Why should parents have to explain ‘gender identity' to five-year-olds?
A very peculiar row has erupted over a BBC programme for small children. Apparently, some parents believe that Hey Duggee – a popular cartoon series about cute little animals – has been subtly promoting gender ideology to its audience of five-year-olds. They base this suspicion on the fact that, in one episode, a raccoon is referred to using gender-neutral pronouns. Other animal characters are given the pronouns 'his' or 'her'. Yet the raccoon, mysteriously, is given the pronoun 'their'. This, the parents infer, suggests that the raccoon identifies as 'non-binary'.
For its part, the BBC has dismissed these claims. 'Wren the raccoon,' insists a spokesman, 'is not a non-binary character.'
Hmm. All I can say is: I should hope not. Introducing a 'non-binary' character would be totally inappropriate for a programme with such young viewers. And it wouldn't be much fun for those viewers' parents, either. After all, little children are by nature extremely inquisitive. So it could lead to some terribly awkward conversations at home.
Just imagine…
'Daddy, what's 'non-binary'?'
'Well. Er. Let's see. How shall I put this… Basically, darling, 'non-binary' is a type of gender identity.'
'What's 'gender identity'?'
'Good question. Very, very good question. Er… Think of it like a special sort of game, played by grown-ups, and which has extremely strict rules. What happens is, a man says he's now a lady – and then everyone else has to agree, or they get in lots of trouble and lose their jobs. Especially ladies. Men can sometimes get away with saying they think the man who's now a lady is still a man. But if ladies say they don't want the man who's now a lady to take his, or rather her, clothes off in the ladies' changing room, everybody gets very cross and shouts at them.'
'I see. But what's 'non-binary'?'
'Well. 'Non-binary' is someone who says, 'I'm not a man or a lady.' Or, in this case, 'I'm not a man raccoon or a lady raccoon.' So, instead of calling the raccoon 'he' or 'she', you have to call it 'they', as if it – or rather, they – were several raccoons, instead of just one. And if you don't call it – or rather, them – 'they', you'll get in lots of trouble, too.'
Wouldn't be easy, would it? Especially if your five-year-old goes on to repeat your explanation to other children at school. Because the teachers might deem your phrasing to be insufficiently inclusive. In which case, both you and your five-year-old will probably be spending the rest of the year in detention.
On the whole, therefore, I doubt I'm alone in hoping that the BBC will not be filling its children's cartoons with characters who are non-binary, or, for that matter, genderqueer, pangender, demigender or gender-fluid. Adults who describe themselves using such terminology would no doubt be delighted if the BBC were to 'affirm' them in this fashion. But why should parents have to explain 'gender-identity' to five-year-olds? Some of us find it difficult enough to understand ourselves.
Anyway, it's funny how things turn out. Back in the late 1990s, when Teletubbies – another BBC hit – was first shown, some parents thought that it set a bad example to little children, because the characters in it all talked total gibberish.
Those parents didn't know they were born.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
BBC Studios Producer Reveals Why ‘Ghosts' Is 'Indebted' To ‘Friends'
Ghosts might be one of the most popular comedies of modern times, but it owes a large debt to the biggest sitcom of them all, Friends. That was the assertion of Charles Harrison, BBC Studios International Scripted Formats Producer, at Seriencamp today during a session about the international expansion of Ghosts. The series, originally from Monumental Television for the BBC in the UK, follows a young couple inherit a huge castle, only to find one of them can communicate with the various apparitions from history who already live there. More from Deadline Euro Networks Talk Streamer Levies & "Talk Of The Town" Scripted Co-Productions - Seriencamp Screenwriter Discusses Rush To Bring Prime Video's The Elevator Boys Movie to Life - Seriencamp Indie Boss & 'How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)' Co-Creator Philipp Käßbohrer To Receive The Deadline German TV Disruptor Award At Seriencamp 'What the castle is about is something very deep in the English psyche,' he said. 'For the last 20 years in the UK all of our television has been about aspiring to own a home, to own a home in the country, or to do up a home, so the idea of winning a castle is the dream for English people. In this case, it means you're never alone – and you end up with a flat-share comedy. The greatest flat-share comedy is Friends and this show is indebted to Friends.' BBC Studios has been rolling the British comedy series out around the world, with CBS running its strong-rating version to four seasons, with two more to come. There have also been versions in Germany, where TV industry confab Seriencamp is being held this week, and France. Upcoming shows are being readied in Australia and Greece, and several others are understood to be in development. Few comedies have multiple international remakes, and Harrison outlined his theory on why Ghosts has been a format success. 'They key to it is a very simple idea,' he said. 'It's a flat share at the most basic level – a classic premise for a sitcom. Nobody really changes, nobody really learns anything and at the start of every episode the characters pretty much exactly the same.' Friends isn't the only classic sitcom that has helped Ghosts on its path, however. When French commercial broadcaster TF1 ordered Ghosts: Fantômes en Héritage, its writers took a page out of The Office's book. They noted they would follow the scripts of Ghosts' first season before branching off into their own direction, just like Greg Daniels did at NBC with Ricky Gervais' seminal British comedy The Office. Harrison complemented the German version of Ghosts, which is for public broadcaster WDR and streaming service ARD Mediathek, for following the initial recipe and then making new scripting choices. 'When you pick up a format, there is so much good stuff in it that you'd be crazy to get rid of,' he said. 'The structure of the first two episodes leads you in incredibly well, as it's incredibly clear – but there is no need to do it. You won't have the big, bad BBC staring over your shoulder, and we all work very hard to be able to say, 'It's great, but you don't have to do it.' 'I always look on it as a treat the moment where the writers, producers and broadcasters we're working with make the leap and do something different. I cheer when it happens.' Harrison also revealed that a Korean version of Ghosts had been developed. However, he said 'the idea of a young couple trying to find a home together wasn't actually reflective of young Koreans' experience. What they wanted was three sisters as the central characters – one who could see the ghosts, one who never could and one is in the middle, so there are different perspectives.' He added that the Korean 'understanding of spirituality' was 'completely different to the Western view,' which had made the adaptation process 'fascinating.' The Korean version, whose production team was not named, did not get picked up to series. Best of Deadline 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More Everything We Know About 'Nobody Wants This' Season 2 So Far List Of Hollywood & Media Layoffs From Paramount To Warner Bros Discovery To CNN & More
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Yahoo
Marcel Ophuls, maker of The Sorrow and the Pity, which examined French collaboration with the Nazis
Marcel Ophuls, who has died aged 97, was a German-born documentary-maker who fled his homeland in the 1930s and spent much of his career interrogating the various legacies of the Second World War; his international breakthrough, the landmark The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la Pitié, 1969), revealed the extent to which his adopted France had collaborated with the Nazis. The son of the German-Jewish director Max Ophuls – known for such elaborate melodramas as La Ronde (1950) – Marcel began his career in film drama but achieved greater traction with complex, rigorous, meticulously edited non-fiction work. In documentaries such as The Memory of Justice (1976) and Hôtel Terminus (1988), the filmmaker set multiple testimonies side by side, sometimes corroborating, often contradicting, always inviting the spectator to shake any passivity and judge for themselves. In The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls spent four and a half hours of screen time – and many more hours of shooting – staking out the city of Clermont-Ferrand 'to analyse four years of collective destiny'. Patiently hearing from residents of all walks of life, the film picked insistently away at the Gaullist myth of a country united against an occupier, instead revealing two Frances at odds with one another – one resisting, the other collaborating. In France, Sorrow was denounced by conservative politicians as 'a prosecutorial film' and initially rejected for both theatrical and television distribution. After much legal wrangling, it finally opened in 1971, earning an Oscar nomination the following year, but it did not air on French television until 1981; a station director said the film had 'destroyed myths the French people still needed'. Ophuls subsequently made films on Vietnam (The Harvest of My Lai, 1970) and the Irish Troubles (A Sense of Loss, 1972), though the latter was rejected by the BBC. His personal favourite, The Memory of Justice, revisited the Nuremberg trials in the context of more recent conflicts in Algeria and Vietnam, though the project was again beset by lengthy and expensive legal challenges; Ophuls filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter and spent a decade on the lecture circuit. He made a triumphant return, however, with the Oscar-winning Hôtel Terminus, on the life of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. As free-roaming as its subject, unearthing material both disturbing and absurd, the film ends in one of documentary cinema's most extraordinary sequences, as Ophuls witnesses a chance encounter between a woman who as a child had seen her father carted away by the Gestapo and an elderly neighbour who had turned a blind eye to the same events. Though Hôtel Terminus sparked violent arguments at Cannes, the critic Roger Ebert admired its tenacity, calling it 'the film of a man who continues the conversation after others would like to move on to more polite subjects'. Yet as a characteristically combative Ophuls countered in 2004: 'I'm not obsessed. I just happen to think that the Holocaust was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century. Think I'm wrong?' He was born Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt on November 1 1927, the son of Max Oppenheimer and his actress wife Hildegard Wall. The family fled Germany for France in 1933, taking French citizenship in 1938, whereupon Max dropped the umlaut from his stage name, Ophüls; after the occupation they fled anew to Los Angeles, where Max began an unhappy spell as a studio filmmaker and Marcel attended Hollywood High and Occidental College. Marcel Ophuls completed military service in Japan before studying at UC Berkeley, taking US citizenship in 1950. Upon graduation he moved to Paris, briefly studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, before dropping out and working as an assistant director (initially under the pseudonym Marcel Wall, to dodge nepotism accusations) on John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father's sweeping Lola Montès (1955). He made his directorial debut with a German television adaptation of John Mortimer's The Dock Brief (Das Pflichtmandat, 1958), before being tapped by François Truffaut to contribute to the portmanteau film Love at Twenty (L'amour à vingt ans, 1962). By now he was part of the New Wave set: Jeanne Moreau funded his detective comedy Banana Skin (Peau de Banane, 1963), but his fiction career came to a halt after the flop thriller Place Your Bets, Ladies (Faites vos jeux, mesdames, 1965). Ophuls moved into documentary, taking a job with the French broadcaster ORTF, where he railed against the prevailing state censorship; he was eventually fired in May 1968 after making a film deemed sympathetic to the student rioters, though by then he was well into post-production on The Sorrow and the Pity. After Hôtel Terminus, Ophuls suffered mixed fortunes. November Days (1990), on the subject of German reunification, played as part of the BBC's Inside Story strand, but The Troubles We've Seen (Veillées d'armes, 1994), on wartime journalism and the Bosnian conflict, failed to reach an audience, despite a César nomination in France. He worked more sparingly in the new millennium, completing Max par Marcel (2009), on his father's legacy, and the career overview Ain't Misbehavin' (Un voyageur, 2013), his final completed film; a later project on anti-Semitism and the Middle East, Des vérités désagréables (Unpleasant Truths), ran into financial and legal troubles and remained unfinished at the time of his death. During a visit to Israel in 2007, Ophuls attempted to define his life's work: 'I'm not a preacher, a judge or an adviser. I'm just a filmmaker trying now and then to make sense of crises... Life made me, unwillingly, an expert on 20th-century crises. I would've preferred to direct musicals.' He is survived by his wife Regine, née Ackermann, and three daughters. Marcel Ophuls, born November 1 1927, died May 24 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Yahoo
Sam Gardiner's family 'overwhelmed' by support
The family of Race Across The World contestant Sam Gardiner have said they are "overwhelmed" by the love and support they have received following his death. Mr Gardiner, 24, who took part in the BBC show alongside his mother Jo, died in hospital following a crash on the A34 near Manchester on 26 May. His family set up a fundraiser in his memory for the National Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) charity which has raised more than £10,000. Ms Gardiner said her son had been diagnosed with the condition, which can develop when someone has been exposed to alcohol in the womb, and added: "If some good comes of this tragedy, it will be that FASD is better understood". "We have been overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of messages of love and support on social media and in comments to press reporting," she said. "We would like to thank the BBC, Studio Lambert and everyone at Race Across The World production, fellow contestants and fans of the show for all their support at this terrible time. "It has been very comforting to know that Sam touched so many people." Ms Gardiner said she had been "particularly moved by all the messages that Sam was an inspiration to many who have been impacted by FASD". "We adopted Sam and he was diagnosed with FASD. As viewers of season two will recall, this was a big challenge both for Sam and for us as his parents," she said. But she added that the National FASD charity "helped us on that journey". The landscape gardener died when his car left the road and rolled before landing on its side on the A34 in Gatley, Cheadle, Greater Manchester Police said. He was the only person in the white Volkswagen Golf R estate and was taken to hospital, where he died from his injuries on 29 May. Mr Gardiner and his mother travelled across Mexico and Argentina in the BBC show, broadcast in March 2020. His father Andrew said: "When the news broke last week, friends asked how they could help. "After some thought, I decided to set up a JustGiving page to raise money for National FASD in memory of Sam. "The page is called Sam Gardiner; Super Human." He said it was "very humbling to see the Race Around The World family rally to this worthy cause". A message on its official Instagram account said: "Sam lived his life full of love, exuberance and adventure as seen on BBC's Race Across the World. "National FASD is both humbled and honoured to help carry on his legacy via donations coming from hundreds." Listen to the best of BBC Radio Manchester on Sounds and follow BBC Manchester on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas via Whatsapp to 0808 100 2230. Former Race Across the World contestant dies in crash National FASD
