Expertise
Oliver Brown and Craig Simpson in The Telegraph:
BBC bosses “ignored” warnings about pro-transgender bias in its sports coverage, The Telegraph can reveal.
Messages seen by The Telegraph reveal that female staff repeatedly raised concerns over several years about the nature of reporting on gender issues.
BBC Sport bosses were told almost five years ago that stories about trans athletes were often uncritical and celebratory “puff pieces”, while glossing over any potentially negative impact on women’s sports.
However, insiders claim that the BBC persisted with overwhelmingly positive coverage of otherwise controversial athletes, including Lia Thomas, the biologically male swimmer, the weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, the cyclist Austin Killips and Imane Khelif, the boxer.
BBC staff have reported feeling ignored and feeling unable to voice opinions that went against the prevailing orthodoxy of affirming transgender identity.
We know. Boy do we know. I’ve been pointing it out loudly and rudely for what feels like several decades.
Insiders have expressed the hope that the scandal will force a culture change at the BBC, and that the trans issue will not be overshadowed by the treatment of the US president.
BBC Sport is currently led by Alex Kay-Jelski, who faced criticism for a column he wrote for The Times in 2019 while he was the newspaper’s sports editor.
In the piece, he wrote that Martina Navratilova, the nine-time Wimbledon champion, and the Olympic swimming medallist Sharron Davies, both vocal opponents of allowing biological males to compete in women’s categories, were “not experts” on the matter of trans participation in sport.
Hey you know what? You know who else is not an expert? Alex Kay-Jelski is not an expert on being a woman forced to compete against a man.
Three cheers for your rudeness. It’s like a breath of clear air in a toxic atmosphere.
Seconded.
OK. OK. Got it.
But Navratilova and Davies can win as women. They have no idea of the dreadful frustration some male sportspersons feel when, try as they may, they simply cannot win as men competing against other men. Those chaps are also quite obviously easily upset by being in this terrible situation; particularly when it can be so easily remedied. They put on women’s clothes, and appeal to all and sundry to ignore their obviously male features, and wait quietly in the dusk with the light behind them for TV crew to ro rock up and accept them for their “expertise” at being who they ain’t.
What is so difficult about that?
Pray tell, how can one be “an expert” at turning men into women? I wonder if he can spin straw into gold, too?