Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

 

It's a strange sensation, dipping into the Sunday papers online and finding The Mail on Sunday going heavily with the BBC Teach telling primary school-aged children that the there are 'over 100 genders'. 

Their political editor Glen Owen has a piece on it, as does columnist Sarah Vine (Michael Gove's missus). The first is headlined: 

BBC lockdown home-schooling programme tells 9-year-olds there are 'over 100 genders' and shows kids talking to adults about 'bi-gender', 'genderqueer' and 'pansexual' identities

and the second is headlined: 

BBC home-schooling programme that tells 9-year-olds there are 'over 100 genders' is a masterclass in indoctrination... on the licence fee

Now, you'll have probably guessed the 'strange' bit about this: The  'over 100 genders' BBC Teach video is old news, very widely reported two years ago. Most of you will probably remember it.

It's something we wrote about in September 2019 and The Times covered it too. And so did the MoS's sister paper the Daily Mail. 

So why is the Mail on Sunday bringing this up as if it's a brand new story now? 

I assumed that it was perhaps being broadcast again on BBC TV as part of the BBC's much-publicised lockdown school programming, but the article quotes the BBC saying it isn't and itself says it's only online. 

It's still just available on the BBC Teach website, online, unchanged, just as it was when we first wrote about it in 2019. 

So, the Mail on Sunday is just recycling an old story it seems - unless its journalists were completely unaware of it till now.

Still, it's a good story, and one that always makes its readers fume at the BBC's 'wokery'. I'm sure they'll be stirred up all over again when they wake up this morning - those that aren't rolling their eyes at being fed old news that is! 

Update: However 'old news' it is, it's driving a lot of anti-BBC comment on the #DefundtheBBC hashtag on Twitter. It's striking a chord again.

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Glen Owen is on a roll, incidentally. He's also got a piece about a new BBC Three documentary 'DIY Trans Teens' which he says (a) "reveals how children can buy sex-change drugs" and (b) "will  publicise the work of a doctor who has been struck off in UK" but "who now has an online firm overseas  that offers gender-change drugs to people" - drugs the effects of which "are unknown and may include long-term harm". He makes it sound irresponsible. Whether or not it is, only time will tell because the programme apparently isn't yet finished.