Equivalent to “sexual racism”

May 24th, 2022 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Let’s revisit that article by Jo Bartosch last November about Stonewall’s calling a BBC investigation “equivalent to racism.” (It’s in the Daily Mail but you know the drill – the Graun won’t publish such things.) I did a post on it then.

Jo writes:

For many, it was a brave and long-overdue airing of an important and distressing subject: a painstaking investigation into claims that predatory trans women have been pressuring lesbians for sex, published on the BBC News website.

But a leaked email shows that the influential trans lobby group Stonewall attempted to suppress the investigation before it had even been published – and made the extraordinary claim that debating the issues was equivalent to ‘sexual racism’.

And today a QC repeated the claim at Allison Bailey’s tribunal.

Earlier this month, the BBC followed several other high-profile bodies, including Whitehall departments, in dropping its membership of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme.

Under the scheme, employers pay the lobby group to help ‘embed LGBTQ+ inclusion’ in the way they work.

The BBC’s announcement came two weeks after the Corporation published an investigation by journalist Caroline Lowbridge in which some lesbians told how they felt pressured into having a sexual relationship with trans women – specifically, men who say they are women but who have retained their male genitals.

THE investigation cited three lesbian women who said they feared being labelled ‘transphobic’, and risked being shunned and threatened by the gay and trans community if they refused to take trans women as partners.

I remember when “lesbian women” would have been redundant. Now, I guess, you have to specify.

[I]t has emerged that months before the article appeared Stonewall’s chief executive Nancy Kelley wrote to the editorial director of BBC News to denounce Lowbridge’s work in an apparent attempt to get her piece stopped.

In her email, Kelley suggested that the BBC article would end up being ‘transphobic’ because it represented trans women as ‘sexual predators’, which was a ‘central anti-trans argument’.

She further complained that the ‘highly toxic’ cotton ceiling issue was ‘analogous to issues like sexual racism’.

And today a QC repeated the claim at Allison Bailey’s tribunal.

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