Erika Hilton, Brazil
Politician
The first black trans woman ever elected to a seat in the National Congress of Brazil. Erika Hilton is an activist who campaigns against racism, and for LGBTQ+ and human rights.
and
Efrat Tilma, Israel
Volunteer
As the first transgender volunteer in the Israeli Police, activist Efrat Tilma answers emergency calls and works to improve the relationship between police forces and the LGBTQ+ community.
It’s only 2% (I assume there are no more because the BBC says up front that these two are trans women and they don’t say that about anyone else) but it shouldn’t be any. It just shouldn’t. The whole point is to big up women because women are so generally smalled down. The whole point is to promote women, draw attention to women, chip away at the neglect and lack of representation of women. You can’t do that and add a couple of men to the mix just because it’s fashionable.
Comments
7 responses to “Two”
Meanwhile, in an astonishingly progressive breakthrough, a white male has won a Rhodes Scholarship!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/rhodes-scholar-bc-uvic-first-transgender-julia-levy-1.6675800
I wonder if the BBC would struggle to find 100 exemplars from the male sex if so tasked.
To Holms @ 2 – maybe Chase Strangio would make the list.
Surely if one believed that what those two people did was meritorious enough to be in the top 100 in the world, and one believed that TWAW, there would be no need to specify that they are trans? it really just smacks of tokenism, which is weird for such a list.
Obviously I don’t believe that they should be on the list because (1) not women, and (2) displaced two women from that list who would otherwise have received recognition for their own good works.
Maybe someone at the Beeb is still keen on sucking up to Stonewall. “Let’s throw a few TiMs in the mix to keep in their good books. We still have all these damned rainbow lanyards about; we might as well get ou5r money’s worth and a pat on the head. Besides, it’s no end of trouble if we piss them off. If they really were women, we wouldn’t have to worry about that at all. Pissing women off is just business as usual.”
I wonder if there’s any sort of intergenerational (?) power struggle within the BBC when it comes to reporting trans “issues.” Maybe there would have been more than two men on the list if it weren’t for the recent court cases and scrutiny that has come transactivists’ way of late.
As far as TAs are concerned, the 98 women are only on the list to validate the two TiMs. Gotta be with real women to show that you’re “actually” one of them. this wouldn’t work if it was a list made up entirely of TiMs, just as the TiM advantage evaporates once a woman’s sporting has lost all women. Replacing all women in such a situation kills the goose that lays the golden egg of validation. So TiMs will keep some token women around for such purposes, so they don’t unintentionally ghettoize themselves into a category that is not (at least nominally) “female”. No third spaces, third teams, or third lists for them.
Once again, including any TIMs at all on a list of “women” implies that the BBC is using the Genderspeak definition of “woman”, based on “gender identity” rather than biological sex, which once again turns the whole list into an implicit claim about what’s going on inside the heads of the other 98 (i.e. they all think/feel/”present”/etc. in whatever way Hilton and Tilma do, thus making them into the same kind of people).
Either that, or the whole thing is a bad pun, just like including Fido the Boxer on the same list as Mohammad Ali, George Foreman, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis etc.
The BBC’s history of sticking men in its women’s list:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-bbcs-not-quite-100-women-list