BBC stokes upset by allowing men to join female-only course

The BBC has come under fire for allowing men who identify as women to apply for a female-only camera course.

‘BBC: Female Self-Shooters’, which is run by the National Film and Television School — and supported by the BBC — is designed to increase the number of women at television producer level who can operate cameras.

Although the course description warns there will be “high demand” for the ten available places, it allows both women and “those identifying as female” to apply.

‘Divisive’

Speaking to The Mail on Sunday, a BBC source asked if it would be “really too much to ask that the course could just be for women?

“If a gender balance is needed then the resources should be just for women, not those saying they are women. These things are divisive and of course there is upset”.

A BBC spokeswoman stated: “This is a National Film and Television School course supported by the BBC to increase the diversity of under-represented groups in the industry that has been running for several years”.

‘Erasing women’

Last year, a senior insider accused the BBC of ignoring biological sex in its treatment of women.

The Corporation’s 50:50 equality project, which is designed to ensure that at least half of programme guests are women, changed its methodology to instruct content-makers to monitor the “gender identity” of their contributors and not the “sex registered at birth”.

The source told The Daily Telegraph: “The BBC has now ‘disappeared’ women as a sex class and instead monitors ‘gender identity’.”

“In this 50:50 monitoring, the BBC is still following ‘Stonewall law’ in failing to respect sex as a protected characteristic.”