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.
