"Martine Croxall’s eye-roll spoke for a nation" - great article by Janice Turner

[Misla]

Like the newsreader, the public is sick of the BBC’s deep-rooted, intractable bias over gender and the erasure of women

The BBC executive complaints unit was spot on. When the newsreader Martine Croxall had to utter the words “pregnant people”, her facial expression — as she added, for clarity, the word “women” — did convey “disgust, ridicule, contempt or exasperation”. Because whose face doesn’t when confronted with the idiotic, ideological terms that dog the NHS and erase women even from motherhood?

But the unit’s judgment that Croxall’s face fell short of the BBC’s expectations of impartiality will provoke more than an eye-roll. A bleak laugh maybe, or a thumped table. Because, really, what was Martine’s fleeting annoyance compared with the BBC’s deep-rooted, intractable bias?

Free link: https://archive.is/NcUrN

Martine Croxall’s eye-roll spoke for a nation

The journalists I speak to stress that lately much has improved: “There are good people at the top who have listened.” The BBC left the Stonewall champions scheme and has removed website links to the transgender Mermaids charity; gender is now covered largely by the more professional social affairs desk. The style guide has removed activist terminology such as “cis”.

But ideological capture is hard to unpick. Reluctance to air feminist voices endures: after their landmark Supreme Court victory, which ruled sex is biological, the feminist group For Women Scotland appeared on just one BBC news programme. The Darlington nurses, who seek only single-sex changing rooms, were grilled on Woman’s Hour like war criminals. The BBC site still describes trans-women sex offenders or murderers as “women”, though these are clearly crimes of male violence.

Great article by Janice. Thanks for sharing.
the BBC won’t accept complaints about this issue. They are so impartial that it’s a joke that they are the national broadcaster and everyone who watches TV has to pay them.
Im waiting for the penny to drop that if the bias is so obvious on this issue then how can viewers trust them on any issue? I’ll wait for the debate but I won’t hold my breath.

Exactly so.

Im waiting for the penny to drop that if the bias is so obvious on this issue then how can viewers trust them on any issue?

I feel just the same about the Green Party. When an organisation has a USP but adopts a policy that directly conflicts with it, how can we trust them?

Green Party - trust the science on climate change; ignore the science when it comes to biological sex

BBC - we are impartial and just report the facts - you can trust us to report all sides of a story - but not that one, obviously!

I know the BBC has higher than average numbers of staff with a trans identity. I'd be very interested to know if they also have higher than average numbers of staff who are closely related to children, teenagers or young adults with a trans identity. As Helen Joyce has pointed out very articulately, such people can't admit they've made a mistake because that would mean admitting they've been complicit in irreversible harm to their loved ones.

It';s a great article. Janice has been a legend in writing about all this.

Janice is far too nice.

Couldn't agree more.
Being super polite and ever so proper while men masquerading as women have been housed in rape crisis centres, women's prisons and using women's toilets for years was never going to have any impact against an aggressive men's rights movement.