Womans Hour Wed 23rd April.

Thank you @JellySaurus and @ClarafromHR I agree with you. "Woman" should never have been included at all, there should have been a whole new name for the pretence.

Edited to thank Clara too.

The interview with Susan Smith was pre-recorded so that the BBC could control what was said. The interviewer (no idea who she was, possibly a freelancer hired in to handle the radioactive topic none of WH's handmaidens would touch) was following a script and had been instructed to be as chilly and unenthusiastic about the verdict as possible and avoid anything that might be even vaguely celebratory. I would say that the absence of human warmth or interest is an indication of bias.

This is the BBC Complaints form for you to fill in on line.
www.bbc.co.uk/contact/complaints

I'll be Tweeting WH, too.

It angers me so much that these woman have literally gone against the actual government to protect women's rights in everyday life, received abuse for it, won, and are being questioned by a steely toned presenter on woman's hour as if they've done something wrong! The presenter is much happier on the fluff piece (not to diminish it as I actually am enjoying it) but fgs FWS should be being celebrated on woman's hour for achieving something so significant and consequential to the whole population of women in this country.

It really feels like women enforcing the patriarchy on WH.

I refuse to use either term. I alway use trans identified man (TIM) or trans identified woman (TIW). I will not use a word that must be reserved for women. Please follow Milli Hill on Substack as she regularly points out all the ways that the word ‘woman’ has been erased or stolen.

Do we think WH/R4/BBC has been a bad friend to women and women's rights?

It's Women's Hour. They should have been all over this from the beginning. Instead they cancelled Jenni Murray and interviewed Grace Lavery. Just being even handed with "both sides" would have been better than the fawning

I’ve just looked on Wiki to find out more about For Women Scotland-anti-trans my arse!

For Women Scotland (FWS) is a gender-critical feminist[1][2] and anti-trans[3][4][5][6] Scottish campaign group that opposes proposed reforms allowing individuals to change their recorded sex in legal documents by means of self-declaration.[7]

Susan was brilliant. I mean, the bar was low as I was very busy with the eye rolling and banging my head on the desk repeatedly and she didn't do any of that. She was polite, considered and more kind to Clare than she needed to be. The funding, the be kind, the social contract, the use of "other men," prisons etc. All in there.

Susan was brilliant! If you are reading this - thank you!! So clear, warm and reasonable. The interviewer let her speak but gosh she was cold! It sound like she was reading a list of question against her will! Her friendliness and change in tone for the next segment was so striking - she’s now using a completely different voice. Edited for typo

Very tightly managed interview. WH clearly paying lip service to the ruling and FWS. Susan Smith was great. Suddenly so much excitement about bad women friends. The irony. Do we think WH/R4/BBC has been a bad friend to women and women's rights?

Susan is wonderful: clear, calm and talking total sense.

I see WH has decided on an alternating question style so that no one can accuse them of bias, but which has the effect of undercutting everything Susan says and throwing her back into the defensive position each time:

Tell us about you and FWR.
What about the people who feel hurt/ marginalised by you?
Tell us about you and FWR.
You were bankrolled by JKR (implication that this wasn't a popular movement)

And wrapped up very sharply. Interviewer didn't even thank her. They cut the interview and she said 'That's Susan Smith, one of the founding members of the campaign group For Women Scotland' in a chilly voice.

Other women who've won court battles for women's rights are celebrated. FWR. don't even merit the basic courtesies. I'd hoped that this interview would give me hope but it doesn't. The people running WH are misogynists.

Neither. It should be trans-identified men. They are not women of any sort.

Separating trans implies that these men are women-who-are-trans, much the same way as blak women are women-who-are-black. It is a deliberate and successful attempt to confuse people - most people not fully engaged with this issue understand it to mean female people who identify as men.

If you extend the logic to 'trans' being one word with 'woman' (I know, I know, there's no logic in transgenderism), would you even dream of calling Whoopi Goldberg a 'blackwoman'? My immediate apologies to WG for using such a phenomenally offensive term!

Oooh will listen later!

Susan was bloody brilliant, so very calm!

I did think the interviewer did a good job in letting Susan get her whole point across. Lots of BBC interviewers would not have done that.

Responses all clear and balanced. Well done Susan Smith. 👏👏

What a brilliant spokeswoman Susan Smith is! She is clear, sensible, full of the facts, compassionate. Of COURSE one of the first things she was asked was, 'but do you not feel you should be KIND to the poor trans women?'

The idea that JKR 'bankrolled' this is absurd. It's well publicised that the most she funded was 100K (I saw 70K cited too). Do people honestly think a court case like that only cost that much?? No no, ordinary women (and probably a few guys) put in fivers and tenners and if they could afford it, £50 here and there. The TRAs can't cope with this idea and naturally would prefer it if the Wicked Witch of the North funded the whole shebang, as obviously she's capable of doing.

Obviously this is a really good reason for JKR not to have funded it all herself, because it just opens it up to criticism. And I'm sure she also wanted to give the rest of us a chance to be part of this, which is very important. The victory belongs to us all.

The interviewer sounded really wooden, her voice suddenly became animated when she moved onto the next interview with a different topic.

Thanks. I've been getting it wrong then.

Covering a lot of bases in this interview.

Huge sigh of relief from the presenter as she moves on to the next, much fluffier and less cognitively dissonant topic. Well done Susan Smith you were brilliant and so so clear.

Susan Smith was excellent 👏

End of segment. It did get the first third of the programme.

Yes, she’s been really good here.

I ended up treating WH like a recalcitrant teenager - praised the good, critiqued the bad (via email), ignored the tantrum / lack of logic.

Then after a few years I stopped bothering with it.

Looks like WH finally started to grow up. About bloody time.

The presenter's questions come across as uninformed and biased but it's giving Susan Smith a great platform to be very clear on and to show how much of a grip she has on this subject.

“The powerful tendency for public discussion of gender issues to drift, inexorably, back to the male point of view.”

Phallic Drift as defined above. In evidence at the beginning of this interview and almost all media since the SC judgement was handed down…

OMG SS is so good