Do heterosexuals work for the BBC?

[Needmoresleep]

I thought this was funny
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12376975/BBC-diversity-survey-ridiculed-employees-discovered-heterosexual-not-listed-sexual-orientation.html

How does this relate to feminism / 'sex and gender', please?

Well ,it’s certainly relevant to ‘sex’ : clue: ‘heterosexual’.

Yeah, only I understood the 'sex' in the title of this forum to relate to whether people are male or female (and what that means for how they navigate the world), rather than sex as in what you might have and with whom.

Forgive me if I'm prickly, it's because this feels an awful lot like LGB people getting caught in the backlash.

Because the BBC seem to have got so absorbed by EDI and counting the number of LGBTQ+++ that when they ask about sexual orientation they forget that there is also heterosexual. Heterosexual has essentially been relegated to "other".

Seems to relate to sex and gender to me. Why don't you think it does?

Sorry cross-post - and I did flag that I thought it was funny.

A similar thing happened about 20 years ago when I was working on a youth project. People doing the poster had got so focussed on ensuring diversity that they pictured a lots of kids of different ethnicities, but forgot to include a white teen. We got a complaint about lack of diversity. We had to redo the poster.

So a bit like the gorilla that no one sees. The BBC have presumably been careful to ensure they have all the right boxes to ensure they did not offend anyone, but forgot an important one.

It's a diversity survey that's been so blinded by diversity training that it's forgotten 'the default' option.

I think to me does say a lot about how women's rights have been completely forgotten and have been sidelined by a drive by diversity trainers.

If being heterosexual is being forgotten, why wouldn't women's rights be forgotten?

It's all about having blinkers on and being so totally self absorbed.

Rights are based on the principle of balancing everyone's needs. If your motivation is so narrow minded and self indulgent it has no thought given to other groups you have a problem.

You aren't representative.

Indeed the BBC'S own diversity figures on who it employs highlight an OVER representation of gay men compared to the rest of the population (and that's the ones who are willing to admit it). And that's interesting in its own right given Stonewalls influence.

That DOES have implications for women, women's representation and women's rights.

I think the conflation of all EDI ideas and initiatives is problematic. I think some good work, trying to address actual structural inequalities, is at risk of being thrown out with the bathwater.

So for eg, I don't see that one poster, featuring a mixture of ethnicities but not including any white teenager, was necessarily a problem. Sure, if all your pictures and advertising materials ever are completely non-white, that would suggest that the service was not serving any white children. But one poster? God knows there are plenty of posters with only white people on them.

I don't see that it's a problem that gay men are overrepresented in the BBC workforce. Sure, in an ideal world all workforces would be perfectly representative of the working-age population, but this isn't a particularly troubling deviation for me, I can't see that heterosexual audiences are being underserved as a result. Women are overrepresented in the charity sector workforce, I don't see that as a problem either.

Obviously it's a stupid oversight in the drafting and testing of the survey. Obviously it's been done with a view to being able to track responses from "LGBO" people (although unwittingly without a proper comparison group!) - which is legitimate, although you'd hope they are also interested in tracking responses from people with other protected characteristics. (Including women - if the DM article had been about the familiar failure to capture sex data, I wouldn't be querying its place on this board.)

But the DM has a particular interest in stirring up antipathy towards "LGBTQ+++". And as a lesbian TERF I object.

They already have been.

What the BBC means by this is that they, like those of the political T lobby, do not see LGBT+ as having anything to do with lesbianism, bisexuality and homosexuality.

LGBTQII+ (and more) now signifies a membership of that political party, as opposed to a diverse group with only homosexuality in common. Homosexuals wishing to notice sex and have a same sex orientation have long since been thrown out. Say you're homosexual near a party member and they'll be glad to scold you in detail for bloody hours.

I can well believe the BBC is confident that no one in their pay is NOT a member of that political party, and then it's just a matter of which label (s) they currently identify with. The BBC have just forgotten to say the quiet bit quietly.

It's a problem if it means Stonewalls influence is amplified within our national broadcaster and that in turn has an amplification in content on anti-women policies and closing down the freedom of speech of women.

Gay men being over represented isn't a problem in its own right. It's the lobby group that comes with it, if it's radicalised, that's the issue.

The whole drive on diversity within the BBC has been about representing the general population better in the first place. Not only has the BBC achieved this in some areas but it's exceeded it. Which should be begging the question about where it's now underrepresented and what are the implications of this.

Several BBC documentaries have touched on how whilst it's now got certain boxes ticked it's not necessarily representative - for example it's private school educated to degree level white men but not working class school leavers or middle class ethnic groups. Which leaves blind spots politically within the organisation.

So the BBC itself is aware that diversity drives have become problematic in their own right and have started to miss the point. This example is a pretty good illustration of the problem.

If in a survey there is such a lack of checking what they are asking, it affects the outcome and decisions made from it, just from poor questions in data collection.

This has been a repeated pattern in terms of women being excluded in discussions about matters which have massive implications for their dignity and safety. A lack of thinking and consideration at the most basic level.

What's more about all those gay men in the corporation is the level of their jobs, not just the number of them. Gay men are less likely to consider female biology or female safety because it's not part of their every day thought process. There has to be visibility of this - yet we get days celebrating visibility of x, y and z but not bog standard boring shit that women face everyday.

That's the problem. Blinkered thinking and political lobbying which excludes.

But the DM has a particular interest in stirring up antipathy towards "LGBTQ+++". And as a lesbian TERF I object.

I dont doubt that lurking in the DM are many old fashioned homophobes, but as the many threads on FWR have shown the DM along with other right wing papers have (unlike the Guardian) been prepared to question, as the LGB Alliance, the way homosexuality has been swamped, erased and undermined by the whole soup of LGBTQI+ Stonewall money degenerating nonsense.

And it is a really, really sad state of affiars that the news industry in this country has been so captured that those of us who are gender critical do not get and cannot expect support from the so called left in this country.

And clearly the stupidity of the rainbow soup that Stonewall has swamped so many institutions with, has resulted in incredibly bad policies in the NHS, schools and just about everywhere.

Everyone knows that the BBC is so captured that their internal monitoring group has the right to approve or reject BBC policy.

And the result of this skewed perspective of the world had led the BBC to make a complete muppet of themselves.

Not to include heterosexual and then think they can palm it off by saying just tick other is grotesque. If it was included in a comedy sketch people would say this would never happen. But it has. And this is why it should be written about and exposed.

And I think you'll find most lesbians on FWR have had to acknowledge that the DM along with others are the only outlets standing up for same sex attracted people.

So the DM probably, unlike the left, knows that a lesbian doesn't have a penis, and it also knows that the majority of people in the country are heterosexual.

If it wasn't so depressing it would be hilarious that an organisation that tries to promote itself as being the source of accurate reporting, is itself unable to compile accurate stats.

On the other hand if you had said the BBC is stirring up antipathy towards the BBC ... I might think there may just have been an element there. But it is the BBC's own goal, and they deserve to be ridiculed.

Sorry typed degenerating nonsense

Should have been denigrating nonsense

Or maybe it should have been both?!

@IwantToRetire yes, I realise that. The wilful refusal of the left/liberal press to grasp this issue (see also, Labour, trades unions, etc) is a massive dereliction.

Strategically, I'm grateful for the DM and the Times for their coverage of this issue, including platforming many feminists.

At the same time, I'm conscious that the DM's objection to the lie that a man can become a woman in certain circumstances, both editorially and in terms of some of their readership, stems from other political positions I don't, as a feminist, align myself with. (Like that venn diagram re: what feminists, TRAs, and conservatives believe about sex and gender.)

I don't think the BBC is 'right' here, obviously. I do think Stonewall have had a malign influence (although I gather plenty of TRAs have been cross that the BBC has not been Stonewalled enough!). But I am also sceptical of the DM's agenda in this story. It's "political correctness gorn mad" fare, isn't it?