HOW TO ESCALATE YOUR BBC COMPLAINT

Don't let them away with it

As you know, I take the gender debate very seriously. I really will do anything to make it a part of mainstream discourse because the stakes could not be higher. We’re talking about the mental and physical health of an entire generation of young people. Their fate is the substance of a long-overdue national conversation and I believe the only reason we have not had it so far is because of the little value that is placed on women’s rights.

If the BBC were fit for purpose, this would be the crucial ongoing discussion of our time, perhaps only superseded as an issue by climate change.

Currently, in the UK, it has not reached that stage, for a number of reasons. For a start, ‘NO DEBATE’ still looms uncomfortably large in every TV executive’s head. They don’t quite know why it’s in there, but it’s in there.

Secondly, no one wants to talk about it because anyone who tries has their life or reputation destroyed—and of course that often amounts to the same thing. I’m talking about Jess De Wahls, Maya Forstater, Stella O’ Malley, Meghan Murphy, Lisa Keogh, Marion Millar, Raquel Rosario Sánchez and the countless women, gay men and trans people banned from Twitter for the crime of standing up for themselves, for the crime of saying no to the meaningless LGBTQ+ alphabet soup. A soup that now includes straight people, straight people who suddenly feel empowered and entitled enough to mock the lived experience of gay and trans people and claim it as their own.

The abuse and harassment women and their allies receive is scaled up according to their station. Trans activists targeted the relatively unknown UK children’s author Rachel Rooney, who wrote a beautiful book called ‘My Body Is Me’, with the same deranged aggression with which they pursued JK Rowling. Trans ‘allies’ throughout the media continue to coordinate to blacken Rowling’s name. Only yesterday, the Metro newspaper published a story that framed a TV casting decision as somehow being Rowling’s fault.

Remember Pink News doing 42 stories on Rowling in a single week? If they haven’t already destroyed her life, you can’t deny they gave it their best shot.

I actually have a TV program on the BBC at the moment called ‘Motherland’. It is now in the hands of an all-female writing team and I could not be more proud to have helped create it.

However, I cannot fully support the BBC when it broadcasts a documentary that features pure propaganda from Helen Webberley, currently on a 55 day hearing as to her fitness to practice. I cannot support a BBC that threatens women with the police for objecting to the destruction of their sports. I cannot support a BBC that presents a straight couple to toddlers and calls them lesbians.

This is an ideological coup. The BBC are grooming the nation. So keep complaining, and when they fob you off, escalate.

• To escalate a complaint with the BBC you need to add something at each stage.

• Therefore, make sure you add a new element e.g. “The BBC is taking an editorial position as soon as it describes Hubbard with female pronouns, or describes Hubbard as a woman.”

• If and when they fob you off a second time, add something - anything - else that is new. For example, the use of “cis”. Or the presentation of ‘the science’, or the lack of links to the studies, or the failure to question the statistics, or the decision not to make the Martina documentary available. The Hubbard article was 3,000 words long, and most of it was fawning, ideological bullshit. So there’s plenty of scope here.

• By repeating the process, it will eventually reach the Executive Complaints Unit and stand a chance of being properly assessed. 

• So, keep pushing them - and focus on one thing at a time. Highlight one bias or inaccuracy at a time, and keep the pressure on them.

SUPPORTING MATERIAL

• The spectacle of Laurel Hubbard is an insult to women (Spiked - Bartosch)

• The shame of BBC Sport (The Critic - Jessel & Nutmeg)

Rob Jessel sent me these points along with a second draft of his complaint I published yesterday, which follows.

This is not good enough. The advantages of male puberty isn't a matter of conjecture; of "on the one hand this, on the other hand that". It's settled. Male puberty confers enormous physical advantage - everything from skeleton to bone density, to upper body strength, to fast-twitch muscle fibres...the list is practically endless.

You don't give equal weight to climate change sceptics or anti-vaxxers, do you? And yet for this 3,000-word article you just had talking heads with an agenda, and no links or analysis of the studies. You took everything they said at face value. Would you do that with Alex Jones and his disgusting claims about Sandy Hook? Of course not. The BBC's role is to question, discriminate, and present the facts objectively - not passively give equal weight to both sides.

Remarkably, the BBC itself broadcast Martina Navratilova's documentary examining this issue in depth and detail. For some unaccountable reason, this programme remains unavailable on iPlayer, depriving the public of empirical, scientific knowledge about this issue at a time when they most need it. Inform? Educate? Shame on you.

And why is the BBC using such absurd language such as "lived as a man"? What does it mean to "live as a man"? That he wore trousers and had short hair? Or that he has a penis and a Y chromosome? Because the first is reducing someone to harmful gender stereotypes (bad! not woke!)...and the second is immutable.

Here's the thing: you are torn between knowing this is nonsense, and sensing that the BBC - being nice and cuddly - has to support a minority cause. Newsflash: supporting anti-science positions will make you look stupid in the long (and not-so-long) term.

Last thing: That small sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when you get to work every day? That's the knowledge that trust in our national public broadcaster is slowly but steadily slipping away. As you pursue "niceness" and abandon reality, your audience are abandoning you too.