The Times enters the ring with trans ideology. Rob Burley writes:
When the new director-general of the BBC, Matt Brittin, introduced himself to staff last week it wasn’t long before he found himself addressing the handling of transgender issues by the corporation. “I’m not an expert,” he confessed, aware these were treacherous waters. “I’ve seen comments in the press over the weekend from Fran Unsworth [the BBC’s former director of news]. I’m not going to go into that. I don’t know the history.” Well, if you’re reading this, Matt, you’re in luck, because I do.
Unsworth’s incendiary interview — part of my 10,000-word investigation into the capture of the BBC by trans activism, published by Unherd — was the first account of life at the top of the BBC during, for want of a better phrase, peak woke. Fran opened up about the way “progressive madness”, especially transgender rights, consumed the BBC and ultimately led her to end her 40-year BBC career.
Only it’s not actually progressive. It puts on the skirts and lipstick of progressive but its beliefs and actions are very regressive indeed. The believers think trans ideology is progressive, of course, but they’re profoundly wrong. That’s the fight in a nutshell.
For many of the BBC staff, if Stonewall thought something, it was probably right and supporting a vulnerable group such as trans people who were fighting for their rights was a no-brainer. If Stonewall says list your pronouns then that was the right thing to do.
Reinforcing this was a desire not to be “on the wrong side of history”, a mantra BBC executives told me they recalled hearing time and time again from the growing number of true believers. This approach discouraged critical thinking and made the position on trans rights an article of faith, as witnessed by the repetitious insistence that “trans women are women”.
But which was the wrong side of history? How was it so self-evident to so many people that the side of bulldozing women’s rights was the right side of history?
As the groupthink started to be reflected in the output, numerous people refused to fall into line. People like the scriptwriter Cathy Leng, who told me how she had questioned the use of inaccurate pronouns and was ostracised by her peers and disciplined by her managers. And others, particularly women, who (anonymously) reported hatred directed at them for suggesting stories that were less than affirmative about trans rights.
In this environment, in late 2017, Theresa May announced plans to introduce self-ID, making it much easier for people to legally change gender. The initiative enjoyed cross-party support. The women campaigners who feared that it would grant access to women’s-only spaces to biological men were largely ignored by the BBC.
Largely ignored for ten long years.
All of this raised serious questions for BBC management and it was frustrating that only one (Gavin Allen, the former head of programmes) would speak to me on the record. Knowing it was a long shot, I put in a speculative bid for Fran Unsworth, the former director of news. I didn’t expect her to say yes or, when she did, to be so candid. I called her in Australia where she spends part of the year and it quickly became clear that she believed she had reached the pinnacle of BBC News just as, in her view, the world went mad. “It was bullying,” she said, “but it wasn’t just the trans issue. There was lots and lots of bullying going on about all sorts of things: people didn’t want to hear from certain points of view; they’d ‘no platform’ them; all that safe spaces shit.”
When I asked her about the BBC management’s failure to get a grip on the trans problem, her first instinct was to mitigate the charge. “I think you have to remember that this wasn’t something that just affected the BBC at this point,” she said, “The world went mad, and the BBC, because it is part of the world, went a bit mad with it. There was a sort of progressive madness going on.” I’d heard this argument before and I didn’t buy it.
Yeah I don’t buy it either. The BBC didn’t just fall off the apple cart yesterday. The BBC has been around the block a few times, and should know how to look at a new and peculiar ideology with a skeptical squint.
“It’s what you might expect of arts institutions or universities,” I said to Unsworth, “but we are journalists. Journalists are sceptical people. They don’t just lie down. They’re supposed to stand up there and think about it first. And there was an absolute absence of that, and just a complete caving.” I could tell this stung. “I don’t feel I completely caved. I really don’t. But I do think that it [the trans right issue] could have done with something more robust.”
I put it to her that some BBC News journalists, including editors, thought that there was only one legitimate viewpoint on trans issues and that everyone else was wrong. “Yeah,” she says, “that was how it was.” And it affected everybody. “There was a sea in which we all swam,” she recalled “… an atmosphere. We need to be kind to transitioning people. It’s a social phenomenon. And I think this ‘be kind’ thing was at the heart of it.”
But why? That claim explains nothing. Why was “be kind” suddenly the job? Why, especially, when the “be kind” actually meant “be kind to men who pretend to be women”? Why is the job to “be kind” to this one particular set of people at the expense of half of all humans?
The most extraordinary part of our conversation came when we turned to discuss the question at the heart of all this: are trans women women? Unsworth told me that “impartiality only operates when you can look at evidence and facts and point to them as the basis of your reporting”. Until the Supreme Court ruling made clear last year that a woman — for the purposes of the Equality Act — meant a biological woman, she said, “the facts at this point were incredibly disputed”.
No they weren’t. There was a noisy political campaign to try to make them disputed, but 99% of people still knew that men are not women. Noisy political campaigns aren’t necessarily the best source of truth.
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