Madness of Auntie’s obsession with gender
TakE a deep breath. The BBC is encouraging all its staff to be be more sensitive to transgender and nonbinary colleagues in emails, and include the pronouns they’d like to be called by in their email signatures.
If I were to email, say, Jeremy Vine, I would stipulate at the end of it that I’d like to be referred to as ‘ she or her’. Jeremy would reply he was comfortable being called ‘he or him’ — or I imagine he would.
Should either Jeremy/ he or amanda/she be transitioning or nonbinary, however, each of us should indicate so in the email, the BBC suggests — saying, perhaps, we’d prefer to be called ‘they’ or ‘them’.
What utter navel-gazing, virtuesignalling madness. We have a BBC facing an existential crisis, threatened by the rise of Netflix, amazon, Disney and other channels.
a BBC bleating about underfunding, so short of cash it has caused outrage by scrapping free TV licences for more than three million over-75s, many of them poor.
and what appears to be its preoccupation? Not programme quality and cost efficiency — but diversity. In fact, auntie has just announced it is to spend £100 million on increasing diversity. Of course that’s a noble aim. Of course transgender and nonbinary people deserve our respect and acknowledgement. But is it right to ‘kick over-75s in the teeth’ — age Uk’s words — over the licence fee, while lavishing a fortune on ‘underrepresented groups’? Or to ‘encourage’ all 22,000 BBC employees to declare their preferred pronoun, when just 400 or so of them identify as transgender?
The BBC argues it is just a gesture, not a requirement for staff to sign emails in this way.
But we live in a world tyranised by minorities. a world in which if you don’t bend the knee to BLM you’re decried as a racist; in which, if you question whether someone born female can ever truly be a man, you are labelled transphobic; in which if you don’t declare your pronoun, you could equally be called transphobic.
Most of us don’t give a damn if someone is trans, gay, straight or undecided. But to try to pressure people into declaring their gender identity is a deeply invasive charter for those nursing grievances to take offence.