The BBC erases homosexuality at the stroke of a pen Update
by Gareth Roberts, UnHerd:
Updated guidelines on gender and sex deny the reality of biological sex.
There is a curious entry in the BBC News in-house style guide, updated last November but picked up this week by Steerpike. Our beloved national broadcaster has managed to do what Margaret Thatcher never attempted, or even dreamed of— to erase homosexuality at the stroke of a pen.
Under the heading ‘gender/sex’ — which is telling even before you go any further — the BBC tells its staff that ‘Homosexual means people of either sex who are attracted to people of their own gender’. This is a bizarre, meaningless sentence. It begins by acknowledging the basic reality of biological sex and ends by denying it. You could replace ‘gender’ at the end of that sentence with raspberry, hippopotamus or jabberwocky and it would make the same amount of sense.
An unfortunate linguistic quirk of English is that sex and gender are often used interchangeably — think how often we hear about the ‘gender pay gap’. This is presumably to avoid confusion between the meaning of sex as biological classifier and as an abbreviation for sexual intercourse; the ‘sex pay gap’ conjures up a quite different mental image.
This makes it easier to swap the two words on the quiet, even though they refer to distinct things. But homosexuality describes people attracted to people of their own sex. The word is not ‘homogenderal’.
The elision of sex and gender in this new BBC-approved definition is however quite deliberate, and echoes uncannily the recent words of the now-egregious charity Stonewall on the subject. In this, it openly contradicts section 12 of the 2010 Equality Act which explicitly defines the protected characteristic of sexual orientation as ‘towards persons of the same, opposite, or either’ sex. The magic word gender doesn’t appear there at all.
Please right-click links to open in a new window.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
