I was finally invited on Woman’s Hour
It wasn’t, let us say, an entirely positive experience.
As readers may know, I was interviewed on Woman’s Hour last week. It’s been a long-running gripe of opponents of trans ideology that the only BBC show that’s supposed to centre women and women’s concerns has for years instead centred trans-identifying men. It has, for example, done fawning interviews of Paris Lees (“What It Feels Like For A Girl”) and Grace Lavery (“Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis”), both of whom got six-figure advances for their offensively titled flops. But it didn’t interview me or Kathleen Stock about our books, both of which sold dozens of times better and are about and by, well, y’know, actual women.
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Last week’s interview was part of a series about the For Women Scotland Supreme Court judgment. It was obvious beforehand that the whole series was going to be pretty biased. Every interview was set up with the same script about “the practical dilemmas this ruling creates for organisations, businesses and individuals” – a second-order concern compared with the consequences for equality and anti-discrimination law, which is what the Equality Act is actually about – and which you would think would be of relevance to women.
This is classic BBC bias: pretend to cover an unwelcome development by focusing on some minor, technical aspect, thus enabling the interviewer to give the impression that they are a dogged truth-seeker and to cast the interviewee as not across the details, while avoiding any discussion of the central point.
Secondly, those of us from gender-critical organisations (me and Kate Barker of LGBA) weren’t trailed on social media, as is usual for guests on Woman’s Hour, and aren’t named in the show notes, which mentions only our organisations. That means someone using our names to search to see if we’ve been interviewed on Woman’s Hour won’t find us. When a colleagues asked whether my name could be added, she was told that for this series organisational names were being used – which was handy.
Not least for Robin Moira White, who was the first interviewee and not from any organisation. Also nothing to do with the case – he really didn’t merit being on the show, still less as the opening interviewee. The interviewer, Nuala McGovern, did a good job in places of giving him rope with which to hang himself – it was quite something to hear a barrister say live on air that he had no intention of obeying the law and staying out of women-only spaces.
But she wasn’t well enough prepared to deal with his ridiculous claim that the judgment would definitely be overturned by the European Court of Human Rights. She didn’t press him on either how such a case could be brought – you can’t just tip up in Strasbourg and demand a hearing – or on what grounds, when he offered nothing more than an unconvincing nod to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, namely the right to privacy. (Imagine being so blind to women, and so muddled up on what privacy law means, that you seriously think men’s right to privacy about the fact of their sex. which is almost always completely obvious anyway, overrules women’s urgent and vital right to privacy over their naked bodies in women-only spaces!)
Nuala also didn’t really know what to say about claims from Victoria McCloud, a former judge and trans-identifying man whose application to intervene was rejected (it almost certainly means that it contained no actual legal argument, which is all the Supreme Court considers). She also didn’t know what to say about Robin’s insistence that the intervention by Amnesty in support of the Scottish Government was ignored by the court. In fact, Amnesty’s arguments were directly addressed in the judgment, only to be demolished
d to be on after Robin, since it gave me the chance rebut a fair bit of the nonsense he talked (and also to make clear that there is a reason he – a man who is well over six foot tall and, let us say, solidly built – is never challenged in women’s toilets). The weakest bit of my interview was my only semi-successful handling of Nuala’s attempt towards the end to go down a rabbit-hole concerning precisely what age little boys should be stopped from going into female-only toilets and changing-rooms with their mothers.
This is the same misdirection technique Nuala used with Kemi Badenoch before the most recent general election. Kemi was invited on to talk about the Conservatives’ manifesto pledge to clarify “sex” to mean “biological sex” in the Equality Act – which the Supreme Court has now made unnecessary by ruling that the biological meaning was the correct one all along. In that interview Nuala started by asking whether we would have to carry our birth certificates for entry to toilets, and Kemi allowed herself to get side-tracked into a frustrating and pointless back-and-forth that enabled Nuala to deflect from the actual issue.
It’s such a classic clip that I’ve used it before now in media training on how to handle hostile interviews. The only way to deal with it is to call it out. Kemi should have said: “Nuala, you’ve skipped right past what the right rule is to discuss how it can be enforced. That’s like ignoring the question of whether we should have speed limits at all because on a country road at 4am some people will be able to break the speed limit with impunity. Let’s get back to the actual issue, which is whether women should ever, anywhere, have the right to male-free spaces, and only after agreeing that obviously they should will we move on to considering how to make that right enforceable.”
So what should I have said? Something like: “Nuala, you seem to think that I’m the government’s Toilets Czar, here to tell you how every single-sex space in the country runs. How on Earth should I know whether a swimming pool should let mums bring their sons in until age 5, or age 8? What I can tell you is this: Robin even raising this is proof positive that he knows perfectly well he’s male, otherwise why would he even be talking about how keeping him out might result in keeping little boys out? And he’s an adult man, so he knows perfectly well he shouldn’t be in there.
“Worse than that, Robin is trying to weaponise women’s vulnerabilities against us. It’s women who most often have to look after children, so it’s women who won’t be able to go anywhere if they can’t be sure they’ll be able to change their baby son’s nappy or go for a quick wee without leaving a two-year-old boy outside the door. Robin is saying: mothers of boys, you’re not going to be able to leave the house unless you accept that any man who, like me, thinks he has the right to come into every space that’s just for women has licence to do so. It’s attempted blackmail, and it’s despicable.”
Since my interview the Equality and Human Rights Commission has brought out a draft of its updated Code of Practice for Services, which is now out for consultation. It contains an example on precisely this point. I like to think Robin inspired it – see, he can be useful!
13.4.3 A council swimming pool has separate men’s and women’s changing rooms. One of the aims of having separate-sex changing rooms is to safeguard women’s ability to access the facilities and use them safely. A woman is allowed to take her male child under the age of ten into the women’s changing room. This does not undermine the aim, because it is unlikely that young boys pose a threat to women’s safety. It also contributes towards achieving the aim, because fewer women would be able to use the swimming pool if they could not bring their children with them.
Overall, though, I thought I did fine. So I was mightily hacked off when I listened to Friday’s interview with Sacha Deshmukh of Amnesty, formerly of Stonewall. The interviewer, Anita Rani, twice misrepresented what I had said on Wednesday, thereby setting up Sacha to say that I had made false claims. She did this by asking questions that elided my explanation of the Supreme Court judgment – which related solely to the Equality Act – and my general proposition that trans women are men. And twice Sacha obliged by replying that I had misrepresented the judgment by saying that it applied to laws more widely, and to society at large.
At one point Sacha says:
“That really very clearly, that that’s not an accurate representation of what the judgment said. The Supreme Court made a judgment on the definition of the words ‘women’, and indeed, then, by implication, ‘men’ in the Equality Act in a very specific piece of legislation. But the Supreme Court itself, in its judgment, made very, very clear that it was not saying that what was being litigated was the meaning of gender in wider society.”
A little further on, he says:
“The judgment stated that in relation to that word in the Equality Act, but the Supreme Court was very, very clear to say that it wasn't litigating on the broader question of gender identity in society. So I think that for someone to say that the judgment and what it said about that specific word in the Act has that implication more broadly, may be their point of view of what they would like, but actually inaccurate representation of the judgment.”
I’ll spare you the ins and outs of my frustrating correspondence with BBC producers on the show over the following days. First they claimed to be unable to see what the problem was. Then they said they would “clarify” that when I said trans women were men, I had been talking about just the Equality Act. I explained several times that I didn’t want a clarification of what I had said – what I had said was perfectly clear – what I wanted was a correction of what Anita and Sacha had said, and preferably an apology.
Reader, I got neither. Instead I got a “clarification” that ran alongside an interview on Wednesday with Baroness Kishwer Falkner, chair of the EHRC. I would honestly prefer they said nothing, because it gives the strong impression that I think trans women are women in all contexts except the Equality Act. And I’m absolutely certain that’s deliberate.
I shouldn’t be surprised: Anita long ago tipped her hand as a transactivist. She should never have been permitted to interview Sacha, because it was obvious she would give him an easy ride for ideological reasons.
On May 28th 2021 she tweeted a response to widespread criticism of Woman’s Hour for inviting Paris Lees to come on the show to talk about his book. As I said in the complaint I’ve just sent to the BBC, if you can’t see how offensive its title is, imagine a book by Rachel Dolezal called “What It Feels Like For A Black Person” – and then the howls of outrage if a show dedicated to issues that affect black people had invited Dolezal on to tell them what it’s like to be black.
Here’s what Anita tweeted – as I write, it’s still on Twitter/X, but I include a screen capture in case she deletes:
I’m disgusted by the levels of transphobia on here. @BBCWomansHour is a space to discuss everything including LGBTQ+ issues. Listening to people’s stories helps us understand something and hopefully empathise. Ditch the hate 🌈
— anita rani (@itsanitarani) May 28, 2021
I don’t expect anything from my formal complaint, except more deliberate point-missing and obfuscation. Nonetheless, I felt I had to make it. Guests on BBC shows deserve better than to have demonstrably biased presenters twist what they say to give a later interviewee with opposing viewpoints the opportunity to misrepresent them without challenge.
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