Tim Davies Resigns - Can Gender Critical Movement take some credit?

Miriam Cates on Twix

Important to remember just how much influence the BBC has in schools. From Bitesize to Newsround, the BBC must bear its share of responsibility for enabling progressive activism in schools. As a parent it’s hard to argue against a school’s stance on gender, sex, race, climate when teachers can point to the nation’s taxpayer-funded trusted broadcaster as ‘evidence’ of accepted facts.

A deep lurker here, delurking.

Great posts from Red. And I too have been laughing hollowly this morning hearing male commentators wheeled out to explain earnestly that it’s a political coup by the BBC's enemies intent on taking the Corporation down.

They do. Not. Get. It.

The feelings and rights and lives of women are so far beneath their notice that it doesn’t even come into the thinking of the alpha male talking heads pontificating on what’s just happened. I don’t much like the term 'echo chamber' but I'll use it here because I think we’re steering dangerously close to letting things be brushed over and the BBC comforting itself with the thought that it’s all a nefarious plot by nasty meanies working to a political agenda. As others have said more eloquently than me: it isn’t. It’s people sick and tired of hearing basic reality being denied, over and over and over, and then their legitimate objections loftily waved away. Meanwhile, we're shown self-congratulatory in-house ads telling us how trustworthy the BBC is. Well - no, actually. BBC Verify? Please.

I'm actually a big supporter of the BBC at its best, and I too know people who work there, so I know that there are many within the fold who most emphatically do not support the madness. But management, and the line it's taking, has been the despair of staff for years now.

This was back in 2018. Does anyone know if it's changed since?

It also has the confusing (but kind of accurate):
"The issue of trans rights has divided Britain, with a split between traditionalists who believe gender is assigned at birth and progressives who believe a liberal society should make strides against any form of discrimination towards trans people."

BBC reporting on the whole subject - they admitted it after the fact that they were utterly lacking

I always assumed the "400 trans employees" thing was an exaggeration, but no.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5905129/BBC-chief-stunned-secret-staff-sex-survey-reveals-417-workers-transgender.html

And the BBC response to this was to say that they needed to make the workplace MORE trans-friendly

@RedToothBrush

Thank you for excellent posts, but ‘they made an almighty pigs ear of it over Brexit and they continue to do so precisely because their issue is about internal authoritarianism’

I don’t understand this sentence. How did they make a pig’s ear over Brexit?

The reason the whole trans activist movement has been able to capture every major institution in the UK, is because the UK is a massively sexist country.

100%

While LBC has Shelagh Doherty, it also has Lewis Goodall and James O'Brien who seem congenitally unable to understand equality.

The Times has a whole roster of women who have been reporting on the issue for over a decade, but are still capable of publishing the odd 'be kind' article.

BBC could admit bias as soon as this morning

The BBC could admit its institutional bias as soon as this morning, sources have told The Telegraph.

There is mounting speculation about the contents of a letter that Samir Shah, the chairman of the BBC, has sent to the Commons culture, media and sport committee.

I agree.

This is not a GC win. This thread is really really overestimating the impact of (what felt like) the blanket positive reporting and tone on gender identity issues from whole of the BBC, not just in news, on these highest possible profile resignations of the DG and CEO of News. That’s not happening because of a GC reasons. It’s about much broader politics. The way the Tories and Reform are trying to claim they’re somehow the GC party is laughable.

It did feel for a long time that it was positive coverage only for the trans activists at the BBC. I complained to the BBC like many others on here.

That was a political position that the BBC should not have taken on so uncritically, but it’s also important to remember that it was the BBC who paid for and aired Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes’ work at Newsnight, raising on mainstream broadcast media for the first time the many concerns about the Tavistock GIDS and labelling and medicating young people as ‘trans kids’.

That was the very a win for the BBC, to provide the very first mainstream investigative reporting in the UK on this key issue. The Times similarly led the way among the newspaper pack. The BBC’s output on this was not then followed up by the rest of the broadcast media, as was the Times’ reporting led by Janice Turner not followed up by the rest of the newsprint press. Which shows the hostile climate that they broadcast it in.

Obviously yes it all should all have happened years earlier but it’s also important to register when reporting is the first and the only and that has to remain a matter praise for the BBC. The growing mainstream media coverage and the legal cases (Keira Bell onwards) are I think what has really turned this juggernaut around. It’s not the politicians have suddenly taken women’s rights seriously. Otherwise we’d see different improvements in health, education and welfare, policing, childcare rights and provision, diplomacy and international development work etc. Everything really.

The reason the whole trans activist movement has been able to capture every major institution in the UK, is because the UK is a massively sexist country. That’s going to take decades to change.

This institutional capture regarding the latest modern form of sexism and homophobia, gender identity politics, was successful for years under the short-lived Tory—Lib Dem Coaliition and then under the successive Tory govs that the UK had from 2010-2024.

So much so that under the massive Tory majority in Parliament we had, Theresa May as PM very very nearly brought in Self ID to the UK. It was a UK government proposal that this should happen.

The issue was systemic and not dependent on party affiliation simply because sexism is systemic and not dependent on party affiliation. Therefore, not a BBC specific problem. Yes, still a massive problem. But we need to be objective in judgement of it.
The wider influence of transactivism is only now slowly waning even at the NHS, and in UK schools and among UK employers. This is evidence that this sexist homophobic genderist politics goes way, way wider than who is running the BBC at any one time and speaks to something absolutely baked into our misogynistic culture.

These resignations at the BBC yesterday are more about the fact that Boris Johnson’s appointees at the BBC as NEDs have gained traction and if that’s good or bad.

It is at the same time objectively true that the BBC has had a series of editorial crisises and has responded far too slowly to them. Which doesn’t say good things about a united or healthy management culture at the BBC but again given the globally high profile nature of the BBC upper levels of board management those relationships are always going to be a war zone. And nobody would want to have groupthink there. The BBC is massive and as such it will always make mistakes, and the key is how it responds to them and actively learns from them. That is about good management at all levels.

The pendulum is swinging way too far today though. Because they haven’t even yet responded to the resignations from yesterday. There’s news coverage now- including on the BBC, about how the DG job is impossible to do or about whether we need to keep the BBC at all in this day and age.

It would be disastrous for the UK and make us more impoverished and irrelevant, and useful idiots to whatever authoritarian might find us helpful, if we didn’t have the BBC with its impartiality remit. I think most of the time, on most issues (but not women’s rights obviously) it treads carefully and appropriately. We’re at high risk of throwing out baby with bathwater which would make the authoritarians and extremists extremely happy. It’s a time for cool heads and diversity of views in broadcasting to be protected.

Yes, just like TD never saw any complaints - we all know they exist, we sent them 😆

Watching it on BBC news, caller just mentioned Maxine Croxall and I swear there was a momentary flash of "arrrgghh no don't mention that" across Nicky's eyes!

I’ve had a separate rant about accountability and the bbc and children here; the damage cannot be ignored

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5441763-the-bbc-is-complicit-in-failures-to-safeguard-children?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

We've already talked about this on MN.

Women don't want to speak out openly due to fear. There are few who will. The BBC don't want to touch certain women because they are viewed as GC rather than the 'ordinary woman on the street' too.

That'll be the production team gatekeeping the calls.

And at the same time you are also seeing peaking. Including within the BBC ranks.

Speaking to people who work at the BBC is interesting. I'm hearing people who were right full on leave and let live go "Actually this isn't cool, I was wrong" but don't quite know how to reverse the ship.

One I know had an incident at work with someone and that broke them, after sometime of me softly saying there's an issue.

I think it surprising generally how many people in BBC Northland have independently raised the subject in the last two years without knowing my position on the subject. I'm in the same sort of social circles as the BBC - in lots of different ways and I have a pretty wide net from very Hipster young Manchester to older South Manchester commuter areas and beyond (we have a lot of friends and socialise a lot in groups that don't cross over - we weirdly fall slap bang in the middle on a lot of things and definitely don't mix in echo chambers).

There's a notable change and I do think there is pushback across the board which isn't yet finished. The bubble is still bursting, and there's still a lot riding on court cases in play.

I've said openly since 2018 that gender issues represented a wider issue with authoritarianism - I brought it up with a local councillor who respected me and told him then it was the next big political arc after Brexit and it would eventually come to a head because you can only maintain a lie of that size for a finite amount of time before it ultimately breaks. I still hold that view and I still think other countries will eventually have a reckoning on that score in time even if they are further in because it's a subject that can only produce safeguarding scandals if you fail to recognise issues. I know that a lot of MNetters were much more skeptical and afraid at points over the years and I'm one of the few who has always maintained this position that it will eventually come crashing down despite some pretty deep lows.

I don't think this is an naivety or ignorance. I think it's an understanding that certain issues can not just go on forever and do eventually reach evitable and predictable crisis even if politicians try and avoid them.

This one always has been a gigantic runaway train.

Listening to Nicky Campbell’s ‘do you trust the bbc’ phone in. 9.26 and no mention of the trans issue yet - lots of `trump….and other things, plus regular comments that bbc journalists aren’t biased

That analogy sums up pretty much most of the public sector nowadays.

There’s a thing running constantly at the moment on the News channel (which is the only one I watch, when at the gym) going on and on about how trustworthy and reliable the BBC is, its fact checking and so on. It annoys the crap out of me.

I think part of the problem with the BBC's lack of understanding of why 'pregnant people' is wrong is plain old sexism.

I (and I am sure many people on this board) could write an essay on what is wrong with 'pregnant people', but it would be about feminism and maternity rights and women's healthcare.

However, I am sure that for many people at the BBC that is just one giant snooze fest. It's easier to focus on criticism from the right.

It's entirely possible 😀 i skim rhe headlines in the morning then try and watch TV news in the evening.

Have there been calls for the Met to be closed? I thought they were doing the "rooting out bad apples" routine!

The main issue I've had with the BBC News and issues like transgenderism, right-wing populism and Israel-Gaza is the sheer lack of journalistic and intellectual curiosity. if I watch a report from Gaza, for example, and think 'Well, who filmed that and are they operating under some kind of gunman's veto from Hamas?' then why does no editor at the BBC have the same worries?

I don’t think you’ve been following the news.