BBC backtracked on "all women finalists"

[PronounsBaby]

Apologies if already been discussed but I was surprised to see that BBC women's hour have issued an apology for saying the finalist on Brain of Britain were all women when one is a transwoman.

twitter.com/BBCWomansHour/status/1595003565646532615?t=xKTabOdwDdh8b095rQKm4Q&s=09

I find it genuinely distressing that I can no longer understand a reference to "woman" or "women" in the BBC or Guardian as relating to female achievements. From my early teens, I took such pride in any headline/award/list like this - thank goodness, we're getting there; people are beginning to see what we're worth. Now, I've lost that certainty. And it's a painful loss. Subsuming transwomen into women certainly undermines our validity as a distinct political class, even as we've only just gained full legal recognition in a multitude of areas in recent decades (marital rape; applying to banks for credit) - to already be losing that in common discourse and, potentially, law scares me; that questioning it is so often silenced with accusations of bigotry terrifies me. And I honestly don't know that disappearing transwomen into women does the trans cause the good that, in contrast, normalising more distinct recognition and acknowledgement of their unique needs could do. This denial of objective difference, when we could validate and celebrate it instead, seems potentially damaging in many ways.

I've sent the following to the BBC in response to their "100 Women" list in an attempt to explain this thinking.

"The inclusion of 2 trans-identified males in your list of 100 women is an explicit endorsement of what is, in reality, a contested political belief: that the word "woman" (and female and sex) should be redefined in law and day-to-day usage.

The Alison Bailey judgement of 2020 states that "belief on gender theory is a belief about a weighty and substantial aspect of human life, especially when reform of the law based on that belief may have significant practical consequences for women as currently defined in law" (commonslibrary.parliament.uk/employment-tribunal-rulings-on-gender-critical-beliefs-in-the-workplace/).

In the light of this, please would you explain how this decision corresponds to your guidelines on impartiality (www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/impartiality/).

To pre-empt any disingenuous or facile suggestion that the proportion of 98 females
to 2 trans figures upholds the standards outlined here
(eg.
"inclusive... broad perspective... range of views"), I would point out that the inclusion of ANY trans figures in a list of "women" must by definition align the titular "woman" with gender-based as opposed to sex-based identity.

By extension, this imposes this re-definition on each of the 98 females in the list (and also suggests that this is your perception of my own identity, as your reader). I do not share this view, perceiving my identity as a woman to be sex-based, and having no sense of a gender identity.
I support trans people and am genuinely pleased to see increasing recognition of their needs. However, could I suggest that a list of 100 transpeople would do more to value this marginalised group than an approach that, under the auspices of "inclusivity", actively denies members of another protected group, females, their own right to self-determination?
It took courage to send this. That, in itself, is frighteningly telling. Please do me justice in a meaningful response: how is this unbiased?"

All good points.

I now hear 'women' in most things and the back of my mind goes 'oh yes? how many were men that you're buttering up with virtue signalling?'

Please don't worry about TQ+ male people being lost in the fogging of femalehood and existence: if anything good happens involving a TW, it will be shouted from the rooftops about the T part. It will be vigorously celebrated as T not as women as an amorphous bunch that the TW is a part of.

The 'women' part is an ego stroke only when it happens to be in the best PR interests of the male involved. Heads males win, tails females lose. It is a dimorphic sex based stitch of misogyny.

I replayed the original item again…nowhere does it say anything to suggest they were wrong. I guess I can’t find podcast as opposed to download. I am also surprised that any letters responding to complaints do not come from official BBC addresses. I will be interested to see the responses to the complaint about the list of “100 women” which I find very offensive.

Ok just heard a kind of backtrack on the podcast. “The detail wasn’t available to the WH team.” If we knew , they knew.

I'll try to remember to post an update somewhere when I hear back, Rambling. Technologically illiterate lurker, but taking action in a few small ways and keen to contribute more; the more I read and research, the more concerned I am.

I reported it under the category of "bias", as opposed to "factual inaccuracy" (as I suspect they would argue that the definition of woman IS now contested in many contexts) or "offence" (as they could argue that to exclude transwomen would be to offend THIS group). If this is the case, then it surely does reflect an inherent bias, regardless - in favour of redefinition, and of avoiding offending one group at the expense of offending another - and so I find it hard to see how they would contest this last category.

I hope (against hope, I know!) that they give me a reasoned argument as opposed to an empty soundbite - I genuinely want to know what the thinking behind editorial decisions like these is (what, and also how much there's been!) They have such a big responsibility, with a clear capacity to shape social change, so when there's viable evidence of there being - at the VERY least POTENTIAL - harms to (female) women in widening the Overton window to embed these perceptions as a new societal norm (as suggested in the judgement I referenced), what, then, drives their belief that this is, so very definitively, the
best approach to take?

Will any reply be ironically ideological (eg. generic references to inclusion that tweely avoid the central paradox of the inclusion of some as necessitating the exclusion of others) or will it be more meaningful? Do they even get what's potentially at stake here? I understand why so many laypeople don't, but the BBC has a responsiblity to, at the least, acknowledge potential implications. That update from them - "the detail wasn't available to the WH team" - is in itself so very telling: to my mind, they should take some responsibility for having, effectively, modelled and implicitly legitimised the obfuscation of "details" like this themselves, in their melding of woman and transwoman, and thereby made future omissions of this nature rather more likely...

I get you Catiette. There are so many 'firsts' that women are yet to achieve and now they might go to yet another male person.

The whole point of '100 women' is to focus on the uniquely female experience around the world.
If you can only find 98...

I recommend the #bbc98women hashtag on twitter.

It is fairly stark when you start to unpick it that by force teaming women and male TQ+ people those 98 merely female people become nothing more than props, the backdrop created to put two male people against to demonstrate how very woman they are and how important it is to demonstrate ideological male centric belief.

I'd rather they hadn't bothered with any lists at all than reduce those 98 women to being used in this way.

@Catiette You have the same points of view as me but beautifully articulated. Thank you.

I don’t read it as that. I read it as “ one of the women finalists was a trans woman.”

Which is not saying transwomen aren’t women, but is saying transwomen are a sub set of women. Which they aren’t.

The statement about the gender of the finalists on this year’s Brain of Britain reflected what the programme believed the preferred gender identity of each contestant to be. At the time of the discussion about women and quizzes on Woman’s Hour, the programme team had not been made aware that one of the contestants was a trans woman and this was later clarified on the programme’s podcast and on a Twitter post promoting the discussion.

This makes absolutely no sense. If you believe that the finalists' preferred gender identities were all 'woman', then it is irrelevant that one of them was male.

Nothing about this convoluted ideology makes any sense.

I think this is a really good email @Catiette

Yes, a list to celebrate women to help mitigate the effects of sexism, becomes, by the very nature of adding men, a list that is actually a demonstration of sexism.

Utter misogynistic wankers.

I complained to the Beeb about this and got this response:

'Thank you for contacting us about Woman’s Hour, broadcast on 22nd November, and the finalists for Brain of Britain being referred to as 'all-female'.

The statement about the gender of the finalists on this year’s Brain of Britain reflected what the programme believed the preferred gender identity of each contestant to be. At the time of the discussion about women and quizzes on Woman’s Hour, the programme team had not been made aware that one of the contestants was a trans woman and this was later clarified on the programme’s podcast and on a Twitter post promoting the discussion.

We hope this helps' blah blah blah

So basically evading the issue. I've sent a follow-up complaint saying this response is just a copy and paste of the public defence the BBC made at the time and asking how they could not know when they're meant to be professional journalists/broadcasters/researchers and making sure you know the sex of all participants, if you're going to make a claim about the finalists group being 'all-female', is pretty basic research and journalism.

I'm not expecting much back, TBH.

Honestly, who cares?

I do.

Passionately.

'Female' is not a 'gender identity' it's a biological fact. And to pretend otherwise in order to pet the egos of men (demonstrating how much more important they are than mere females) is to fuck over women. Evidence all over this board.

Two threads today on this board - one with supporters of violent men who assaulted women silently protesting a murdering psychopath being placed in a women's prison on the grounds that a little bit of violence to women is ok if they're out of line and they were white women anyway so who cares

and another, a teenaged girl raped and sodomised by a boy in feminine wear (not at the time identifying as TQ+) in the girls' toilets where the staff protected the boy, arrested the distraught girl's father for 'bigotry'. The boy was moved quietly to another school and sexually assaulted another young girl.

Who cares ? Are you serious?

I do too.
if ‘woman’ means anyone then how can you have anything specifically for women (the old fashioned cunty type) that male bodied people can’t be a part of? For example the bbc list of 100 women- or really 98 women and two male bodied people, quiz finals, all women short lists, rape support groups, breastfeeding support groups, prisons, changing rooms, hospitals wards, toilets… the list is endless. There is literally no where that women (again cunty type) can gather online or off that male bodied women can’t access. I care about that. Women need to have spaces free of men - and vice versa.

Totally agree with above. And it's frustrating that we have to explain this so carefully and fully for it to be understood.

You may not care that this ideology means violent rapists are being put in women's prisons, or that women can't get a female only space to recover from sexual abuse. But plenty of women do.

I think it is a sort of semi-apology. By saying one of the finalists was trans but the reporter wasn’t made aware, aren’t they implicitly saying that they would not have stated it was all women if they had been made aware?

Me and a lot of other women.

I do see what you mean; but I still think, as professional journalists/researchers, they should have got their facts straight. In the context of the Beeb's general treatment and coverage of trans issues – ie toeing the TRA line – I tend to think they knew exactly what they were doing by saying it was all-women.

Yes, I guess they should have sorted it originally - surely it would have come up in research. But I still think it’s slightly heartening that they’ve gone back and said ‘yes one person was trans, we didn’t know that at the time’ because it does imply that it changes their original statement of ‘all women.’ Whereas they could have doubled down and insisted it was in fact ‘all women’ because ‘trans women are women too, so it’s still all women.’ I think there’s something to be said for correcting it.