Thread by @JournalismSEEN

The number of trans-identified men used as contributors on apparently random BBC stories has generated interest.

The BBC has its own contacts database but one resource it uses for stories/contributors is a company called NEON.
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neweconomyorganisers.org

NEON is the New Economy Organisers Network - consultants who ‘help social justice movements win’.

It routinely emails journalists, including lots of BBC journalists, offering story ideas and interviewees.

They also offer media training.

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Emails from NEON will open with ‘we have five guests available today to discuss (insert story here)’.

As an example, they offer ‘social justice’ activists like Cleo Madeleine, a trans-identified male from Gendered Intelligence, who’s had airtime on the BBC several times.
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There doesn’t need to be a story that’s already in the news - they offer ready to go items as well as ready to go guests, with a ‘full’ briefing for producers.

This can be very appealing for talk radio show formats and live and continuous news coverage who have hours to fill.

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The BBC doesn’t officially endorse NEON, but the resources and contacts offered up are certainly used by some BBC journalists.

Emails are frequent: they can be daily. It’s an intensive PR push for ‘social justice’ around issues that have become known as the Omnicause.

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NEON is fully gender identity affirmative and has programme targets for ‘womxn and non-binary people and people with LGBTQ identities’.

One of its training programmes ‘explores cognitive research on perception and persuasion, language and semantics’.

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Another of Neon’s offers is Mika Minio-Palluello, of the male ‘breastfeeding’ controversy. Others are Palestinian activists, climate activists, exactly the range you might expect from an ‘anti oppression’ consultancy.
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Freddie McDonnell is another favourite. One thing NEON also does is promote trans-identified guests for ‘non-trans’ stories.

With the dominance of trans-identified males in ‘gender PR’, the effect is to erase women’s voices not just on gender but on a range of other issues.
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This wouldn’t be a problem if it didn’t operate in synergy with the media’s adoption of self-identification.

But it does. On the BBC’s 50:50 database, those six men will be counted as women. Not only have six women’s voices been erased, the record of that erasure is deleted.
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The adoption of self-ID in coverage of courts and crime, healthcare, violence against women, education, is often roundly and appropriately deplored.

However it’s clear that self-ID in the media has an equally pernicious impact when it is apparently incidental to the story.

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Accuracy is never irrelevant. A media consultancy’s efforts to promote a damaging and unsubstantiated belief system - however anodyne the story - should be ignored or blocked.

NEON is not impartial on one of the most contentious political issues of the moment.
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We don’t know if the recent specific deployment of multiple male trans contributors on the BBC was a result of NEON PR. We do know that when random surprising guests are used - guests that make you think ‘where did THEY come from’ - it’s exactly the type of thing NEON does.
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The recent examples are a reminder that sex self-identification is never irrelevant, even on stories where it seems on the face of it to be incidental.

Each time it happens, a female voice and experience is erased.

Finally of course - it matters because it’s just *not true*.