Conditioning
The Times (the real one, the one in London) on Rachel McKinnon’s unilateral control of a BBC discussion:
Nicola Williams, from Fair Play For Women, was booked to appear on Stephen Nolan’s show to discuss comments by Martina Navratilova about transgender women in sport.
…
Dr Williams agreed to take part in a discussion on Sunday night but says that she was subsequently contacted by a producer to say that the invitation to appear in that specific segment had been withdrawn.
The change of heart came after Rachel McKinnon, a transgender world cycling champion and activist who had also been asked to participate in the programme, made clear that she would not take part in a debate with Dr Williams. In a series of tweets before the show was broadcast, Dr McKinnon compared Fair Play for Women to the Ku Klux Klan and accused it of leading a “smear campaign against me and other trans women athletes”.
We saw yesterday that the BBC has an explicit written rule against that: against allowing invited subjects to veto other invited subjects. What I wonder is why it had to be McKinnon; why not say “Ok then, bye,” and find someone else?
I suppose it’s because McKinnon is one vivid example of a large, muscular trans woman who insists on competing against much smaller women, and is also a dedicated Twitter bully. I suppose people with those particular qualifications aren’t all that abundant, so the Beeb decided it was worth it…but it is probably also because the Beeb, like so many outlets and people, has swallowed the lie that women in this situation are the oppressor class. The Beeb, like so many outlets and people, seems to be unable to grasp that there are competing rights here, and that women’s rights are not automatically less important than trans people’s rights.
This is one reason the name thing and the pronouns thing is pushed so hard, you know – it’s because they condition us. They condition all of us. They condition us to think of trans women as literal women and thus as traditional targets of bullying and subordination. They condition us to forget that trans women started out (at least) as boys and (mostly) matured into men, and thus have both the physique and the mindset of male people. They condition us to forget that trans women grew up being conditioned to understand that they have the option of domineering over women, even if they don’t always choose to exercise it. They condition us, therefore, to find it plausible to think gender critical women are domineering over Rachel McKinnon, and that therefore it’s ok for the BBC to let her veto an invited subject even though it’s against the BBC’s explicit rules.
Maybe the BBC saw it as a “Man bites dog” novelty/human interest sort of story, and without McKinnon, not really as interesting or worth airing. Just guessing. But still, another establishment rollover and capitulation to trans ideology, which, one would think, might be deemed “contentious.” Add that to the refusal to link viewers to abortion information in conjunction with a relevent and topical episode of “Call the Midwife” that you noted, and you get a bit more of a pattern, though, don’t you?
YNNB, are you suggesting there may be a pattern of discriminating against…women? How could that ever happen?
Some patterns don’t need a lot of pieces to become recognizeable as the pieces are quite large. Also, I might have missed a few thousand pieces that came before, not being a regular watcher or listener of Beeb news and information programming. But I see there are plenty of branch plants around the world cranking out puzzles of the same picture, and the pieces are often perfectly interchangeable yet produce the same picture that’s on all the boxes. Funny that, and by funny I mean typically awful.
And they normalize the belief system behind it all.
“Transgenderism” an incoherent concept? Talk therapy has never been scientifically studied as a treatment for the poorly-understood condition(s) called “gender dysphoria”? WPATH admitted they don’t know what “gender identity” is? The science supporting the current ideology is dreadful and the science that undermine it is being actively suppressed?
No worries. Trans women are women! You can tell because everybody says so. (And anyone who doesn’t is just a bigot who hates trans people.)
I’ve worked with a lot of BBC people (albeit a few years ago now) and there is a very definite supawoke culture there, even among the IT people and other staff who are not directly associated with content. This led to some farcical decision making at times. For example, one team leader’s entire team was made redundant and she basically had to do their jobs. This would have been fine – the team was a complete overload and really did need only one person. But it was a technical job and she was not in any way technical, but it was decided that they couldn’t fire her solely on the basis that she couldn’t do the job, because that would have been unfair. Although sacking the people who could do the job and had been for years was totally OK.
Everyone I worked with was so ultra cautious of offending anyone that everything took three times as long as it needed to. Fine by me, of course, I was charging by the hour.