Mick Hartley

Joan Smith at UnHerd on that BBC’s 100 Women list with only 99 women:

You’ve probably never heard of Brigitte Baptiste, but the BBC certainly has. As the corporation proved last year, no list of women is complete these days without at least one man, and Baptiste ticks all the right boxes. The self-styled “queer ecologist” is on the corporation’s list of “100 inspiring women”, appearing beside Nadia Murad and Gisèle Pelicot. Both women are survivors of the worst examples of male violence, but the BBC evidently has no qualms about placing them on a par with a trans-identified male.

No single-sex spaces here: two of the world’s bravest rape survivors have to rub shoulders with a man who denies the most fundamental tenets of biology. First, and most obviously, Baptiste believes that human beings can change sex. Now 61, he was called Luis Guillermo until the age of 35, when he “transitioned” and took the first name Brigitte after Brigitte Bardot. Choosing the name of the Sixties icon speaks volumes, and it should come as no surprise that Baptiste has turned himself into a hyper-sexualised caricature of a woman….

His views on “green capitalism” — that the free market has a role to play in sustainable development — are contested. But his views on “queer biodiversity” get a free pass in an atmosphere where “queering” anything and everything, from Roman emperors to beetles, is met with uncritical applause. “There’s nothing more queer than nature,” he has said.

This brand of gobbledegook was evidently music to the ears of the people at the BBC tasked with identifying the year’s most inspirational women. It doesn’t seems to have occurred to them that it’s an insult to survivors of sexual violence to nominate them alongside someone so committed to gender ideology that he once claimed scientists had discovered a “transsexual” palm tree.

When Nadia Murad was abducted by Islamic State in Iraq, she couldn’t “identify” as a man and escape being repeatedly raped. In France, Gisèle Pelicot’s vile husband invited men to rape his drugged wife, not someone who had decided to identify as a woman. Biological sex is central to the experiences of these heroic women, as it is to every woman who has been raped or sexually assaulted. Theories about an innate “gender identity” ignore such inconvenient facts, brushing them aside in favour of impractically idealistic notions about someone’s “inner feelings”.

You would think that the BBC, currently embroiled in yet another scandal about alleged bad behaviour by a male presenter, would understand the importance of sex by now. But its annual list of “99 inspiring women and a bloke” suggests otherwise.

Having regularly included a man in their annual 100 women list, it seems to have settled into a BBC tradition. If they didn't, people might start asking questions….has the Beeb gone transphobic now?