Thread by @leng_cath

Now the dust has settled, what’s the fallout for sex and gender reporting?

It’s not good. It will still depend on the efforts of brave individuals at the BBC, because there’s no corporate impulse back to impartiality and fact-based coverage / bbc.co.uk/news/entertain…

Some of you will remember Ben Hunte, the LGBT Corr who was appointed as and who saw himself as an advocate Ben Hunte named first LGBT correspondent for BBC News This was after Stonewall activism at the BBC demanded the creation of two postsbbc.co.uk/news/entertain…

The other one was Global Gender and Identity Correspondent, filled by Megha Mohan, who hasn’t done any work on the slow worldwide realisation that an enormous medical gender scandal is brewing. Ever, I don’t think a single article.bbc.co.uk/news/world-535…

Ben’s advocacy was a little too ripe for BBC audiences and he got himself a new job at Vice after a stint in West Africa. Now was the perfect opportunity to recalibrate our coverage. Either by deleting the role altogether, which would handed coverage to Health, Education /

/and Politics, or by appointing less (not hard!) of an advocate.

Eventually they settled on Lauren Moss, former Health Corr, so ideally placed to do good work, and gave her a producer, Josh Parry he/him.

Now Josh deleted his Twitter history on appointment/application so /

Unfortunately I can’t show you the exchanges where Josh made it clear he was a gender believer, trans women are women, and so on. They’re old and we all delete stuff, so.

The LGBT Correspondent and Producer jobs sit in the Identity Hub which is tremendously important. This is /

..what shows us the BBC always intended this story to be covered through the lens of authenticity rather than hard, fact-based investigation.

The existence of these jobs also serves as an excuse for Health and Education to avoid sex and gender stories.

All the good/

/stuff, the best stuff, was done outside the unit: Hannah Barnes and Newsnight, Nolan and Stonewall, Caroline Lowbridge.

The BBC can’t claim credit for any of these tbh. They were fine in spite of rather than because of.

It’s not that Lauren isn’t /

impartial or a good journalist. Imo she’s just a bit trapped.

Bear in mind at any time the senior editors involved could give the nod for her and Josh to do some really serious work here. It always goes back to higher up the editorial hierarchy. Most importantly /

/they could give them their absolute backing in standing up to the transactivists who phone and email them direct to complain about every little effort to inject realism and balance.

So, to come up to date and the recent changes. This was another perfect opportunity to /

/recalibrate.

You have to realise - they deleted the posts of Home Editor and four Home Affairs Correspondents and kept the posts of LGBT and Identity Correspondent and LGBT+ Producer and Gender and Identity Global Corr.

Look at the priorities. Look at what this says./

/It’s not like Deborah Turness (CEO BBC News) and Richard Burgess (Director of News Content) didn’t delve into the Identity Hub when working on the cuts. Community Affairs jobs have gone, and what’s left in Identity is LGBT *and Education* - clearly seen as a natural pairing 😳/

This is entirely deliberate, because they are obsessed with youth-focussed content, and they think ‘gender’ is youth focussed, rather than the obsession of middle-aged men projected on to children and vulnerable people.

Just want to remind at this point that DT’s first email/

/to all BBC staff (I was still there at this point) was a mini mission statement, naturally, in which she set out various priorities, and the first heading was not any of our rusty old principles like accuracy, or impartiality, but ‘BRAND’.

DT is a principled person but this/

/was revealing. Accuracy and impartiality were sub-heads under ‘BRAND’.

Obviously - they’d say - we want to produce stuff that young people want to read/watch/hear. Problem is that the people deciding that are mainly middle-aged white men.

There’s a Next Generation panel /

/

that the Exec Committee consults.

Problem with that is they’re all young BBC ppl at the start of their careers with a gender-affirming employer and gender affirmation written into all its policies and guidelines - and presumably they want to keep /bbc.com/aboutthebbc/wh…

/their jobs. Maybe they are genuinely all gender believers - which wouldn’t be surprising as there’s a competitive selection process within the gender affirmative employer run by the massively gender affirmative D&I bloc within its gender affirmative HR.

Anyway these are /

/the people consulted when the BBC wants to know how to youth-focus their content. It makes me think of this, every time.

So/

/this is what’s happened. An opportunity was lost here to adjust the BBC’s response to pretty seismic global changes in gender affirmation and medical transition.

More than lost - deliberately not taken.

That’s despite really heavy lifting within the BBC by some /

/truly wonderful people that I adore and respect.

What’s next? All isn’t lost, don’t despair ❤️❤️

I do believe the Identity Unit will start to produce more and more good journalism on this. It’s completely up to them now and they have the ability to rise to the challenge /

/Newsnight being slashed feels like a punishment for the meticulous work of Hannah Barnes and Deb Cohen.

But there’s no one left to do this now. The BBC can no longer waft its hands in the direction of Hannah’s work and deploy it as balance for mountains of gender guff/

The LGBT team are going to have to be both good cop and bad cop themselves.
They’re definitely up to it.

We can help them by talking to them, contacting them with story ideas and comments, establishing proper journalistic and PR connections.

BBC Health is NEVER going to do/

/it - they couldn’t even be bothered to cover the Tavi story.

BUT the realisation is dawning in more and more corners of the BBC that actually transactivists are bossy, stroppy, childish, annoying, painful to deal with and often wrong.

Don’t give up on the BBC yet 😘