What a conversation about gender diversity could look like
Dr Helen Webberley on Triggernometry: the trans debate, with Konstantin Kisin, Triggernometry
The only way to have a serious conversation about gender diversity is to put two opposing sides in a room and let them argue it out. That's what balance looks like, and anything else is just advocacy.
What I was pointing to in that moment is the conversation we are not having. Not a debate between people who disagree about whether trans people should exist, but a real exchange: a gender specialist, a trans person, a family, talking about what their lives actually look like. That is not a lesser kind of television. It is a more honest one. The format we keep reaching for presents one worldview as the challenger and another as the thing being challenged, and calls that balance. It is not balance. It is a frame, and the frame has consequences for real people. I do think we will get to something better. I have to believe that, because the alternative is that we keep mistaking noise for rigour, and the beauty of human diversity keeps getting left out of its own story.
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