Everyone knows that the UK’s Press Complaints Commission is a big joke, an operation run by the media with the express remit of whitewashing everything that the media does. When the BBC misbehaves, however, the government has to get involved, and complaints are apparently handled by Ofcom, the communications regulator. Are they any better? There are no prizes for guessing the answer.

My story begins several months back when a Thai airline decided to hire a few kathoey as stewardesses. Monica Roberts has a recent blog here with pictures of the successful applicants. In the wake of this a “comedian” on the BBC did a sketch purporting to show what would happen if that sort of thing happened in the UK. Christine Burns has more background here, but the basic details of the “joke” were that:

• Trans women can, and indeed should, be laughed at;
• Trans women are not just ugly, they are so repulsive that people seeing them are likely to vomit; and
• Trans women are not women, they are heterosexual men who are liable to sexually assault women in public.

A more textbook case of a dehumanizing portrayal of a minority group would be hard to find. And yet Ofcom managed to find the whole thing entirely innocent, claiming that it was only making fun of budget airlines. It is a piece of whitewashing on a par with an inquiry finding that the prisoner died of natural causes, and the mass of boot-shaped bruises, broken ribs and cracked skull must have happened when he fell out of bed. They even had the cheek to say that the BBC “could have made is clearer that the characters were not intended to be based on transgender or transsexual people.” Exactly how would that be possible when the whole point of the sketch was to respond to the fact that trans people were being given jobs instead of, you know, beaten up or murdered or something?

Paris Lees has a great post on the human cost of trans people being treated with contempt in this way by people supposed to safeguard the public.

In regulatory economics we have a term for this sort of thing. It is “regulatory capture”, and it is what happens when a regulator becomes so caught up in the agenda of the industry that they effectively act as a lobbyist for the companies they are supposed to be guarding us against. Regulatory organizations that get into this sort of situation need to either have their senior management fired, or be disbanded. They are quite clearly a waste of public money, and as Mr. Cameron is so keen to make savings he might profitably take a good look at a few over-paid bureaucrats doubtless too fond of a good lunch with their media executive pals.

Of course that’s not going to happen, because the kow-towing to media executives doesn’t just stop with civil servants, does it?