For once the police back down.

Police have apologised to one of Scotland’s most prominent gender-critical campaigners for threatening to prosecute her over claims she vandalised a trans activist’s umbrella.

Susan Smith, one of the three directors of For Women Scotland, had earlier been informed she would have to accept a formal warning or face court action over an altercation with Tom Harlow, who attempted to drown out speakers at one of the group’s rallies with amplified music.

And by doing so harassed those speakers and attempted to deprive them of their right to protest being erased by people like…him.

…following a major backlash to news that Smith was facing prosecution, the national force said it would launch a “review” into the matter.

On Friday morning, Smith received a notification, via her lawyers, that the matter had been dropped. Police Scotland confirmed it was “now satisfied that no crime has been committed” and has also issued an apology to Smith.

“now” satisfied, they say, as if it hadn’t been obvious all along that Tom Harlow was the aggressor, and the piggy attempted silencer of women. It was obvious but the cops got the vibe wrong. They thought it was still open season on women.

Smith said she was relieved at the outcome but said Harlow’s allegations should never have been taken seriously in the first place.

Video footage showed that his umbrella had been damaged before the brief confrontation with Smith, who was asking him to turn down his music.

His “music” which he was playing at high volume in order to silence women. The cops should have turned his damn music off and told him to go away.

“While I am delighted that Police Scotland have dropped this case, it is concerning that an individual who came with the express intention of disrupting our rally and drowning out our speakers was taken seriously, especially when extreme, credible threats to women are frequently overlooked,” Smith said.

Exactly. I am sooooooooo tired of it. We all are.

The thing about this is the air of confident certainty and enlightenment – in short the staggering vanity. She talks the most unmitigated bilge and she carries herself as if she were Hannah Arendt and Nelson Mandela combined.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on And producers let them.

Prescott notes an in-built censor: instead of a story on, say, the side-effects of puberty blockers being covered by health reporters, or the legislation by the political team, all gender stories were routed through an LGBT desk.

They need to find out who decided on this “routing” and fire them. It’s like giving control of editorial content to a bunch of astrology activists, who are going to present everything they cover through thei filter of their pseudoscientific world view, and who are never going to allow astrology-critical stories to see the light of day. All the while, the reputation and cerdibility of what was supposed to be a news organization, goes down the toilet.

One ex-BBC correspondent tells me: “They’d say ‘we’re covering that’. But they wouldn’t. They’d sit on it. So no one did.”

Why were these people who said they were going to do something, but did not, permitted to continue working? It must be nice to get paid for not doing your job because you don’t want to, or object to the beliefs of people whose viewpoints you’re supposed to be reporting on. How did this “T” desk get so much power to shape the policy and workings of the entire corporation after just a few months on the job? Did they have compromising photos of all of their managers, superiors, and supervisors? Were all of their bosses, at all levels, so afraid of the meaningless, content-free accusation of “transphobia” that they handed over the keys to the editorial suite, letting these people do whatever the hell they liked? Why did they surrender to people who should have been sacked?

Presumably the BBC had and has rules about standards, neutrality, and objectivity. Why weren’t those rules followed? Why were these delusional ideologues exempted from them? Who gave them blank cheques and carte blanche to push their reality-denying, Lysenkoist, parasitic party line, using the BBC as a host body? What did the BBC, or members of staff and management who could have said “No”, but didn’t, get out of it? Why did they sell their professional standards and standing so cheaply? And for what? Ludicrous bullshit that had to be protected from any and all examination or criticism, lest it implode through the exposure of its manifest contradictions and incoherence. At this point, the BBC stopped being a news organization and became the official, state propaganda arm of trans “rights” activism, taking on board its preferred, obfuscatory, counterintuitive language and framing, while confusing and gaslighting its audience in the process. How could this abdication of responsibility and control have ended up as anything other than a disaster for the BBC, its mandate, and its reputation? How were they so blind as to not foresee this? Who decided to let these children run around with lit sparklers on the Hindenburg?

BBC gender correspondent tried to block coverage of trans criticism

The BBC’s “gender and identity correspondent” sought to block coverage of a campaign group aiming to protect women-only spaces, The Telegraph can reveal.

Megha Mohan, who has held the specialist role since 2018, emailed a co-worker raising concerns about their plans to film a debate by the group Woman’s Place UK.

Apparently women are not part of the genner ann idenniny beat. I guess only men have genner ann idenniny?

In the email – sent months after she started her role – Ms Mohan wrote: “There’s some concern from LGBT+ about giving this group a platform, they are seen as a more extreme organisation that we would be legitimizing (sic).”

In a follow-up email, she added: “A couple of LGBT contacts have told me about Woman’s Place and called them transphobes in the past.”

Oh well then. There’s no more to be said. Thus the wise decisions of the BBC are formed. A couple of people who are lesbians and gay men and bisexual and trans called Woman’s Place transphobes. Who could possibly ignore that as meaningless gossip from random unknown parties?

Ms Mohan’s intervention can be revealed this week as The Telegraph published revelations from a leaked internal BBC memo that details numerous instances of apparent bias at the broadcaster.

The 8,000-word letter was sent to members of the BBC board by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser. He wrote of his “despair at inaction by the BBC executive” over widespread evidence of bias.

…

The leaked dossier includes claims that its trans coverage was biased towards stories “celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”.

It claims the BBC’s trans coverage is subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters who refuse to cover gender-critical stories.

Oh that kind of specialist – the kind that ignores all dissent and correction.

Ms Mohan was one of the first journalists hired by the BBC to report specifically on sexuality and gender. She is a World Service correspondent reporting primarily on global stories.

…

She was appointed alongside Ben Hunte, who was made “LGBT correspondent”. The pair have reported extensively on transgender issues, in numerous instances focusing on the transgender experience or detailing the abuse the community suffered.

Ms Mohan interviewed transgender soldiers banned from the US army, while Mr Hunte wrote about the “distressing” waits for children to have gender reassignment treatment at the controversial Tavistock gender clinic.

The Telegraph could find no examples of the pair having written articles that focused on people who had de-transitioned or expressed concerns around transgender women using female-only spaces.

I am all astonishment.

Janice Turner on The Eyeroll That Shocked a Nation:

The BBC executive complaints unit was spot on. When the newsreader Martine Croxall had to utter the words “pregnant people”, her facial expression — as she added, for clarity, the word “women” — did convey “disgust, ridicule, contempt or exasperation”. Because whose face doesn’t when confronted with the idiotic, ideological terms that dog the NHS and erase women even from motherhood?

I know the answer to that one – the faces of the people who have bought into the ridiculous destructive trans ideology and its Core Command that Everyone Must Tell the Lie. There are still lots of them, including many who work for major news media.

Back in 2019, when Theresa May’s government was holding a public consultation on amending the Gender Recognition Act to include self-ID, and feminists were trying to raise concerns about how this would affect women’s prisons, sports and safety, the BBC ignored stories or voices that did not endorse LGBT activist demands.

Frustrated by this, James Kirkup, of the Social Market Foundation think tank, and I met Kamal Ahmed, then news editorial director, James Angus, director of the BBC world service, and Richard Burgess, now director of news content.

We first asked them to watch a report by Megha Mohan, one of their recently-hired “identity correspondents” about a so-called school for trans children in Chile. One girl with short hair says: “When I was growing up my family started to push feminine things, like dresses, long hair, makeup — and I am not this.”

Mohan never wonders if such girls, or the fey boys who liked drawing butterflies, weren’t actually retreating from macho, homophobic South American culture. It was self-evident: these kids were trans.

The three bosses watched this expensive mess in discomfort. The problem, they said, was young and inexperienced journalists balked at balance, refusing to include any views counter to their own. And producers let them because they were terrified of vicious complaints from the LGBT staff network.

Why? Why were they terrified? Have BBC producers ever been terrified of complaints from women or Other races or workers or Jews? What is so particularly terrifying about yelping from “LGBT” whatevers?

BBC guidelines are clear: “In applying due impartiality to news, we give due weight to events, opinion and the main strands of argument.” Yet on gender they let activist reporters dictate coverage, and suppress any stories that raised difficult questions. Prescott notes an in-built censor: instead of a story on, say, the side-effects of puberty blockers being covered by health reporters, or the legislation by the political team, all gender stories were routed through an LGBT desk. One ex-BBC correspondent tells me: “They’d say ‘we’re covering that’. But they wouldn’t. They’d sit on it. So no one did.”

So why didn’t they fix it? Why didn’t they then rout the stories through the health desk or political desk or whichever desk was relevant and would actually cover it?

BBC staff who have fought to bring balance to gender coverage speak of unofficial blacklists: high-profile feminists or women’s groups were kept off the centralised contact database, hence never called. Activist journalists like Mohan — still at the World Service — put pressure on colleagues who planned to cover an event by the feminist group A Woman’s Place in 2018, calling it “transphobic” and an “extreme organisation”. Gender-critical speakers were booked then dropped at the last minute; phone-ins screened out callers who opposed males in women’s sport.

So the question remains: why? Why this one set of people and not others? Why, espcially, not women, who are after all not some tiny pressure group but half of all human beings. Women are the literal source of all human beings. Why have women never had this kind of veto power at the BBC?

The journalists I speak to stress that lately much has improved: “There are good people at the top who have listened.” The BBC left the Stonewall champions scheme and has removed website links to the transgender Mermaids charity; gender is now covered largely by the more professional social affairs desk. The style guide has removed activist terminology such as “cis”.

But ideological capture is hard to unpick. Reluctance to air feminist voices endures: after their landmark Supreme Court victory, which ruled sex is biological, the feminist group For Women Scotland appeared on just one BBC news programme. The Darlington nurses, who seek only single-sex changing rooms, were grilled on Woman’s Hour like war criminals. The BBC site still describes trans-women sex offenders or murderers as “women”, though these are clearly crimes of male violence.

Most baffling is the executive complaints unit itself. Why was Croxall’s face guilty of bias, not the scriptwriter who typed the non-BBC-style term “pregnant people”? Why was the Today presenter Justin Webb reprimanded for saying “trans women, in other words males” in a discussion about gender rules in chess? The complaints process needs reform: placating a handful of activist letter writers has a chilling effect on journalism and public debate.

It is time the BBC acknowledged its failings of impartiality, that gender is a subject with more than one side. It must restore trust, before the nation’s eyes roll right out of its head.

Nailed the landing.

The current state of play in Trump’s campaign to starve us into submission:

The Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump to withhold about $4 billion in funding for food aid for 42 million low-income Americans this month, as the effects of the longest government shutdown in history continue to ripple across the country.

Oh good. How nice of the court to let Trump starve people.

The court’s ruling, known as an administrative stay, came after the Trump Administration appealed a federal judge’s order to fully fund the program by Friday.

The administration had previously agreed to a judge’s order to partially fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP or food stamps, by about $5 billion from a contingency fund, but it has objected to paying another $4 billion to fully fund the program.

…

The ruling will keep millions of Americans who are reliant on food aid on a knife’s edge. The benefits lapsed at the beginning of this month for the first time in the program’s 60-year history…

Well they should have thought of that before they decided to be poor.

The SNAP program has become a political bargaining chip in the ongoing government shutdown, which has dragged on as Republicans refuse to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans, which are set to expire at the end of the year.

Look, you have to keep people poor one way or another. It’s what God intended.

Trump is doing his No YOU’RE the racists number again.

Donald Trump has said the US will not attend the G20 summit in South Africa over widely discredited claims that white people are being persecuted in the country. The US president said it was a “total disgrace” that South Africa is hosting the meeting, where leaders from the world’s largest economies will gather in Johannesburg later this month.

South Africa’s foreign ministry described the decision by the White House as “regrettable”. None of South Africa’s political parties – including those that represent Afrikaners and the white community in general – have claimed that there is a genocide in South Africa.

Ah yes “the white communinny” – who knew there was one?

Never mind. The important thing is that Trump knows better than any mere South African person; if he says there’s a genocide against white people in South Africa then there is one.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has repeatedly accused South Africa of discriminating against its white minority, including in May when when he confronted his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office.

The Trump administration has given Afrikaners refugee status, stating a “genocide” is taking place in South Africa. Last week, the White House announced plans to caps refugee admissions at a record low, and give priority to white South Africans.

He’s teaching us a lesson. We are meant to learn that that whole history of kidnapping into slavery and centuries of forcible enslavement and then another century of profound race-based exclusion and persecution never happened – it was all a big story told to abuse our darling virtuous white country.

Police Scotland have finally backed off.

Police Scotland has been left humiliated after it was forced to drop its case against a famed women’s rights campaigner for allegedly damaging an umbrella. Susan Smith was told she would face charges unless she accepted a police recorded warning for vandalism after a confrontation with infamous trans activist Tom Harlow.

He disrupted a women’s rights protest outside the Scottish Parliament in September by playing loud music in an attempt to drown out speakers. He was asked to turn it down by Ms Smith, with pictures and footage showing him jabbing a rainbow-coloured brolly towards her face.

Despite which, the cops went after her instead of him.

According to the FSU, cops will take no further action against Ms Smith and have even invited her for a meeting with senior officers to discuss the case and wider issues like women not feeling like they are protected by law enforcement. Complaints were made about their inaction when protests are hijacked by trans activists.

Good. Educate them until their faces are SCARLET.

Ms Smith said: “I am relieved that I can now draw a line under this episode and I am incredibly grateful to the Free Speech Union and my lawyer Neil Hay for all their help and support. This has highlighted how difficult and frightening such an action must be for those who are not able to draw on the help of FSU and who cannot hope to have the same level of public, political, and press support I was fortunate enough to receive.

“While I am delighted that Police Scotland have dropped this case, it is concerning that an individual who came with the express intention of disrupting our rally and drowning out our speakers was taken seriously, especially when extreme, credible threats to women are frequently overlooked.”

Not to mention extreme bullying and silencing of women, like for instance Tom Harlow’s determined effort to disrupt a women’s rights protest.

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

The Trump administration on Friday asked a federal appeals court for an emergency pause on a federal judge’s order to fully fund SNAP benefits this month.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell ordered the administration on Thursday afternoon to deliver payments in full to states by Friday, chastising it for delays that he said have likely caused SNAP recipients to go hungry.

No no no please don’t make us pay for poor people to eat food!

“People have gone without for too long. Not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable,” McConnell said, adding: “This should never happen in America.”

This is the first time SNAP benefits have lapsed because of a government shutdown in the program’s 61-year history. Some families whose EBT cards were due to be reloaded already this week have reported skipping meals or subsisting on the meager foods remaining in their pantries, such as cereal or ramen.

Or brioche.

More on the “Shall we erase women? No let’s not” controversy.

In other words it wasn’t necessarily political, or exclusively political – it may also (or entirely) have been about not befuddling the listeners.

Language matters.

The Telegraph reports:

The BBC’s “gender and identity correspondent” sought to block coverage of a campaign group aiming to protect women-only spaces, The Telegraph can reveal.

Sorry to interrupt but what tf is a “gender and identity correspondent”? A correspondent in meaningless but trendy abstractions? Did the BBC have an actual women correspondent at all?

Megha Mohan, who has held the specialist role since 2018, emailed a co-worker raising concerns about their plans to film a debate by the group Woman’s Place UK.

In the email – sent months after she started her role – Ms Mohan wrote: “There’s some concern from LGBT+ about giving this group a platform, they are seen as a more extreme organisation that we would be legitimizing (sic).”

Oh I see. She was a silencing women correspondent. How very BBC.

Isn’t it odd how we’ve gone from sturdy conventional mainstream ignoring of women to exciting trendy enlightened ignoring of women? You’d think we could have had a year or two of actual non-hostile attention, but I guess Karens just never manage to deserve that.

In a follow-up email, she added: “A couple of LGBT contacts have told me about Woman’s Place and called them transphobes in the past.”

I don’t suppose it occurred to her to talk to a couple of women contacts? No, of course not, that would be retrograde and despicable.

Ms Mohan’s intervention can be revealed this week as The Telegraph published revelations from a leaked internal BBC memo that details numerous instances of apparent bias at the broadcaster. The 8,000-word letter was sent to members of the BBC board by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser. He wrote of his “despair at inaction by the BBC executive” over widespread evidence of bias.

…

The leaked dossier includes claims that its trans coverage was biased towards stories “celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”. It claims the BBC’s trans coverage is subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters who refuse to cover gender-critical stories.

…

[Mohan] was appointed alongside Ben Hunte, who was made “LGBT correspondent”. The pair have reported extensively on transgender issues, in numerous instances focusing on the transgender experience or detailing the abuse the community suffered.

Ms Mohan interviewed transgender soldiers banned from the US army, while Mr Hunte wrote about the “distressing” waits for children to have gender reassignment treatment at the controversial Tavistock gender clinic.

The Telegraph could find no examples of the pair having written articles that focused on people who had de-transitioned or expressed concerns around transgender women using female-only spaces.

Mohan is still the BBC’s genner and idennniny correspondent.

The Times version of the Martine Croxall/pregnant people clash:

A BBC News presenter who corrected the phrase “pregnant people” to “women” while live on-air has had 20 complaints about her upheld.

Martine Croxall, 56, was introducing a news item in June about a study into protecting vulnerable people in hot weather conditions when she made the change to the wording contained in the report and appeared to roll her eyes.

Not roll exactly. More do that thing where you twitch the skin around the eyes – it’s more a glare than a roll. She definitely doesn’t turn her eyes up toward the ceiling like a teenager. If you blink you miss it. If she hadn’t also uttered the word “women” no one would have noticed the slight twitch.

But now the broadcaster’s Editorial Complaints Unit [ECU] has censured the presenter for breaching its rules on impartiality. It concluded that her reaction, which it said “has been variously interpreted by complainants as showing disgust, ridicule, contempt or exasperation” revealed her personal viewpoint on the controversies surrounding the debate over transgender people.

Oh do shut up. There wouldn’t be any controversy if you idiots would stop pushing this ridiculous ideology on us. There shouldn’t be any debate over whether or not men can be women. They can’t; the end; don’t slam the door on your way out.

The Telegraph starts its article on the libel suit against Owen Jones with a hilariously absurd photo of him shouting into a microphone and brandishing a posh fist. It sums him up nicely.

A BBC editor has sued Owen Jones, the journalist, over an article claiming the corporation is biased towards Israel.

The article about coverage of the conflict in Gaza has caused the BBC’s online news editor for the Middle East to receive death threats, documents in a High Court libel claim allege.

Raffi Berg, who joined the BBC in 2001 and has been Middle East editor for its news website for 12 years, is suing Mr Jones over an article titled The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza published on the Drop Site website in December last year.

Mr Jones spoke anonymously to 13 BBC staffers who claimed Mr Berg “plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of ‘systematic Israeli propaganda’”. Mr Berg denied the claims.

The article also said that staff had told Mr Jones that Mr Berg “reshapes everything from headlines, to story text, to images” and “repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity”.

Did Jones speak anonymously to the 13 staffers or did the staffers speak anonymously to Jones? The first makes no sense so it’s probably the second.

I don’t know anything about Raffi Berg or the BBC Middle East desk, but I have heard and seen a lot from Jones and I’m not an admirer. May the better journalist win.

Now there’s a headline – and a BBC headline at that.

Martine Croxall broke rules over ‘pregnant people’ facial expression, BBC says

You might wonder what a pregnant people facial expression even is, but it’s the BBC saying, so it must be true.

The BBC has upheld 20 impartiality complaints over the way presenter Martine Croxall altered a script she was reading live on the BBC News Channel, which referred to “pregnant people” earlier this year.

Croxall was introducing an interview about research on groups most at risk during UK heatwaves, which quoted a release from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

The presenter changed her script to instead say “women”, and the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) said it considered her facial expression as she said this to express a “controversial view about trans people”.

Ahh yes. Of course. The “view” that women are the people who get pregnant is a view, while the ridiculous fantasy that it’s “people” in general who get pregnant is not a view but just the obvious reality.

The presenter said: “Malcolm Mistry, who was involved in the research, says that the aged, pregnant people … women … and those with pre-existing health conditions need to take precautions.”

In other words the subject here is safety and precautions, so clarity is absolutely necessary, but never mind that, it’s wicked to say “women” when you mean “women”.

The ECU said it considered Croxall’s facial expression laid it open to the interpretation that it “indicated a particular viewpoint in the controversies currently surrounding trans ideology.”

Blah blah blah fucking blah. Knowing that women are women and men are not women is not a “viewpoint.” Knowing that rocks are not food is not a viewpoint, knowing that jumping off a tall building will make you go splat is not a viewpoint, knowing that rain is wet is not a viewpoint. We know some basics or we don’t survive.

The ECU said Croxall’s facial expression after she said “pregnant people” had been “variously interpreted by complainants as showing disgust, ridicule, contempt or exasperation.”

It added that “congratulatory messages Ms Croxall later received on social media, together with the critical views expressed in the complaints to the BBC and elsewhere, tended to confirm that the impression of her having expressed a personal view was widely shared across the spectrum of opinion on the issue”.

It’s not a “personal view” that women are women. It’s basic human knowledge. It’s basic mammalian knowledge. It’s not fancy, it’s not arcane, it’s not something you have to have a PhD in to understand. We all exist because of a woman. We all emerged from a woman. It’s not mean or reactionary to know that and to say it.

No you may not ask that question.

A woman has been blocked by Bristol city council from asking Green Party leaders whether “predatory men” could enter single-sex female spaces by posing as trans women.

Helen, a university academic in the city, submitted a question to ask at the full council meeting on Tuesday evening but was told it was “offensive” and would not be allowed.

I’ll tell you what’s offensive. City councils telling women we can’t ask questions about men in women’s spaces is offensive. Why is it offensive? Because it makes it so blindingly obvious that women just don’t matter and that our safety is overruled in favor of men’s determination to intrude on us against our will. What does that sound like? Oh yes, rape. It sounds like rape.

Bristol city council, led by the Green Party, has criticised the Supreme Court ruling in April that the words “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act refer to sex at birth.

Ok so then what are the words for people whose sex at birth is one or the other? If “woman” and “man” are not the right words, what are the right words? Please inform.

The council has been openly aligned with trans activists since it passed a motion in July 2022 to “recognise and affirm trans men are men, trans women are women”…

An entire city council actually passed a motion “affirming” that women are men and men are women if they say so. Might as well “affirm” that the sun is a warm yellow sphere a mile above the earth and the earth is a platform ten miles wide.

Tony Dyer, the Green council leader, claimed the Supreme Court ruling “falsely pitted women’s safety against trans rights” and said the “guidance does not achieve the necessary clarity and risks driving further exclusion and division for some of the most marginalised and vulnerable people in society”.

By which he means trans people, especially the male ones. He does not mean women, except for the few of them who call themselves men. He thinks men who pretend to be women are more vulnerable than women.

BBC Middle East editor sues Owen Jones for libel at High Court over Gaza article

An article by journalist Owen Jones about the BBC’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza has caused the corporation’s Middle East editor to receive death threats, documents in a High Court libel claim allege.

Raffi Berg, who joined the BBC in 2001 and has been Middle East editor for its news website for 12 years, is suing Jones over an article titled The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza published on the Drop Site website in December last year.

The claims in the article, which Berg denies, include that BBC staff told Jones that Berg “plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of ‘systematic Israeli propaganda’”.

I can’t help feeling just a little Schadenfreude at OJ’s being tripped up. He is such a smug dismisser of women, you know.

Mr Stables said that following the article’s publication, an online petition was launched calling on the BBC to suspend Berg, who was targeted by protesters at the corporation’s premises in January this year.

The barrister continued that the BBC had since put “workplace security measures” in place for Berg and that police were investigating death threats made towards him.

But of course post hoc is not propter hoc. It’s a fallacy to claim that chronology=causality. The fact that a petition was launched after OJ’s article was published doesn’t necessarily mean the latter triggered the former.

One to watch.

Gordon Rayner at The Telegraph:

The BBC’s trans coverage is subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters who refuse to cover gender-critical stories, one of the broadcaster’s own advisers has warned.

BBC staff have expressed concerns that the LGBT desk – which is shared by all the corporation’s news programmes – has been “captured by a small group of people” promoting a pro-trans agenda and “keeping other perspectives off air”.

This has led to “a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories … celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”, a leaked internal BBC memo concludes. It said it reflected a “cultural problem across the BBC”, which treats issues of gender and sexuality as “a celebration of British diversity” rather than a complex and contentious subject.

Not to mention a pernicious attack on women’s rights.

The debate around transgender rights, and children being given irreversible medical interventions such as puberty blockers, has been one of the most highly charged issues in politics, society and medicine in recent years.

It led to a Supreme Court ruling that “sex” referred to biological sex rather than gender identity, and the independent Cass Review of gender identity services, which resulted in the closure of the controversial Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock clinic in London.

But stories reflecting the views of people who challenged the concept of gender identity were largely suppressed by the BBC’s LGBT reporters, according to a memo written by a former member of the broadcaster’s editorial guidelines and standards committee.

Also according to many of us sweaty commoners who keep saying women’s jobs should go to women and prizes for women should go to women and promotions meant for women should go to women, ad infinitum.

The Telegraph has seen a copy of the 19-page memo, which was sent to members of the BBC Board last month and is now circulating in government departments.

It was compiled by Michael Prescott, who until June was an independent adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, and sent to executives because of his “despair at inaction by the BBC executive when issues come to light”.

It warns that the BBC is not only risking bias in its coverage of trans issues, but is confusing viewers by failing to make it clear that transgender women are biological males, or even transgender at all.

In other words the BBC is not making it clear that some of the people it refers to as women are in fact trans women i.e. men. It just straight up calls them women/she/her and leaves it at that.

Stonewall, the LGBT rights charity, has attracted growing controversy in recent years over its increasing focus on trans rights, resulting in all government departments, as well as the BBC, withdrawing from its Diversity Champions scheme for equal opportunity employers.

Mr Prescott had already noticed that stories raising difficult questions about the trans agenda were not being covered by the BBC, even when they were being widely reported elsewhere. 

We too had noticed. Day in and day out for years we’ve been noticing and saying.

Among stories ignored by the BBC was the leaking of documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in March 2024 that raised concerns about the quality of care given to gender-distressed children, which was covered by The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Economist, the Observer, the Washington Post, The Times and others.

The BBC also failed to cover the story of Darlington nurses who took their employer to court for allowing their changing rooms to be used by biological males, or the story of biological male police and prison officers allegedly conducting strip searches on women and girls.

Instead of giving viewers, listeners and readers a balanced view of the trans debate, the BBC gave them “a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories, usually news features, celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”, the leaked memo says.

As many of us have been pointing out for years.

The leaked memo also says that the much-debated concept of gender identity is often presented in BBC reporting as “an established fact rather than contested”.

This was put down to a cultural problem across the BBC: “That too many of its staff have never considered the idea of ‘gender identity’ to be either spurious or offensive to many people.”

No not either spurious or offensive; both spurious and offensive.

Will anything change?

Trump does a magic.

We’re in good hands.

Slowly slowly slowly the disavowals trickle in.

Pan Macmillan has taken the unprecedented step of apologising to its former author Kate Clanchy four years after it parted company with the writer. Clanchy left her publisher Picador in January 2022 after her book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was accused of perpetuating racial stereotyping, an accusation she denies.

The statement put out by Joanna Prior, CEO, Pan Macmillan – who took on the role in 2022, a year after the controversy flared – read: “This was clearly a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past. I’m sorry for the hurt that was caused to Kate Clanchy and many others.” 

Jeezus. If you’re going to apologize then apologize. Don’t make a half-assed feint at apologizing while distancing yourself from the very apology you’re pretending to make. If you can’t manage to say you’re sorry for the harm Pan Macmillan did then don’t say anything. Above all don’t hint that your victim is a whiney baby who gets her feelings hurt too easily.

Also don’t translate “Pan Macmillan behaved horribly” to “a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past.” If the lawyers won’t let you say it bluntly and clearly, then fire them or ignore them or quit the job. Whatever. Just don’t do this all too familiar thing of pretending to apologize while carefully not actually doing so. Have some guts. Have some sensitivity to language, which is after all the field you’re in.

A six-part BBC podcast on the events that took place in 2021 – Shadow World: Anatomy of a Cancellation – is to be aired from 12th November, and features interviews with many caught up in the episode, including authors Philip Pullman and Monisha Rajesh. In a preview of the series now on the BBC, Clanchy says she was “scapegoated”, while one unidentified voice calls what happened to her as a witch hunt. Others, though, saw it as a reckoning at a time when publishers were still responding to the killing of the US Black man George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.

When publishers were still responding to the killing of George Floyd by randomly punishing authors in a different country thousands of miles from Minnesota.

Ripple effect. Pink News excitedly reports

The parents of transgender teenagers in the UK have denounced the effect the ban on puberty blockers is having on their children.

According to North West Bylines, the parents of children receiving gender-affirming care at GP surgeries in East Sussex, have described life as “horrific” and “inhumane”, in the wake of the indefinite ban on new NHS prescriptions for puberty blockers for anyone under the age of 18, imposed by health secretary Wes Streeting last December.

But North West Bylines has withdrawn that article by “Sophie Molly” so your source is currently not a source.

They identify as journalists.