BBC attempts ontology

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

What a display.

https://twitter.com/BBCr4today/status/2060300868898185232

Now plenty of people listening will say “Ah well look trans men and women can use unisex toilets or single cubicles” but many of them will not think that. They want the dignity of being confirmed in their sex.

But that’s not dignity. Adults playing let’s pretend is not dignity. Adults playing let’s pretend at the expense of women is not dignity and it’s not fair or right or acceptable, either. Adults demanding that everybody else in the world play along with their fantasies is so emphatically not dignity it’s hard to know how to express it.

Idiot man continues.

Call it an adopted sex if you like but that is what they will think.

But they will be wrong. They could insist on an adopted species, too, and they would be wrong about that also. People think a lot of things; there is no absolute rule that we have to endorse everything that people think.

They don’t want separate, they want to be who they are.

No, you buffoon, they want other people to pretend they are who they are not.

How did this happen? It’s as if adults like this guy, a professional BBC employee, were insisting that we all have to agree with people who claim to be elephants or spiders or whales or rattlesnakes. It’s embarrassing.

Comments

6 responses to “BBC attempts ontology”

  1. Sumi Avatar
    Sumi

    “They want the dignity of being confirmed in their sex.” I thought the Supreme Court and the EHRC guidance gave them that.

  2. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    The way these guys dress? How could that be anything resembling dignity? Nope…it’s fetish, it’s delusion, it is not dignity.

  3. Omar Avatar
    Omar

    They could insist on an adopted species, too, and they would be wrong about that also.

    Hang on there. What about us transgiraffes? We’re so exceptional, we surely have to be assigned to the national treasure class, and kept in the manner in which we would like to become accustomed.

  4. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Omar, as a trans-otter, I am on your side!

  5. The Whimster Gap Avatar
    The Whimster Gap

    A minor defence of Robinson here: his job is to be inquisitor, not advocate. He’s put a question based around what some people might say, and followed it up.

    Now, there is a perfectly good question to be asked about whether the mere fact that some people might say something is sufficient reason to raise it in a line of questioning on national radio. Some people might say that women ought not to be unaccompanied in public, or that women ought to have the right to kill annoying shop-assistants with a chainsaw. These would be absurd things for a journalist to take seriously. Maybe questions about whether or under what circumstances men should be allowed into hitherto women’s spaces rest on absurd claims as well.

    But they are absurd claims that have – for some reason – managed to get embedded into quite a lot of the public discourse in a way that defences of chainsaw massacres haven’t. Lord knows how. But, still, for a journalist to rehearse them in this context doesn’t seem gratuitous to me. I don’t think that Robinson is pushing that claim, so much as airing it and giving Stephenson an opportunity to rebut it.

  6. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Good point.

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