BBC responds to backlash to article about lesbians being pressured into sex by some trans women

it might not be as widespread as TRAs like to claim, and it is certainly not a result of gender critical feminism or female people asserting boundaries, but let's not make the mistake of minimising it/taking a "this never happens" route.

My difficulty with this is the selection of the appropriate comparator when considering relative levels of harassment.

I sometimes wonder if some cohorts are comparing levels of harassment to their experience with a previous presentation or set of protected characteristics. E.g., I'd be surprised if white men with gender conforming presentation experienced the level of street harassment that (say) an otherwise comparable black man did.

As women, I wonder how many of us wouldn't have cared to count the number of micro-aggressions or harassment events in the average day? Being beeped at and catcalled by men hanging out of vans while we were waiting at the bus-stop and commuting to work? Being pressed up against during travel? The usual hassle while walking to complete the journey into work and that's pretty much standard before beginning the working day?

*about

So the poll of women talking baout their experiences wasn't good enough and yet the poll on supposed transkids suicide was relevant for months and months of BBC misinformation.

Also Little Lord Orange Juice makes my blood boil!

I'm sure trans women do face threats of real violence that are reactions to their transness. Toxic masculine culture does not take kindly to gender nonconformity and while mostly society is far more tolerant of especially male femininity than it used to be, there's plenty of thugs who didn't get the memo.

It might not be as widespread as TRAs like to claim, and it is certainly not a result of gender critical feminism or female people asserting boundaries, but let's not make the mistake of minimising it/taking a "this never happens" route. That's their tactic and we are better than that.

What many TRAs call 'literal violence' is any language from women that hurts their feelings. The ideology then goes on to assert, falsely, that the severity and impact of these feelings of hurt will result in mass suicides - all this imagined from a dodgy set of statistics based on a self-selecting sample size of 27 and some data from trans M2F prostitutes in Brazil.

It's all absolute twaddle and I wish the government would make it illegal for people to peddle suicidal ideation to children and young people, particularly the idea that if they don't get what they're told they want that they'll probably kill themselves. So incredibly irresponsible and harmful.

It overlooks it because it doesn't exist.

"Additionally, this article completely overlooks the massive rates of violence faced by transgender people"

Where? Where are all the reports/articles about all this violence? Or do they still mean mis gendering and hurt feelings.

I really, really dislike the use of the coy euphemisms that are being used. TMI FOLLOWS.

'Dating pool' - oh fuck off, as dear Magdalen would have said.

'Sleep with'. Er, no, we're talking about males wanting to put their penises into vaginas or female anuses or female mouths, as part of acts of penetrative sex.

Please let's not play this down.

The letter was obviously written very quickly in reaction to the story, and put out the same day I think?

I wonder how many on the TA side are regretting that now and realising that a slightly more... considered response might have been better.

Just if you be like repeatedly stressing not sleeping with you because you're trans, that's different.
As that shows a prejudice

But lesbians wouldn't need to repeatedly stress they don't want to sleep with tw if some ( some, not all) would stop insisting that they should be willing to.

They're not stressing this just for the fun of it or to hurt anyone, they're responding to homophobia.

I've never in my life had to repeatedly stress that I don't want to sleep with lesbians, because lesbians aren't telling heterosexual women that we're bigoted, prejudiced, genital fetishists or worse than racists for excluding them from our dating pool.

The "open letter" is exactly the sort of unhinged rant signed by men on Reddit calling themselves made up names that you'd expect from TRAs. Hilarious.

It's not like twitter is an echo chamber where GC people get kicked off for spurious reasons frequently or anything...

NoNotMeNoSiree

^So's CisWithTheT which is the original hashtag that IStandWithLesbians was set up in protest to.
29k tweets a few hours ago as opposed to about 10k for the latter.^

Thank you for pointing this out in such detail. It really shows how pervasive and deep the rape culture and pressure on lesbians is.

This is a hashtag in response to a BBC article with sections like this.

Extract 1
Another lesbian woman, 26-year-old Chloe*, said she felt so pressured she ended up having penetrative sex with a trans woman at university after repeatedly explaining she was not interested.

They lived near each other in halls of residence. Chloe had been drinking alcohol and does not think she could have given proper consent.

"I felt very bad for hating every moment, because the idea is we are attracted to gender rather than sex, and I did not feel that, and I felt bad for feeling like that," she said.

Ashamed and embarrassed, she decided not to tell anyone.

"The language at the time was very much 'trans women are women, they are always women, lesbians should date them'. And I was like, that's the reason I rejected this person. Does that make me bad? Am I not going to be allowed to be in the LGBT community anymore? Am I going to face repercussions for that instead?' So I didn't actually tell anyone."

Extract 2

One woman reported being targeted in an online group. "I was told that homosexuality doesn't exist and I owed it to my trans sisters to unlearn my 'genital confusion' so I can enjoy letting them penetrate me," she wrote.

Extract 3. Content warning, description of rape

Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date.

"[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me."

end of extracts

Responding to this article with CisWithTheT is like responding to reports of child abuse by priests with WomenWithTheVatican, or responding to the initial coverage of Weinstein with IStandWithFilmProducers.

It is callous and tone-deaf. Yet 29k people have, by your account.

The introduction of the BBC article says Some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners - then shunned and even threatened for speaking out. That was the premise being investigated.

The twitter reaction proves this is indeed the case.

It’s a trans thing as it’s trans id men claiming lesbians not wanting to have sex with them are discriminating against them. Like ash sakar, they have it round the wrong way, it’s pure DARVO.

It’s not about them, it’s not about anyone pointing the finger at a group of people and saying they’re all disgusting as ash has claimed. I saw a gay guy on Twitter who put it well he said; I’m gay because I’m same sex attracted, not because I think all women are disgusting.

Hooray for the BBC! That is a grown-up response.

[quote Enough4me]@334bu thanks for the link to give the BBC anonymous feedback, I tried it and it's very straightforward and great idea to let them know that people want the truth reported

www.bbc.co.uk/contact/comments-feedback/#/Your%20comment[/quote]
I wrote using the link above, it was very easy. I pointed out the article was very clear about its sources which was excellent journalistic standards, and compared it to the BBC articles on suicide risk in the trans community which use a survey which had very few participants, yet the small sample size is never mentioned. I also asked the BBC to stand strongly behind a female journalist who is receiving the most awful abuse

Yes Salted, that sums up what seems to be their main objection to eg the LGBA as well? It's not about us so it must be 'hate'?

The open letter's obsession with how the interviewees in the article are not "unbiased sources" is ridiculous and makes them look completely idiotic.

There's no such thing as an unbiased source - all sources contributing to news stories are always biased because they're stating their personal experience. It's the job of the BBC as a news outlet to be unbiased, and therefore for the journalist to balance the article by providing context and responses from the other side of a contested issue. Which she's done here very fairly, by attempting to contact people who disagree, and by including that magnificent self-own of a quote from Stonewall.

The BBC has done nothing wrong here. The open letter writer and signatories just haven't understood journalism, at all. I mean they've barely understood how to read.

That's a great response to the letter, and I hope that it can be published/shared widely.

One of the telling lines to me was:

"Additionally, this article completely overlooks the massive rates of violence faced by transgender people¹²,

yes, because the article was about violence against lesbians! Not every article has to feature transgender people as the victims. Not every article about violence against women has to, either. You can have an article about any particular group's experience with rape and coercion, and the fact that it exists and thus is a problem, without having to mention every other group who may also experience violence. This just seems so typical of this insistence that every time someone mentions something affecting women, they also have to acknowledge that transwomen have it too/worse

I'm so extremely pleased that the BBC grew a fucking backbone.

The vast, vast majority of TW with a GRC currently, will be fully intact, and most won't have seen a surgeon for anything at all.