Why is CBeebies celebrating transvestite sex workers?

CBeebies, the BBC’s platform for pre-school children, has run a bizarre puff piece lionising two transvestite prostitutes.

Ahead of this year’s International Women’s Day, CBeebies’ staff saw fit to include the late Ray ‘Sylvia’ Rivera and Marsha P Johnson in a list of ‘Inspirational Mums’ – alongside figures like poet Maya Angelou and Irena Sendler, the Polish heroine who rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Today, no BBC list of high-achieving women would be complete without some drag queens, and so Johnson and Rivera are lauded for supposedly providing ‘a home, food, clothing and a sense of family to many LGBTQ+ kids made homeless by their biological families’.

But Rivera and Johnson were not only childless men, and thus not ‘mothers’ in any sense. They were also the kind of men that no loving parent would leave a child with. They were prostitutes known to be involved with the New York mob.

The pair founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which operated out of STAR House, in Greenwich Village. But this was not the warming and nurturing refuge that CBeebies paints it as. It was deeply squalid.

As Fred Sargeant, gay-rights campaigner and veteran of the Stonewall riots, wrote on spiked:

‘It had no toilet, water, heat or electricity. Liquor and drugs were plentiful. The four rooms were strewn with trash and occupied by as many as 20 people at a time. Food and other supplies were generally stolen or shoplifted by residents. What little cash there was came in from sex work in the 42nd Street area and elsewhere, or from begging. Conveniently, this building was next door to one of [the mob’s] porn-distribution operations.’

These inconvenient facts have done nothing to slow the BBC’s hagiographers, busily reshaping history to fit their ideological worldview. When alive, Johnson and Rivera were clear that they understood themselves to be gay men who cross-dressed and sold sex. Neither had easy lives, but this does not excuse what they allowed to happen to the vulnerable young people who found themselves at STAR House. The idea that these men were maternal figures can only make sense to the sort of fool who thinks Hamas only gets a bad rep because of ‘Islamophobia’ – in other words, your average BBC staffer.

The hashtag used to promote the BBC’s insulting revisionism is #EveryMumWelcome. This ideological slogan is meant to suggest that some people are being cruelly excluded from the category of ‘mum’, as if motherhood were a private members club with discriminatory rules. It’s an attempt to undermine a truth we all know: that a mother is simply a woman with children.

The BBC long ago abandoned the Reithian values of educating, informing and entertaining. Everything the BBC does now comes with a political agenda, whether the endless stream of BBC News puff pieces about drag queens, or the tiresome attempts to normalise cross-dressing men in every daytime TV storyline. Yet this CBeebies incident marks a bizarre new low. When the BBC is directing trans propaganda at children, recasting transvestite prostitutes as loving mothers, it is waving a womanly willy in the face of every licence-fee payer.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.