Why is this male Oxford professor allowed to wear massive fake breasts at work?

It’s a lose-lose situation. If you listen to this fellow as if he is not, in fact, sporting massive fake breasts and dolled up like a circus bearded lady, you are playing along with the idea that this is normal or acceptable. If you do point this out, you are being hateful. It’s kind of like passing a man walking down the street without pants on and being accused of being a pervert for pointing it out. How dare you notice?

As it turns out, the man in the video is science professor Matt Rattley. “A tutor at the proudly inclusive St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, he takes ‘bringing his whole self to work’ several cup sizes further, pairing a wispy beard and hulking frame with massive prosthetic plastic breasts,” Jo Bartosch noted at Spiked. “No one in his male-dominated department has publicly criticised his sexist sartorial choices, and he has been pictured and filmed at professional events looking as though he has wandered in from a stag do.”

Rattley, who uses “they/them” pronouns, has been a non-stipendiary lecturer at St. Hilda’s College since October 2023; when asked about Rattley by several media outlets, the college—founded in 1893 for women—did not respond. Rattley is male, but his social media profiles are littered with photos of himself in female makeup and dresses.

“Rattley doesn’t claim to be a woman,” Bartosch noted. “He is just a man who wears low-cut frocks and a huge rubber rack. The question is not about his identity, or even his motivations, but whether his choices infringe on others. The university clearly has a two-tier approach to what is deemed acceptable. While no one will tell Rattley to dress appropriately, academics who stray from the approved line on transgenderism have been investigated, disciplined and threatened.”

Rattley’s shtick is so absurd—a sort of reductio ad absurdum of transgender institutional capture—that I always wonder if part of it is just playing chicken with the authorities: Just how far will the university let me go? Lipstick and nail polish, of course. But what if I wore a low-cut dress and massive plastic breasts? And then I teach students? Wearing all that stuff?

In fact, Oxford professor Michael Biggs told Bartosch that Rattley’s sexual exhibitionism in the workplace might be “creating a degrading and offensive environment, especially for female students, which would constitute sexual harassment.” (No kidding!) Actual women, however, may be afraid that if they complain about Rattley’s pornified cartoon Barbie performance, they might run afoul of the transgender tolerance buzzsaw.

Speaking of buzz saws, Rattley isn’t just a one-off. Back in 2022, a male shop teacher from Canada made headlines for teaching his high school students wearing a wig and massive plastic breasts with protruding nipples. This teacher caused headaches for the administration—and presumably, back problems for himself—for months, because nobody dared to tell him that wearing giant plastic breasts while teaching kids was inappropriate, exploitative, and disgusting. His prosthetics were a real danger around the shop equipment.

Gallons of ink have been poured detailing the collapse of trust in institutions over the past several decades. I think that trans activism has been a torpedo aimed right at the heart of institutional credibility. The kinds of “experts” and institutions who can be cowed into letting men play out their sexual fantasies in front of students when any normal person can tell you what is going on are voluntarily setting fire to their own credibility.