Mick Hartley

Janice Turner in the Times has the last word on the BBC and its "100 women" list:

Every year the BBC trolls women by sticking a token biological male in its “100 women” list. It just can’t help itself. Somewhere in the BBC charter must be a clause that women can’t have anything. Certainly not Woman’s Hour, on which Bethany Hutchinson, a Darlington NHS nurse campaigning for female-only showers, was recently grilled by Nuala McGovern like a war criminal. Nor a best woman footballer award, given to Barbra Banda, banned from the Africa Cup of Nations for having male levels of testosterone and who refuses to take a sex test.

But the BBC 100 women 2024 list is a doozy. Among Gisèle Pelicot, a Nobel laureate and brave campaigners against violent suppression in Iran and Afghanistan is a 61-year-old who lived most of their life as a man, fathered two children, took the name Brigitte Baptiste (after the sex symbol Brigitte Bardot) and dresses as a grotesque parody of womanhood, slathered in make-up and wearing low-cut microscopic dresses. But then a “scientist” whose claim to fame is “looking at nature through a queer lens” and deciding Colombia’s national tree has a gender identity would never be fêted if they were a woman.

Meanwhile Baroness Cass, whose report on child gender medicine has changed global policy, was omitted. The BBC putting Baptiste on its list is like Al Jolson winning a Mobo award.