This month’s UK Supreme Court ruling on gender has already set in motion a number of victories for women and for common sense. Women will be able to use the ladies’ bathrooms without fear of bumping into men. Lesbians will no longer be forced to include men in lesbian groups. Young girls will be able to play on sports teams that are filled with other young girls, not boys.
One unexpected knock-on effect of the Supreme Court judgement is that it may also force the BBC into admitting that transwomen are not, in fact, women. In light of the ruling that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act should be understood as ‘biological sex’, rather than self-identified gender, the state broadcaster is purportedly considering changing its editorial style guide. At the moment, BBC News refers to all transgender people by their preferred pronouns and however they ‘identify themselves’. But if reports in the Telegraph are to be believed, then this could be about to change.
Should the BBC start taking biology into account, it would be a major u-turn. For many years, BBC News has gaslit its audience whenever a transwoman is the subject of a major news story. Last year, it gave viewers the false impression that ‘cat killer’ Scarlet Blake was female. This was the man who put his neighbour’s cat through a blender and later killed a random stranger in cold blood. Criminals from the ‘Halifax woman’, who was jailed for stabbing and tying up ‘her’ victim, to the ‘predatory woman’, who ‘incited a man to abuse… a child’, are described as women, even as their menacing mug shots tell us otherwise.
The BBC’s trans-pandering goes further than just adopting preferred pronouns. It has also been spreading outright misinformation on behalf of the trans lobby. BBC News has previously told its viewers that men can breastfeed their babies. Worse, a segment that aired last year featured a supposed ‘expert’ (who herself identifies as nonbinary) claiming that the discharge that can sometimes be produced by transwomen as a result of artificial hormones is actually better for babies than real breast milk from a woman. It has also produced news reports and whole documentaries about ‘men’ supposedly getting pregnant.
The BBC has repeatedly shown licence-fee payers that it has no idea what a woman is. Last year, it counted ‘queer ecologist’ and transwoman Brigitte Baptiste among its annual list of 100 inspiring women. The year before, it included a trans Nepalese human-rights activist. And the year before that, it counted two biological men. In 2014, it placed Austrian Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst (whose real name is Thomas Neuwirth) on the list – even though Wurst is a drag queen who doesn’t even identify as a woman.
Still, for BBC News, a drag queen need only exist or encounter a mild inconvenience to become the subject of a puff piece. Countless articles on the BBC website have been written documenting the minutiae of the lives of cross-dressing men. Even major news stories are given a drag-queen angle. Last year, the BBC News website felt the need to publish an entire article on the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on drag queens, who are apparently struggling to buy ‘essentials’ like elaborate costumes and wigs. For a brief period last year, the BBC became obsessed with gender-nonconforming Morris dancers, but the rolling coverage of drag queens has since continued.
As with any organisation that has gone this far down the trans rabbit hole, dissent from the orthodoxy is strictly punished. We saw this last year, when the BBC upheld a complaint against Radio 4 presenter Justin Webb for referring to men as ‘men’. During a discussion on air about the International Chess Federation’s trans guidelines, he clarified for listeners that transwomen are ‘in other words, males’. According to the BBC, this was an expression of Webb’s ‘personal views’, which violated impartiality rules – despite the fact that saying a biological man is a man is a statement of scientific fact, not an opinion.
A change to the BBC’s style guide would be a welcome step in the right direction. But we can’t expect sanity to be restored overnight. It will take years to undo the damage of the Beeb’s trans derangement.
Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.
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