BBC WTF

@BonfireLady been having a nose around TwiX (study avoidance) and see that he has no presence there. No account and very few mentions. I think this somehow insulates him from the discussions being had about this issue and provides yet another veil between him and public opinion?

I've very behind @ArabellaScott and still catching up with the thread, but just to say that I thought that now would be a good time for the ridiculous unfairness, partiality and circularity of the BBC complaints system to be brought to attention of the Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport, chaired by Caroline Dinenage (Con, Gosport).

These are the details I have gleaned in order for individuals to make a request for this to be a topic for the Committee's consideration.

Chair: Dame Caroline Dinenage MP

Specific committee email address: [email protected]

The Committee Operations Manager is Andy Boyd who can answer queries via the above email address. Correspondence to Caroline Dinenage should be sent to the same email address and not to her constituency office.

There are different types of inquiries and non-inquiry work packages available to the Committee.

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/378/culture-media-and-sport-committee

I have a working theory that Tim Davie is now beginning to see the true picture. I hope I'm right.

On Friday I was feeling incredibly frustrated, hence the deliberately provocative post above. Despite all that has been discussed in the public discourse (and then parliament) about this medical scandal, it was presumably still filtering through to him as noise in a toxic, two-sided culture war. I'm not saying he's blameless (that's for a Public Inquiry to determine) but I'm imagining the impact of all the BBC activists, the werewolves, and Be Kinders giving him briefings. It's been shared on MN before and it's worth dropping it here now: Malcolm Clark has done lots of investigation in to the roles the Nathan Wren (IIRC, Malcolm sees him as a Be Kind person, not an nefarious activist) and Phil Harold (see screenshot).

As has been shared by posters on MN, at the weekend, the BBC More or Less team (which is a tiny podcast from what I can tell), put out a 12-minute broadcast and accompanying tweet thread about the mis/disinformation surrounding the Cass Report. I've said it on another thread but worth putting here too: Hannah Barnes talked about the Newsnight work she did existing in isolation - no supporting online content etc. The More or Less tweet thread is hugely popular, with something like 2k likes now. That must be unusual for such a niche team.
Hopefully we're seeing a shift from the seemingly interminable stream of distressed trans-identified teenagers wanting medical intervention and pulling on our heart strings (so that we the public feel that we want it for them too) towards coverage about the scandal itself🤞

I'm not offering excuses for Tim Davie but I think the phrase "useful idiot" (or Tim Nice but Dim as some have said in this context 😬😁) has a lot of layers to it. I've shared my own experience of peaking/learning on several MN threads and that it took me a very long time to join the dots between my daughter's exposure to this issue, JKR's tweets about the word "women" and the dangers of autogynophilia. I had a vested interest in this to support my daughter and it still took ages. As I've shared on MN previously, my best friend (who unbeknownst to me had silently peaked in 2014ish but never had occasion to share it) had to take things carefully with me as she knew she was often on the edge of me seeing her as bigoted.

A while ago now, I asked someone who I know (who has occasional IRL contact with Tim Davie) what he was like as a person. The answer was "A nice bloke. Comes from an arty background." Obviously that could mean anything but, in the light of the new coverage that is starting to come out of the BBC, I'm wondering if he's receiving the information more effectively than he did before. I do hope so. Whether he is complicit in any way is for an Inquiry to decide but right now, I'm far more interested in what the BBC can do to make a difference here.

Except in Australia - only coverage for many days was buried deep on the ABC (national broadcaster). I only found it by searching for Cass Review on the website)…

I'm convinced they are using this scandal which is old news as a distraction from the current scandal.

snap!

Hugh, Hugh, Mr Pym, are you there?! I'm shouting as loud as I can.

Give me a sign if you can hear me but you're not allowed to speak about actual news because you're drowning in toxicity.

Look what the BBC was saying on 26th February in relation to the tragic death of this body builder:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2802881.stm

"The temptation to take anabolic steroids should be offset by the risk of an early grave"

The news team forgot to link that article in unfortunately, when they told the story again this week, but his poor parents did say this in the latest article:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-68821985.amp

His parents said the chemicals had negatively affected his mental health.

As you're more science-y than me, I'm sure you already know that synthetic testosterone (as given to teenage girls who identify as trans) is anabolic steroids.

At this juncture I'd like to pass on my thanks to my journalism evening class teacher (6 week course) and am now interested in that career change. Would you like me on your team? I've got lots to learn about copy writing but I'm not that bad. I've even had stuff published that I've written in my current field of work. What I can bring to you is a passion for calling out this MASSIVE MEDICAL SCANDAL before more children and young people need to be harmed and the ACTUAL ANGLE OF THE STORY.

Tim, stop being nice and wake the fuck up. Oops, sorry. Too toxic again? Hopefully you can balance me out with another emotional story about another teenage transwoman who wants faster access to cross-sex hormones?

Dropping in a link to this thread. If anyone from Hugh Pym's team is reading this thread (I really hope you are), please replace all of the words relating to the awful scandal that was reported today by your team with the current medical experimentation on children and have a think whether you want to be calling it out right now or waiting until the impacted generation is in their 40s and 50s. I've added a helpful comment for you with some things we already know about the life-limiting aspects of "Gender Affiriming Care" e.g. cancer risk (not contested), risk due to infections from surgery (suppressed but known and acknowledged by gender clinics), risk of heart failure due to testosterone use (known and not contested, due to knowledge about anabolic steroids).

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5057880-how-long-will-it-take-before-we-see-this-type-of-reporting-in-relation-to-puberty-blockers?reply=134649429

Cass Report was on the BBC before it dawned that it was the revealing of an enormous medical scandal, not just a strategy report, I think. Now sections are being stunned into silence..

I've just had a second listen of the Media Show with Hannah Barnes.

Two more observations:

1. Hannah Barnes explicitly says that the BBC has not been impartial
2. Rebecca Coombes mentions the "silence" of the scientists more than once. She also emphasises how unusual it is for scientific consensus to happen in this way.

(And a small correction: HB didn't say "no" after the pregnant pause. However, I stand by my description of the sentiment that this paraphrased word articulates about the "culture wars" at this point in the conversation. Jake Kanter's comments also added to the same sentiment. The net effect is that an evidence-based, scientific approach to healthcare is being sacrificed because of the loud and/or influencial trans activist voices)

The recent HOC debate about the Cass report had some MPs saying that an investigation needs to occur on how this was allowed to happen, with mention of the stifling of voices sounding the alarm, and the power of trans lobby.

Certain MPs were looking for people to be held accountable, and the BBC have definitely had a part to play in supporting this medical scandal, by their lack of reporting

So surely contacting someone in the government and pointing out the bias of the BBC and the need for them to be held accountable...

I don't know much about the government - whether it is the contacting of MPs from the debate or contacting some of the lord's/ladies..The government needs to step in.

The concerned MPs might be totally unaware about how awful the BBC coverage has been.

If anyone more politically savvy could come up with a plan then I'm sure many of us here would implement it. x

I remember your posts 💐💐
I'm glad to hear that she is hopefully on her way to understanding herself better 🤞🤞 It's such a cruel situation where parents are framed as the enemy for trying to save their children from harm.

I can only imagine how stressful this is for you.

Thanks for this.

@BonfireLady . I feel the same. The anxietyI suffered when my adopted child said they were trans was so appalling. Luckily my horror at the treatment made me completely unable to go along with it, and eventually she desisted, after about 3 years. She’s been home this week and ive not been able to have the tv or radio on. I think she is starting to see, but has really close friends who have transitioned, i cant afford for her to know just how opposed I am.I so want to ask if they are medically ok, but it’s just not possible yet. I love them, I really want them to be ok. I really would so much rather be the terf our monitors expect ,with no lived experience of trans people.

Russell Grant? 😮

What did I miss about Russel Grant?

So the BBC deal with complaints in-house?

Does anyone know if Ofcom could, capacity wise, take on the role of monitoring BBC complaints?

Could we petition for Ofcom to step in?

I'm increasingly disappointed, frustrated & infuriated with the BBC's bad faith on a range of topics.

I hadn't come across the programme before. Only on episode 3 so far but it's so good. Thanks for this link.

... and add sterilisation to the list

Ps obviously I know that transwomen can't get pregnant 😁

That was the sanitised version of the dark humour that popped in to my head about transwomen claiming such things will become possible. What stopped me using that instead was that awful, awful video of the transwoman talking about wanting to be the first person to have a successful uterus transplant. However, it was too disgusting and upsetting for use as a joke because, as anyone who has already seen it will know, that wasn't the only desired "first". That video remains one of the most upsetting things I have seen so far, beyond the harm being done in this current medical scandal.
(And yes, I'm pro-choice, but I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would ever take a fetish that far that it would incorporate a deliberate and planned abortion).

Perhaps I'm not being very nice though in calling that revolting video out, or even when I did the original little pregnant pause pun. Perhaps I'm being toxic. What do you think, BBC?

@BusyMummy001 too fucking right. In my session with my counsellor this week (there is no way I could stay on the right side of sanity without going to counselling) I used to the work "fuck" I don't know how many times. I don't normally use it on here, although I do occasionally (I've been known to do the same over a sauvignon blanc) but it was everything that is coming out this week that is making me so angry. I'm aware that your daughter is much further in to this risk-wise than mine because of her age. My fear and anger is a small fraction of the fear, anger and pain that parents of adolescents and young adults are feeling where irrerversible damage has already been done and/or they are estranged.

@CantDealwithChristmas brilliantly put.

Re the Media Show on Radio 4 tonight, I presume this will be a repeat of what they aired this week already. If so, that's great. I need to listen to it again because there was so much good stuff in it. Including a pregnant pause after a particularly daft "both sides" question that was so big that if they had had a transwoman on the show, baby names would have been picked already. As it stood, after the awkward silence, Hannah Barnes came back and said "No".

You don't need to balance out all reporting on this with a "lived experience" trans voice: if the topic is whether the media is adequately reporting this scandal, you need journalists who understand how editorial direction and accuracy work. More of that please BBC 🙏

Ha ha the scold has arrived!

Absolutely stark when you lay it out like this CantDealwithChristmas

I don't think anyone who pushed this will really be able to face up to the shame of this if they let the truth of it land in them.

Hence the doubling down.

Media show at 8 on radio 4 is talking about Cass report and what journalists can learn about how to report on controversial issues.