The PR tactic of 'lived experience'
The BBC's focus on human stories was only offered to 'trans' people
By Cath Leng
If you follow Seen In Journalism, and are engaged with women’s rights, it’s highly likely that the trajectory of your life was changed in June* 2013 when three people met for afternoon tea at the Langham Hilton in central London.
Three people were there: Steve Herrmann, who was in charge of BBC Online and therefore the BBC News Style Guide, and two trans activists - Leng Montgomery and Paris Lees.
I’ve written before about how the BBC became captured but the two things have brought it back into focus. The first is the Good Law Project’s latest anti-women caper, a suit against the EHRC, on the basis that ‘no trans voices’ were heard by the Supreme Court when it was taking evidence about what sex means in the Equality Act. The second is a piece by BBC East, which platformed a number of trans-identified males saying their lives are a living hell since the Supreme Court judgement that sex means sex in law as well as reality.
Steve Hermann’s meeting was not quite the beginning for the BBC, but it sealed the deal. The problems began in 2010 when an unnamed BBC executive, under Mark Thompson’s Director Generalship, agreed to pay gender identity activists £20,000 to set up a media lobby group - to which they could then pay more money, to lobby them right back. This is all quite well known now.
The friendly afternoon tea in summer 2013 was part of that lobbying. The subbed version: Montgomery and Lees told Hermann that the BBC should use trans people’s ‘preferred pronouns’. In November 2013, self-identification was installed in the BBC Style Guide. There was no fanfare, but it changed everything.
The scientifically unsubstantiated, counter-factual - indeed demonstrably false - theory of gender identity was built into the BBC’s framing of all its ‘sex and gender’ stories. It led to where we are today.
People concerned with women’s rights were losing a fight they didn’t even know had started.
There was a simultaneously a parallel shift at the BBC, around how news stories are told. In the mid-20-teens, news managers began encouraging reporters and online writers to tell more ‘human’ stories, or tell stories in a more ‘human’ way. This was ‘lived experience’ journalism - perfect for gender identity advocates, who are obsessed with their own ‘personal journeys’, and for whom it is their primary PR tool.
There’s no cogent argument for supplanting sex as a discrimination metric with ‘gender identity’. Therefore lived experience takes on enormous importance. The only tools which identity advocates have in their arsenal are descriptions of how sad they are if you don’t comply, enforced by the threat of social ostracism and shame.
It has an astonishing value for activists: it doesn’t need to be internally balanced. It can rely on being balanced ‘over time and platforms’ - which means for example that Keira Bell’s story could do the heavy lifting for half a dozen trans personal journeys, and more. Recently, one piece on DSDs in sport was offered up as ‘balance’ for eight or nine affirmative trans ‘personal journeys’. The work of Hannah Barnes and Deb Cohen on Newsnight was cited in plenty of interactions as balance for multiple features affirming child and teen transition.
‘Lived experience’, could therefore be described as a type of unchallengeable emotional agitprop, or even emotional blackmail. The BBC happily stepped in line and churned out dozens of transgender personal journeys - Online, on live and continuous news, on bulletins, on current affairs, on radio news and radio factual programming.
Was it an accident? No. The BBC knew what it was doing. Here’s Charlotte Moore, then BBC Head of Content, in 2019:
‘It’s by telling the story in emotional terms that the reality truly hits home’
Here’s the kicker - the BBC never applied that principle to women, detransitioners, desisters or gay people.
I’d love to be able to link to stories headlined:
‘I was terrified when a man in a dress came into the shower’
‘I had to share a cell with a male inmate’
‘He stole my underwear and tried to steal my identity’
‘I will mourn the loss of my breasts forever’
‘I had to give up swimming because they allowed a man in the changing room’
‘I was beaten by a boy in a race and given detention for complaining’
‘She told me she was a gay guy and it wasn’t until we met that I realised’
‘The school lied to us about our child’
‘We didn’t know how to tell our other children’
‘The children can’t cope with their father asking them to call him Mum’
‘I was horrified when he said he wanted to breastfeed’
‘Our meeting was attacked and we had to hide in the toilets’
- I could go on, and on, and on. The single piece on the ‘cotton ceiling’ was fought over for months and led to at least one reported threat by a senior editor to resign if it was published. They were never commissioned, these lived experiences of people based on reality, rather than a wholly unsubstantiated theory that sex is determined by the brain. Instead, a constant diet of trans-identified ‘lived experience’ emotional ooze was pumped into our public consciousness by the national broadcaster every day, for years.
It affected policy-making. While policy-makers, legislators and local officials were being propagandised heavily in private meetings, they were receiving the same message from a news outlet they trusted mightily. They were told that gender identity is real, pronoun compliance is merely courteous, puberty blockers are a reversible pause, men are women, women are men, not transitioning a child is harmful, and that trans people are the most oppressed, marginalised and vulnerable on earth.
None of these things is true. But policy was built on them. We in the media helped to do that. We helped to build the world which forced three women in Scotland to give up seven years of their lives to fight for their sex-based rights. It’s forced women to spend thousands of pounds on legal cases. It’s cost jobs. It’s cost family estrangement. It’s cost friendships. It’s cost hours and hours of unpaid work, auditing, monitoring, emailing, consulting, drawing up reports, fighting disciplinaries, time with children, time with ailing parents, time with spouses, stress, sleep, ill-health.
Just because journalists weren’t themselves picking up the surgical knife or jump-scaring women in the toilets doesn’t mean they bear no responsibility. They - or we - do, and of the media, the BBC bears the greatest burden. Which brings us to the latest ‘lived experience’ tragedy - the ‘living hell’ items out of BBC East - and the GLP.
In short, trans voices were not only represented to the court, they swamped public discourse in the years before, and the result was profound disbenefit to several key groups. In addition since the Supreme Court judgement the voices most often heard have been those of trans-identified men, and their most heard complaint is that they won’t be able to use the women’s toilets any more.
They have not suffered, in the last three weeks, anything like the pain women have suffered in the last decade plus. We have not heard any presenters ask: ‘What’s it been like for the past 15 years when men were given access to all women’s spaces?’ ‘Did you feel you were never going to win?’ ‘Are you worried now that this judgement won’t be implemented in full?’ ‘You must be exhausted by having to fight this - how do you keep going?’ ‘What’s been the cost of this fight to you personally?’
We didn’t get asked these questions when we were being put upon, and we aren’t being asked them now. It was trans lived experiences then, and it’s trans lived experiences now.
We can be kind and say that when this began, it’s likely that the motives of BBC executives were well-intentioned. There were probably internal activists even then, but the decision to jump into a position of extreme activism feet first probably came from a combination of ignorance attached to common or garden misogyny - that is, it didn’t occur to them that women might need a voice.
However now, unless the BBC changes course it will be thoroughly morally compromised. We know more. There is no plausible deniability. They have been told. They know what harms have been caused, and if they don’t, they shouldn’t be involved in any editorial decision-making on the issue.
The I Kissed A Boy debacle is an example of how some lessons still haven’t been learned. An example of profound homophobia, marketed as entertainment and defended as inclusion. Commissioners need to catch up fast.
No more trans ‘lived experiences’. We’ve had enough for several lifetimes. Start telling women’s stories. Start giving us the post-surgery testimonies. Start with the people who’ve lost careers, and the medics who left their jobs in protest. Start listening to devastated parents. Start being honest.
And if you’re asked for balance, point to a decade of unquestioning, fawning, personal journeys, and tell them: ‘You’ve had your lot, and look what it did.’
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An earlier version of this had the month of August for Steve Herrmann’s meeting, not June. In fact August was the meeting between All About Trans and the BBC’s Colin Tregear, from the Complaints Unit. In the Spring of 2013 they’d met BBC Drama Commissioners and in the Autumn they met editorial executives and producers in a group meeting, where they split off into pairs with transgender volunteers to discuss ‘acceptable terminology’ and pronouns.
After their afternoon tea, All About Trans wrote - ‘We expect the relationship to develop!’
How right they were.
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We’re linking to another piece here which you must read.
It’s by Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) on how women’s trauma seems to make their testimony less credible to the public eye.
‘Women should always be able to say no’ in The Critic
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Links to some of the screenshotted articles
I write poetry about my trans experiences
That TIMs have been driving the narrative for years isn't a revelation, but stating it so clearly has a power of its own. Thank you.
Thank for this, excellent, and really needed saying