The BBC’s gender equality project has come unstuck

The BBC’s 50:50 project is designed to empower women. One of its targets is to ensure that half of the contributors are female. But while this aim might have been questionable from the outset – is this really something the BBC should be focusing on? – its mission has been undermined: the BBC has admitted it does ‘not monitor whether a contributor’s gender differs from their sex registers at birth’. 

In effect, trans women, who were born as male, will be counted as women. ‘The BBC has now ‘disappeared’ women as a sex class and instead monitors ‘gender identity’,’ fumed one senior BBC insider, one of many Corporation staff who have protested about the change.

With the ascendancy of the trans debate, there are vast numbers of Brits who worry about the plight of women today, and indeed the very existence of the category ‘women’ in the eyes of society. There are many men who sympathise not merely on rational and intellectual grounds; we also observe the unfolding vicissitudes of today’s gender and sex wars vicariously, through the eyes of our mothers, sisters, daughters and nieces.