Glinner that interviewer was appalling. You did a good job of the limited areas you were allowed to talk on. But presumably you were invited on to talk about how speaking out had affected your career and why you feel there is a culture of silence when people speak up on this one issue. (Otherwise why’d they ask you on now when you’d just had two articles published on that point this last weekend- yet weirdly you were fighting even to shoehorn that in at all- plus the police interest etc- while Sarah Smith talked over you. You got the very good ‘hinge moment’ point in though- thank you. Spot on.
But instead Sarah Smith wasted question after question on how you’d tried to call out authoritarian at best but often threatening, misogynist, homophobic views online ... by her basically saying you’d not been nice enough in the words you’d used. It wasn’t objective to focus only on your wording in a tweet and not the substance issues at hand. guess she was diverting the discussion and shooting the messenger because she didn’t like to see the truth? Not very impartial.
In general there’s no excuse for ignorant, leading aggressive interviewing like that. Plus on the issue of her not apparently accepting that kids are being encouraged for believe they are in the wrong body and therefore medical and surgical interventions are justified- that’s just baffling: It’s a central premise of this political dogma.
Smith’s dismissive attitude to you raising this point appears unfortunately disingenuous on the specific issue of gender nonconfirming and/or distressed children in GIDS and research around the experimental treatments that they are given- (without the safeguards of being given these treatments as part of properly run robust research.)
Hannah Barnes and Deborah Cohen at BBC Newsnight have in recent months done some very important journalism on this topic of how children are treated at NHS GIDS and the lack of research follow up including them writing a letter published in British Medical Journal exposing important issues about how what ‘research’ there is, is being done. Their work caused the research regulator, the Health Research Authority, to issue a defensive response addressing some of what they’d raised. Emily Maitlis as a Newsnight interviewer has asked questions of an NHS GIDS spokesperson about exactly this issue prompted by her colleagues’ investigating- obviously well on top of her brief.
Why didn’t Sarah Smith seem to know or care about any of this factual background of concern about experimentation on children, which had been raised by investigative journalists from her own programme, Newsnight?
IPlayer link to the Maitlis interview:
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bpx3/newsnight-25112019
starts at 13.25 Until 36.00
Can everyone who thought this was not an even handed interview please let the BBC know?
www.bbc.co.uk/contact/comments
Thread about the Newsnight journalists’ investigation with lots of helpful detail here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3645243-Newsnight-tonight-Britains-Experimented-with-Puberty-blockers