Conversations are already a lot freer
A BBC boss had to tell staff to get used to encountering ideas they don’t like. One wonders what job they thought they were in, if they needed to have that spelled out to them.
Fran Unsworth, who is due to leave the corporation in January, was speaking on an often-hostile Zoom call with the BBC’s Pride network on Friday morning.
The meeting, in which Tim Davie, the director-general, also tried to reassure staff that he was concerned about LGBT inclusivity, was held in the wake of the corporation’s departure from Stonewall’s diversity champions scheme, under which it paid for advice and assessment from the charity.
There’s no such thing as “LGBT inclusivity” though. You can’t be incloosive of all the claims of all four categories because some of them are in tension with others. The T is not the same as the L and the G, so the claims aren’t all going to be compatible with each other.
Two sources who attended the meeting said Unsworth, 63, told staff: “You’ll hear things you don’t personally like and see things you don’t like — that’s what the BBC is, and you have to get used to that.” She added: “These are the stories we tell. We can’t walk away from the conversation.”
Again: it’s a large news organization. Of course you’ll hear things you don’t like.
A BBC journalist said: “Fran was totally calm but determined about it. She was reacting to questions from the network that implied people shouldn’t come across views they disliked. To me, it felt like she was having to explain journalism to idiots.”
There you go. That’s exactly what it sounds like.
A BBC source added that the meeting was “extremely hostile” towards Davie, 54, who was previously chairman of a lesbian, gay and bisexual working group at the BBC. “He was told by one member of staff that he was not in a position to make decisions on this issue, because he’s not trans,” the source said. “Another said the BBC was institutionally transphobic.”
Which is exactly why all this has to stop. We’ve all been told, constantly, that trans demands and taboos outrank all others, including all others combined. That means lesbians and gays and women just have to shut up and listen while our rights are dismantled. We don’t agree and we refuse to shut up. We will listen, but we will then go on to say what bullshit we just listened to. The trans dogma is utter nonsense, and that fact is finally becoming more apparent to the movers and shakers.
A culture war has long been simmering in BBC newsrooms over its handling of transgender issues. Some staff, especially younger employees, argue that the rights of the minority group should not be debated; others believe that the BBC had become in thrall to Stonewall and journalists were not allowed to challenge the charity’s views. The latter group, many of whom are older female staff, believe that some of the policies transgender campaigners advocate infringe upon women’s rights, such as the right to single-sex spaces including refuges.
Not so much a belief as an unmistakable fact. Where the belief comes in is when we discuss whether that matters or not. We pesky older female people think it fucking well does matter and that it’s sheer misogyny to wave it away.
Some said they felt unable to express such views at the BBC. “If you mention it, it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers: everyone goes quiet and their faces go blank. Since Wednesday, conversations are already a lot freer,” one added.
Brilliant. Keep that going.
There is a YouTuber who I tend to respect named “Shaun” who recently did a video entitled “Response to BBC transphobia” which does a very good job of eviscerating the recent BBC article “‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women” by one Carolyn Lowbridge. (I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post a link.)
It’s clearly a problematic piece of journalism, needlessly giving fodder to the TRA extremists.
“Shaun” has previously made at least one other video discussing trans issues in the past. My problem with “Shaun” is that I don’t recall him addressing any of the pertinent issues outside of his specific critique of “anti-Trans” ideas.
In the video on the BBC/Lowbridge article he doesn’t mention at all the concept of the “cotton ceiling” which essentially (and homophobically) condemns lesbians as bigots if they don’t want to have sex with transwomen. I think that he’s essentially drunk the kool-aid and believes that the reality of “transgenderism” is settled science. That he cannot grasp the concept that transwomen are actually men and that men have far higher tendencies to physical violence than do women and that THAT is one of the main things that women are worried about. He doesn’t ever seem to notice the extreme rape and death threats extended to J. K. Rowling for bringing up that issue.
Yes, Shaun is an interesting egg; I have enjoyed some of his videos quite a bit, especially those absolutely destroying Cinema Sins, and also a long one in which he ably demonstrated that the Allied saturation bombing of the civilian populations of Germany and Japan were very much war crimes and also quite likely unnecessary in bringing the Second World War to its conclusion.
He is, however, a thoroughgoing member of “Breadtube”, i.e., fairly hard leftist YouTubers whose work is generally shot through with critical theory aimed at promoting (or, more often, simply taking as matters of course) leftist viewpoints which are often only reasonable in comparison to extreme revisionist Communism. A fellow member, Ladyknightthebrave, does analyses of media and often interrupts her — or maybe by now it’s them? — self to insert leftist slogans into the analysis, such as when she/they smugly dropped “By the way, defund the police” when talking about the problematically positive portrayal of police in Sense8.
The PhilosophyTube person, oh he of “I am female!” provenance around these parts, is also a member in good standing of Breadtube. I am not generally one to cast aspersions by association, but I think you can take that as good evidence that this community would react negatively to the publication of the article. Another fellow traveller in that space, Three Arrows, retweeted someone claiming that one of the article’s major sources herself stands accused of sexually harassing women in bathrooms; his addition was “Gott Strafe England”, a phrase popular during the First World War in which Germans called upon God to punish their British foes.
It is highly likely that the default opinion in this loose affiliation of YouTubers is that transgender identities are “valid”, both socially and scientifically, and anything but fawning praise is literally horrible transphobic bigotry which must be dismissed and combatted at every opportunity.