Mick Hartley

At The Critic, Jo Bartosch on the BBC and its reporting priorities:

BBC audiences might be surprised to learn that the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is committed to upholding the ban on puberty blockers. That is because on the same day as the puberty blocker story broke, our national broadcaster instead ran an interview with Venus Wailer, a trans activist who performs drag in a provincial city.

Bizarrely, this is the second BBC puff piece on the same Bristol-based performer in the past few months alone. The article, which twangs on the heart strings with much the same effect as a Hallmark greeting card, describes Wailer as “developing a drag act to help mentor transgender youngsters.”

The 32-year-old man, who identifies as a woman, reflects: “It gives me hope for the future because [the children] get it and I just want to lead the way for them.” No alternative viewpoint was offered about the existence of “transgender youngsters”, nor of the dangers of affirming a child in a cross-sex or nonbinary delusion. Tellingly, Wailer himself recalls that at his school in Venezuela, “there were kids in my school who were very flamboyant and getting bullied,” presumably these proto gay boys will today simply opt out of manhood by identifying as girls.

Granted, it takes skill to lip sync and dispense sarcasm while wearing skyscraper heels. But expert analysis of paediatric policy isn’t part of the drag package. So why did the BBC not opt to probe a little more deeply with an article on Streeting’s policy announcement? Why, instead of covering a major and controversial policy pledge did editors distract readers by digitally dangling a man in sparkly clothes in front of their eyes?

To many, drag queens are a sneering parade of gay male misogyny; of what feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys referred to as men who perform “woman face” in the same way as white people once “blacked up” for popular entertainment. Yet because Stonewall died for our sins (or something to that effect) drag has now been recast by the BBC as progressive, as fun for all the family.

And by now it seems clear that someone senior at the BBC has a thing for drag queens, or at the very least shares in bouffant wigs. It goes without saying that some of those paid from the licence fee will have children who identify as trans, making impartial coverage tough.

And some of those in high places in the Beeb have family connections with a company with a lucrative trans connection, as Graham Linehan showed a couple of weeks back. It's all part of the pattern of gender-friendly news they're only too happy to dish out to us poor licence-fee payers.