Thread by @helenlewis

I found Lewis Goodall's Substack piece very interesting on the internal politics of the BBC, but I can't agree with this bit. Gender-critical voices *were* marginalised and suppressed for most of the 2010s. A personal story (1/n)

In 2018, I did a Woman’s Hour discussion about the toxicity of the debate, and the representative from Stonewall (a charity dependent on public money, including from the BBC) refused to be in the same room with me as a result of their “no debate” policy.

The BBC went along with that, recording us separately, because it was the only way to get Stonewall to play ball, and therefore to have a “balanced” item and get the issue on air.

So we all had to listen to Bex Stinson of Stonewall (a biological male) talk about being very comfortable in women's spaces, while also being unable to sit next to me and Jane Garvey in Broadcasting House because of safety concerns. What.

Still, that was the price of getting that week of discussions on air. Producers at WH had a real struggle to get it to happen at all (not least because Jenni Murray couldn't host any of the programs because she had said publicly she didn't think trans women were women).

Before then, activists had an effective veto on coverage — in 2014, Paris Lees and Fred McConnell entirely scuppered a Newsnight discussion at the last minute by pulling out when they learned that a gender-critical trans person, Miranda Yardley, would also be on the panel.

There was, after all, "No Debate" permissible on self-ID, which was a question of human rights. This was Miranda's experience:

newstatesman.com/world/2014/08/…

That can't really capture the tenor of the disagreement, which included lurid accusations that the BBC was guilty of genocide or maybe merely perpetrating violence. By hosting a discussion. Newsnight's editor at the time was open about what had happened:

https://x.com/iankatz1000/status/498962040623755264?s=20

The gender issue is unique, because a small cadre of activists effectively jammed the BBC's ability to report on it, by refusing to take part in "balanced" discussions (which then didn't happen at all). And for years the BBC really didn't get a handle on how to deal with that.

It was a huge institutional failure that for the early years of this debate (2014-2019ish), the BBC and the main political parties endorsed the idea that Britain should have a big legal change to equality law but also that no one should talk about it or question it.

Into that vacuum came the rightwing papers, anti-woke podcasts and TV channels. You can say they "exploited" the issue OR that they found something that people really cared about but were being told they couldn't talk about.

I do think things are better now. For example, Tim Davie pulled the BBC out of the ludicrous situation of being graded as an employer by Stonewall on how far it preached Stonewall's (wrong) interpretation of equality law. But they're not fixed by any means.

Ultimately, the BBC no longer has anything like a monopoly on attention, and it can't ignore stories and expect them to go away. It *can* do brilliant, non-ideological reporting (as with Stephen Nolan's Stonewall podcast or Hannah Barnes's work on the Tavistock).

Here is Lewis Goodall's piece, which as I said before, is interesting and told me things I didn't know before. But hopefully he can also consider experiences like mine, and those of other women in similar positions.

goodallandgoodluck.substack.com/p/the-truth-ab…