BBC Radio Ulster covered the cancellation of the Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland’s panel planned for the Belfast arts festival, Féile an Phobail, several times in the fortnight running up to the event. But that coverage was far from balanced.
The cancellation was first reported on the BBC NI website on 21st July. The next day The Nolan Show, the station’s big morning show, hosted Nora Calder of WRN NI, opposed by a local councillor called Fiona Ferguson from People Before Profit, a small political party.
Speaking to stand-in presenter Chris Buckler, Calder did a good job of explaining what the panel was about and why cancelling it was wrong, but Buckler allowed Ferguson to say several defamatory and false things about members of the Sex Matters team and about gender-critical groups in general, without any challenge. Ferguson also repeated discredited, scaremongering claims about suicide among young people who identify as transgender.
Later that day Talkback had Ruth Paterson of WRN NI against a local solicitor called Sarah Creighton who claimed that “transgender people had lost a lot of rights” and implied that WRN had targeted Féile in order to engineer a legal case, and that gender-critical campaigners “do not want trans people to exist or to have rights”. She named Sex Matters and said: “I cannot debate with people who think that my family members do not have the right to exist.” The presenter did not challenge her hyperbole and she repeated it, calling us “people that have no respect”.
Nolan returned to the issue on 24th July, moderating a discussion about the legal issues in Féile’s cancellation, with Maya Forstater and Robin Moira White.
On 27th July the Belfast Telegraph ran an opinion column by Allison Morris which referred to “anti-trans” groups and said “enthusiastically parroting and trying to import Trumpian-style moral panic is as far removed from feminism as you can possibly get”. Morris slurred WRN NI as “aligned with right-wing, misogynist political agitators”, and falsely claimed they were “heavily funded”.
On 28th July, Talkback gave Helen Joyce the opportunity to respond to Allison Morris. In a startling pre-emptive attack, Morris declared that Joyce had a “nasty attitude”, interrupted her constantly and made many false claims.
She said: “You couldn’t get a sheet of paper between them [gender-critical feminists and their supporters] and the far right”, that our supporters were “the same people that were cheering on attacks on migrants” and that we believe “all trans women are deviants and sex offenders”. We do not, of course, just as we do not believe all men are. We merely point out that since no-one can reliably distinguish between the good and the bad until after the fact, all men must stay out of women’s single-sex spaces. She said our beliefs were “toxic”.
Following complaints to the BBC about Ferguson’s unchallenged falsehoods on Nolan on 22nd July, Fiona McAnena was given the opportunity to speak to the same presenter, Chris Buckler, one to one for The Nolan Show on 4th August. This was just before the WRN NI panel went ahead at a new venue, as reported on BBC NI television news that evening.
Buckler put it to McAnena that she really had said the things Ferguson had attributed to her, and showed no interest when she explained that the context was a violent protest against women’s rights in which women were physically attacked and injured. Instead, he challenged her on why campaigners like her couldn’t use a better tone. He asked for her thoughts on an interview he’d conducted with a trans-identifying young man, Tristan Morrow, and demanded to know why she did not use female pronouns for him.
What does this coverage show?
Neither The Nolan Show nor Talkback shied away from the issue, to their credit. They platformed a wide range of guests, including two from WRN NI and all three directors of Sex Matters. The freedom-of-speech aspect of the story was aired and debated pretty well.
But in all that coverage, the fundamental issue – women’s rights and the need to speak about how they are under threat – was not explored with any openness or curiosity from the journalists.
Gender-critical campaigners were dealt personal slurs about our attitude. We were accused of guilt by association. The audience was told we were “far-right”. Claims were made that were simply false: that we wanted genital inspections at the doors to public toilets, that we did not believe trans people existed, that we want them to have no rights. Most of our airtime was spent denying these lies and defending our work and our right to speak plainly. In almost every interview, a woman had to point out that we were trying to talk about women, but the interviewer kept talking about trans people.
As some on social media observed, Chris Buckler interviewing Fiona McAnena appeared to equate “hurty words from women with physical violence from men”. The expectation that women advocating for our rights must show verbal restraint seemed baked in. The extensive challenge on McAnena’s use of male pronouns for a gay man was not matched by any challenge to the young man himself. He was handled with kid gloves, and was not asked why he believes he is a woman now, or what that means. As a vulnerable young man, perhaps Morrow should not have been put in that position at all.
The result was a fortnight of coverage in which the default assumption was that the campaigning women are intolerant of trans people, who themselves are harmless and vulnerable. The standard set for us was not truth and impartiality but a demand for concessions on our use of language and a focus on the needs of trans-identifying people.
The idea of “respectful debate” — meaning that trans-identifying men must be accorded female pronouns — was ever-present. The implication is that women who use accurate language have lost the right to be heard.
This shows how far we still have to go to reset the norm on something that many of us thought was settled years ago: that women and girls need male-free spaces and services, and that it is perfectly acceptable to say so.
What did listeners make of it?
Both Nolan and Talkback take calls from listeners. The producers select who gets on air, but in Northern Ireland there is always a majority in favour of sex-based reality. Among politicians, the issue has a sectarian bias along the same left-right axis as in other Western democracies, but with the addition of the local tribal politics of Republican (left/Catholic/green) versus Unionist (right/Protestant/orange). This is largely absent among callers to the shows.
People in Northern Ireland are the same as everyone else on this issue. They know there are only two sexes and they know about male violence. A poll by the Belfast Telegraph showed strong support for the Supreme Court judgment in the For Women Scotland case, supporting the point Helen Joyce made to Allison Morris that most people across the political spectrum hold sex-realist views.
What next in Northern Ireland?
The Equality Commission of Northern Ireland (ECNI) has applied to the NI high court to determine how it should interpret Northern Ireland’s equality laws in light of the decision in For Women Scotland. Both WRN and Good Law Project (GLP) have filed cases against the ECNI. WRN is challenging ECNI’s failure to issue guidance, while GLP is challenging an interim statement made by ECNI and later withdrawn. Hearings on all three cases are scheduled for September and November. The September hearing relates to procedural matters. The November hearing will determine whether leave should be given to proceed. If given approval to proceed, a court hearing to determine whether the definition of sex in Northern Ireland's sex-discrimination law is the same as in the rest of the UK should be scheduled for some time in 2027. Sex Matters has been granted leave to intervene in the ECNI case.
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The sexism is breathtaking : women - be polite and use the correct tone when complaining about the people taking your rights away!! Thank you for all you do in shining a light on this nonsense.
Well done to the sex realists who appeared on these radio segments with partisan hosts and hyperbolic pro trans supporters. The policing of tone of only the sex realist side was obvious, hopefully even some neutral listeners noticed it