn towards blood like a moth to a flame.
For good measure, Zang also professed to be a chronic, night-walking insomniac with drink and “recreational substances” habits, and to have “dissociative amnesia”, albeit admitted this had not been officially medically diagnosed yet. As pleading insanity is always a great way to get your sentence reduced, you may have thought Zang’s lawyers would have called in various psychiatrists to back up their client’s claims here immediately – yet strangely they failed to do so. Why?
According to the presiding judge, Martin Chamberlain, such a narrative was simply an attempt by Zang to spuriously “rationalise” his crimes along the following lines:
“You attributed your morbid interests to a split or dissociative personality, using the language of psychiatry or psychoanalysis. You adopted the persona of a cat. You talked about the difficulties you had had since transitioning in childhood to live as a woman and about your troubled relationship with your parents. All this was part of an elaborate attempt to rationalise what you had done and shift responsibility to others.”
This kind of sceptical interpretation creates an awkward trap for the trans-crowd. If Zang was only pretending to self-ID as a cat, then what is to say he was not also only pretending to self-ID as a woman likewise? On the other hand, if he was an actual outright lunatic who genuinely thought he really was an animal, then wouldn’t this tend to imply that his self-identification as being female was equally delusional too?
A study in Scarlet
Interestingly, the future Scarlet Blake was a former patient of the notorious Gender Development Identity Service (GIDS) unit at London’s Tavistock Clinic, once the UK’s leading such institution, but which is slated to be closed down this very month after internal whistleblowers and investigative journalists revealed it to be an activist-riddled quack-house. GIDS prescribed Zang puberty-blockers aged 17, and hormone treatment aged 18, because this was the place’s standard, ideologically-motivated procedure to deal with their average infant patient – to push the narrative that any and all unhappiness they were suffering was because they were actually trans. This was despite the fact that many of the kids who turned up there were clearly mentally ill, and self-identified as completely impossible things like people of a different race, age … or, in Zang’s presumable case, as a whole different species.
Zang’s former attendance at GIDS was left happily unmentioned in most media reports of the case too. Wonder why that could be? Possibly because, by encouraging an obviously disturbed future murderer like Mr Zang to think that, actually, he was perfectly mentally healthy, it was just that an oppressive cisheteronormative society was making him depressed by forcing him to suppress his true feminine self, the activist doctors (and the activist journalists who later indulged and pushed this very same dubious narrative) arguably had blood on their hands here.
Thankfully, in spite of his many media and medical allies, Mr Zang himself will be forced to serve his sentence in a UK men’s prison. Less than thankfully, however, Thames Valley Police Force, in accordance with their idiotic standard policy, have decided to record his crimes as being committed by a woman, just because he says he is one. As has been pointed out, this will have a significant distorting effect upon British crime-figures. In 2022/23, 202 men were convicted of murder in the UK, compared to only 12 women. Adding just one man in a dress to those 12 authentic, biologically female murderesses will immediately result in an 8.3 per cent apparent increase in the female murder rate. You only need one lunatic to do this per month, and the UK female murder-rate will double. Criminologists will then be called upon to account for this abrupt spike – but will they be allowed to tell the truth about why British “women” are suddenly becoming more violent?
Transgender man bites dog
How are trans-sympathetic journalists to escape engaging with this whole unedifying and awkward can of worms? For certain of the worst outlets, the answer was simple: by refusing to report on certain key aspects of the case whatsoever, or else by shamelessly trying to shift the topic elsewhere as a standard distraction tactic.
PinkNews surprisingly admitted in their headline reporting Zang’s sentencing that he was a transgenderist – but seemingly only to highlight the fact “she” was being held in a men’s prison: “Transgender ‘cat killer’ Scarlet Blake to be housed in a male prison”. That should be no more news than “Cat to be housed in cattery whilst owner goes on holiday”.
They also used it as an opportunity to have a go at the trans-world’s alleged enemy number one J.K. Rowling, who posted online about Zang’s case. In response to an inaccurate Sky News headline about “A woman who filmed herself killing a cat”, the Harry Potter author wrote “This is not a woman”, together with the feminist-friendly hashtag #NotOurCrimes. Yet, in their own report, PinkNews didn’t just repost Rowling’s tweet, but needlessly appended the following addendum from one of her many queer-loving critics:
Who even half-way normal cares about hurting the feelings of a mentally ill murderer? In a separate post, Rowling explained that “Crime statistics are rendered useless if violent and sexual attacks committed by men are recorded as female crimes. Activists are already clamouring for this sadistic killer to be incarcerated in a women’s prison. Ideologically driven misinformation is not journalism.”
I’m afraid it is these days, Ms. Rowling. In a lengthy protest to far-Left British newspaper The Guardian, whose initial reporting online neglected to include a single mention that the killer of Jorge Martin Carreno was anything other than “a woman”, one of their regular freelancers, Louise Tickle, posted a long open letter to the editor, announcing she would boycott writing for the newspaper until such a point as it actually began telling the truth again.
Following complaints, The Guardian subsequently stealth-edited its text to include some brief mention Zang was actually a transgenderist, but, said Tickle, this vital info was buried five whole paragraphs down, and “many people will not read that far”, thus still giving them a completely false impression. Tickle claimed this was part of a general pattern of Guardian reporting which was “actively deceiving readers into believing that there is a sudden upsurge in women engaged in violent, homicidal and sexually motivated criminality” across the UK, when there was not.
“I’ve contributed to the Guardian for nearly two and a half decades, but as a result of an utterly dismaying news piece published on Friday, I cannot do so again until I’m confident that the Guardian is able to demonstrate that its reporters, editors and management understand what constitutes a fact, and stops deceiving its readers.”
Louise Tickle, incidentally, is a past finalist in an award given out to Britain’s most deserving investigative political journalist and teller of unwanted, awkward truths to the ears of power, named The Orwell Prize. It seems, with their deliberate mis-reporting of the “Scarlet Blake” [sic] case, most of the rest of the British media-class deserve to receive a special prize named after George Orwell, too – but for rather different reasons.
In the long run, which is more dangerous? An unhinged killer or journalists who have lost touch with reality? Tell us in the comments below.