"Should These People Exist?" Live on the BBC at Ten
The surreal, exhausting, frustrating battle of pretending "both sidesing" is a form of legitimate debate
When you think of the terms “impartiality”, “balance” and “both sides” in the context of the media, what comes to mind?
I think for most people it’s likely to be something innocuous, wholesome even - the BBC, a round table of sorts, four panelists who are politely disagreeing with each other, perhaps cups of slowly cooling coffee between them.
The word “impartiality” feels like it implies that there are grown ups in the room, making sure that things are neutral while balance sounds like “fairness” and “both sides” implies that democracy is doing exactly what it’s meant to be doing.
That would be the branding of it anyway.
In practice, though, all these terms, especially “both sides” have started turning into something far messier and uglier - a commitment, at almost any cost, to giving the pretence that opinions have all been created equal, even when what is being opined upon isn’t something like a policy choice, but whole human beings and their existence.
One of the standout bits for me about that internal memo at the BBC has been about the broadcasters coverage of the “trans issue.” The Telegraph has had multiple small but intense meltdowns about the idea that “both sides” of the “trans debate” weren’t sufficiently platformed, and was positively crowing with delight this morning when Richard Burgess, the broadcaster’s director of news content, admitted that they had made mistakes in its coverage of the issue, and going forward, that “they must cover the gender debate impartially and consider the views of both sides.”
This whole conversation is just a bit absurd - it’s as though there’s some sort of fixed and knowable number of sides to whether trans people should be allowed to exist and live peacefully in society, and the BBC had accidentally under-ordered them, and is terribly, terribly contrite about this.
The implicit question in this situation that I can’t help but keep poking at though is, what exactly do people think is balanced? What, exactly, is the counterweight to a trans person saying “this is who I am, and I’d quite like to not be legislated out of existence, please.”
What is the other side to that? Is it “I find your existence distressing and uncomfortable and would dearly like the law and the state to agree with me.”
But most importantly, why in the world does the latter sentiment deserve equal billing as the former?
“Both sides”, in the context of this conversation, doesn’t look particularly noble when you start stripping away the nice words - it looks like you’re putting someone in a chair in the middle of a studio in Television Centre in White City and asking the country to phone in to opine on their existence.
For many readers, there will be some alarm bells ringing that sound faintly familiar, and there’s a good reason for that - because what we’re seeing now in the media about trans people is a rehash of the conversations about gay people. You can pretty much trace a straight line from how the gay community was spoken about in the 80s and 90s to how we’re talking about trans people at the moment.
Section 28 wasn’t talked about as homophobic in any way, it was talked about as “protecting children.”
Civil partnerships were discussed as the delicate compromise with which to keep “both sides” comfortable.
Every single step that we as a gay community took towards the current unstable state of equality we now know had to be filtered through hours and hours of cloyingly earnest chatter about whether we were going too far, too fast, too publicly, too… existing.
And I wish this was ancient history, but the fact is that I have a bottle of red wine in my house that’s older than gay marriage in the United Kingdom - and even here, you can see just how fragile things can be when your rights are treated as something that is permanently debatable.
Look over the Atlantic at the recent resurrection of the Obergefell-Hodges case that was brought before the court by the four-times-married-four-times-divorced Kim Davis. The Supreme Court made the decision that ultimately, no, it would not hear the case.
That’s a win for us, right? On paper, it certainly is. That door is slammed closed again, the case refused and there is no fresh precedent that gets conveniently handed to homophobes and no sweeping judgement tearing up marriage licences for LGBTQ+ people in the US. Same-sex couples the country over woke up the next day, still very much married. Yay us!
Except, look at what happened for us to reach that “victory.”
Someone still decided to bring the case, lawyers still drafted arguments against same-sex marriage, activists still used their networks to raise funds, media outlets still ran stories and commentators still dusted off those tired old talking points about “religious liberty” and “conscience.” Same-sex couples in the United States (and abroad) still had that “oh, for fuck’s sake, not again” feeling.
The court said no. This time - and the point I’m making is that the question made it to the door at all.
This is one of the things that this fixation on “both sides” achieves over time - it keeps that war going and teaches people that no issue is ever truly settled, that the door to some people’s rights must always be left on the latch, just in case someone wants to reargue your humanity for no good reason.
Understanding just how absurd this position is doesn’t need a massively elaborate thought experiment - you just need to apply it to me. Not me as an abstract man with a MacBook writing away overly verbose commentary - me as a gay man married to another gay man, paying bills, taxes, unloading the dishwasher, worrying about my parents, watching Below Deck: Mediterranean on a Wednesday night.
Imagine to yourself that my existence becomes a topic on which the BBC must remain “impartial” - that it must, at all times, be “balanced” and show “both sides.”
You’ll get something like the below horror.
“Good morning,” the BBC presenter says in that gently authoritative voice that is designed to grab your attention. “You’re listening to the Today programme, and in this segment, we’re asking, should a man like our guest today be allowed to live openly as a gay man? In the studio with me today is our guest, Bear, and opposite him is Priscilla Thatch from the group Families for Traditional Values, which has expressed their concerns on social media about what it calls ‘the normalisation of same-sex relationships’.”
The camera pans - or the imaginary radio camera, I don’t know, I’ve never been on radio - to me. I’m in an ordinary jumper (blue), I have slightly tired eyes and the look of a man who has done this just a bit too many times.
“Morning,” I say.
“To, summarise my position - I do, in fact, exist, I am gay, I am married to my husband and nothing, to my knowledge has exploded hinged on these facts. I pay my taxes, I go to work, I cook dinner most nights of the week and I worry about the future. I would quite like to have, and keep, the same rights and basic respect as everyone else, and I would please like to not be repeatedly summoned to justify that.”
“Thank you, Bear,” says the host before turning to the other guest. “Priscilla, what exactly are your concerns?”
Priscilla leans forward in what I can only describe is earnest alarm. “Well,” she starts, “what we are seeing in todays world is the rapid normalisation of something that many ordinary people, mums, dads, people everywhere, find deeply, deeply unsettling. Marriage has for centuries been understood as between one man and one woman. That forms the foundation of everything in our society, and now, very suddenly, we’re being told that we must accept same-sex marriage as being equal. There are so many studies which suggest that this could have real long-term consequences for children and the moral fabric of our communities - and that’s without even mentioning the risk to children of being raised by two dads or two mums, which is terribly confusing to them.”
“Just to clarify,” I respond to Priscilla, “I have read the research, and there are decades of studies that have given very strong evidence that children raised by same-sex couple parents do just as well as anyone else, and in some cases even better. All the major medical and psychological bodies across the world agree on this front - the only consistent harm factor is the stigma around homosexual families. Your stigma.”
“Be that as it may,” Priscilla persists, “I get emails on a daily basis from concerned parents saying they just don’t want their kids learning about gay people or gay relationships at school, because they’re worried it will confuse them. Do their feelings not also deserve respect?”
“Feelings are deserving of empathy,” I respond, “but they don’t deserve a veto. Someone else’s discomfort doesn’t trump my existence, and your preference for a world in which you don’t have to explain gay people to your kids doesn’t outweigh my right to have a husband and visit him in hospital.”
The host cuts in.
“Bear, there are listeners who say this is all moving too quickly - they grew up in a time when they never saw openly gay couples. You must understand their anxiety too?”
“Of course I understand it,” I say - “I grew up in a time when seeing openly gay couples in open life and in the media didn’t happen because they were pushed into hiding. Of course it’s disorienting for people when the world changes, but, there’s a difference between acknowledging that discomfort and elevating it into a political programme. The former is human and understandable, the latter is how you ended up with Section 28, with people like me treated as a contamination risk instead of a neighbour.”
The producer, off screen, has clearly decided that none of this is spicy enough, so a caller is patched in.
“Hiya,” she says. “Now, I’m just a normal mum of two, and I just have to say, I don’t hate gay people, I really, really don’t. But I just don’t want it shoved in my face all the time, you know? Why do we have to have a whole month of Pride? The parades, the kissing, all the talking about husbands - can’t it just be private? Live your life, really, it’s fine, but expecting us to celebrate it just doesn’t feel right, you know?”
The host looks at me and gestures for me to respond.
“I got married,” I say. “We had a reception, some friends gave us toasters, plates and kettles. That’s what you’re calling flaunting. I mention my husband in conversation I presume in the same way that you mention your husband. I hold his hand in the same way you hold your husband’s when you walk down the street - maybe, I don’t know what your relationship is like. The only difference is that you’ve never been told that who you’re married to is a threat to the moral fabric of society, whatever that means.”
“Still”, the caller says, “I just think it makes people uncomfortable.”
The host politely thanks the caller as though she has delivered some sort of profound moral insight instead of “I don’t like seeing things that remind me that other people different than me exist.”
Priscilla’s smile tightens. “We at Families for Traditional Values are not saying in any way that Bear should be banned from having a relationship altogether,” she says. “We’re simply suggesting that there be reasonable safeguards - perhaps we move to civil partnerships instead of marriage so we can protect the special status of heterosexual unions? Maybe something like a conscience clause so registrars and business owners who truly believe that marriage is between one man and one woman aren’t forced to act against their belief. All we’re looking for is a reasonable compromise.”
The host, shuffling their notes and turns back to me, “Bear, lots of people listening will think that Priscilla’s solutions sound like a fair compromise between your rights and what people are feeling. Any final thoughts?”
“Yes,” I say. My existence isn’t a hobby, my marriage isn’t a special interest. Any compromise where you retain supremacy and I accept formal inferiority isn’t actually a compromise - it’s just you winning more slowly, and asking me to sit here politely while you frame my life as a reasonable topic for negotiation isn’t impartial, it’s dehumanising.”
“And on that note,” the host chirps cheerfully, “we’ll have to leave it there. Thank you both for bringing both sides to this robust and thought provoking debate about whether men like Bear should be allowed the same status as his heterosexual counterparts in society. Coming up next - are there more left handed people now than there were before, and should they be accommodated for being not right handed - we’ll be pitting a left-handed woman from Surrey against a right handed man from York.”
Obviously the above exchange is completely ridiculous.
Except, it’s not - because that’s the structure that we’ve already normalised when we discuss trans people, and in slightly different ways, still around homosexual people.
There are shows where one person has to sit there and offer up the evidence that supports their right to exist or access the same things that other people do, while another person sits there offering unease and discomfort that’s generally backed by theology, nostalgia and a Facebook poll, while in between them sits a presenter behaving as though both sides are offering symmetrical positions and not, in fact, a person and their would be eraser.
And that asymmetry is built in from the first sentence - on the one side there’s lived reality, “I’m here, this is my life, here are the harms I face and the protections that I need, please.”
On the other side, there’s conjecture and feelings, “I read a dodgy article and I don’t like the direction of travel and this person is going too far.”
And instead of recognising the incoherence of pitting these two sides against each other, the difference is flattened under the banner of “both sides.”
What this achieves in the end is that the public starts to believe that some people’s rights are perpetually provisional - that your marriage, gender or ability to use a toilet safely might at any time reasonably be revisited after the weather. It creates an environment where you never get to stand on solid ground - that you’re always one electoral cycle, one court case, one scandal away from yet again having to argue for your own legitimacy.
And not every issue is treated this way - nobody insists that every report on domestic violence includes someone in a suit saying “well, to be fair, some people’s partners are annoying.” We don’t discuss interest rate rises with a “both sides” lens attached to it, and we don’t have conversations about vaccines or climate change pitting experts against Twitter hacks… oh, wait a second.
The point is that we have slowly learned, in some areas, that there is such a thing as platforming harm, and that not amplifying certain viewpoints is responsibility, not censorship.
Except it’s somehow considered suspect to apply the same kind of logic to certain identities. Saying that, “No, we’re obviously not going to invite someone onto a major platform to say that trans people are predators or that gay people are inherently immoral, because that’s just not a legitimate contribution to public debate” is being framed by numerous people as a breach of impartiality.
The mere possibility that the “debate” phase should end at some point - that we should move on from “are you real?” to “How do we make sure you’re safe?” - is treated as somehow being biased.
All of this, makes me just a bit… tired. How it feels like the conversations around existence of some humans just don’t stop - they just change shape, get repackaged for a new format and thrown at our door to respond to, like we’re doomed to orbit the same damned moral cul-de-sac forever more.
In the past, it was gay people like me, on issues that new feel resolved, but could change at the drop of a hat. At the moment its trans people in the spotlight, and I can’t help but feel that there are resurrection of arguments against my existence waiting in the wings.
Most of us aren’t asking for grand declarations of enlightenment - all we’re asking is to be able to live without the dread that someone, somewhere is warming up their studio mic to wonder aloud whether or not our existence has “gone too far” again.
It’s a disconcerting thing to realise that your right to exist in this world is occupied in the same mental category for some people as a controversial planning application or a particularly difficult bit of fisheries legislation.
In the end, I don’t need the media to fight my battles, nor do I need grand statements of solidarity, rainbow logos or endless thinkpieces to reassure me that I am, in fact, a real boy - I just need the media to stop pretending that cruelty, discomfort and outright homophobia and transphobia are reasonable or respectable counterarguments.
And if I feel this tired of the situation as a gay man in the closing months of 2025, I can only imagine the exhaustion being forced on the trans people who I count as part of my community.
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There's a BBC charter renewal due in the next few years.
We could (if we got our act together) insist that that requires the removal of those toads inserted in the BBC management structure by Johnson (remember him?) to ensure permanent loyalty to some political grouping that's already self-destructed (were they called the tarrys?).
At the same time, we could also deal with the question of defining "balance" and "impartiality". It can't be beyond the wit of someone to write a subsection saying that not every issue is binary, so you don't have to find someone who thinks the world is flat every time you discuss the way satellites orbit the planet.
And of course we could also insist that they cease allowing the gutter press (in which I include the Times & the Telegraph) to set the news agenda. They have tiny sales these days. There's no reason to take them at all seriously.
And yes, the trans debate does seem to echo the debates around Section 28. I too thought we'd moved on from that, and in my experience, most people have. But the great & the good of the gutter press (Murdoch, Rothermere, Marshall of GB News) think they can take us back to the "good old days" when they could hack phones & gather salacious gossip about stupid people, and make massive profits.
I do hope they're wrong.
Thank you for putting this so much better than I could. As the parent of a gay child - and a gay child with cPTSD - I am fearful for her every day. I wear a smart watch not because give a flying f*ck about how many steps I've done but because I am terrified I will miss that call when she says she can't take it anymore and I can't persuade her that if she doesn't turn up for tomorrow then she will never know how much better tomorrow might have been. That's becoming a difficult argument though, to be fair. As a parent, should that really be my life. As a gay woman, should that be hers? Where will it stop? There are already morons in the States, a place that takes moronicness (is that a word) to whole new levels, intent on removing the vote from women, building their own Gilead and other such horrors. Why are the supposed 'normal' people so obsessed with what people have in their pants? It doesn't sound normal to me. And the idea that impartiality means one side having to justify their existence and the other calmly explaining why the have no right to exist gives me the dry heaves. Just stop! Please...