This is what it’s all about. Fact and opinion. It’s not an opinion that men are not women, it’s a fact, but it’s treated as if it were an opinion, and (not coincidentally) a forbidden one at that. Cath Walton at The Critic:

A funny thing happened to me on the way to BBC redundancy. I was put through a lengthy disciplinary process for saying truthful things about sex and gender — not quite the same as the very visible farce that unfolded last week around Justin Webb and the complaint against him, but an earlier example of the BBC’s festering problem with accuracy around biological sex.

The festering problem is the “It’s true but you mustn’t say it” one.

(There are plenty of truths one shouldn’t say in ordinary everyday non-journalistic life, but journalism is a different thing altogether. If it ain’t true it ain’t journalism.)

The truth has become punishable: the lie that trans-identified men are women is not. So here’s my tale, and I hope it helps explain the BBC’s contortionist thinking on accuracy and impartiality around sex and gender.

A couple of years ago the BBC started using the word “cis” as if it meant something real.

The BBC Academy teaches that it’s important journalists don’t adopt activist language as their own — and I feared that “cis” was to become normalised by repeated use, just as gender identity did.

It’s fascinating that the BBC teaches that because good grief.

So I decided to write a Twitter thread about “cis”, figuring that at least if someone complained, then editorial managers would have to read it, and any complaints would themselves prove it was a contested political term that shouldn’t be adopted.

The idea that if something is true, it is not an opinion, is at the root of this journalistic dilemma.

And the whole thing, really. The whole war over trans ideology. If it were true it wouldn’t be an ideology, but it’s not true, so there you go.

It explained that using “cis” involves accepting a system of belief underpinned by an understanding that there are two types of women, male women and female women, and this is as yet scientifically unsupported. (I didn’t really need the “as yet” but I thought I’d cover my bases).  

Or rather underpinned by a misunderstanding that there are two types of women. Underpinned by a confusion, or more bluntly, a lie. (Of course she didn’t want to put it that way to her bosses; I’m just pointing out how much truth she had to leave out because the BBC is so corrupted by this stupid ideology.)

Within about an hour I was told to take it down by my then boss on the News Channel for allegedly breaching the social media rules. After an afternoon of emailing, we brought another editor into the conversation. But neither was able to explain which part of the thread was untrue, and therefore might fall into the error of opinion.

Spoiler: they never were able to do that. They still aren’t.

So there was a hearing, there were reports, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, all without being able to find anything untrue in what she said.

Then Russia attacked Ukraine and she told her boss she was willing to delete, because she wanted to move on.

By then, deletion wasn’t enough. This is the most extraordinary part. I was told to admit to managers that I’d been wrong and would never do it again, or the disciplinary would proceed.

This wasn’t just policing of public speech, which is part and parcel of everyone’s contract. It was a demand that I internally confess my wrongthink, and repent. Obviously I wasn’t going to do that. Everything I’d said was true, and no one had been able to identify a single opinion I’d publicly expressed. In fact, to this day, that is the case.  

And that sums up this whole god damn tedious war, doesn’t it. All we’re doing is telling the truth, and the result is endless denunciation and shunning and expulsion and sometimes outright violence.

What this says, in effect, is that if the facts are on one side of a debate, we mustn’t articulate them, because it would reveal your thinking. The very willingness to make certain indisputable statements about biological sex is the crime, because gender activists have rendered the debate landscape so toxic and chilling that truth has become an emblem of defiance rather than clarity.  

…

Many people have understood for some time that this is the case, but the Executive Complaints Unit ruling has now made it public policy. Biological sex has officially became a mere “viewpoint”. 

See also: the sex of men who murder other men by strangling them.