Mick Hartley

BBC News journalist Charlie Walsham in the Spectator – How did the BBC get the trans debate so wrong?

Regrettably, I believe there is a straight line between the BBC’s capitulation to extreme trans rights ideologues and the disturbing findings in Dr Hilary Cass’s 388-page report.

Crucially, what Dr Cass has exposed was only able to happen because of a skewed and distorted national conversation around the issue of sex and gender, a narrative I believe aided by the nation’s broadcaster. Dissenting voices have been marginalised, castigated, cancelled, silenced.

Well before Dr Cass got to work, BBC employees started putting their preferred pronouns in their email signatures. Given the increasingly polarised political debate over self-ID, these virtue-signalling postscripts made a mockery of the BBC’s neutral remit; they also exerted an unspoken pressure on colleagues who resisted this posturing….

As Dr Cass tried in vain to wrest data from the uncooperative Tavistock clinic to assist her work, the BBC was doubling down on its adherence to the cultish self-ID doctrine, depicting in news reports sadistic male murderers and devious rapists as women so as not to offend these odious men; victims be damned. This approach by a news organisation on any topic, let alone a hugely disputatious issue, looks like pure propaganda.

Despite having a well-funded Verify department, the BBC has made no attempts to set out the cold, hard scientific reality that modern medicine has found no way of changing a healthy biological male human into a woman, or vice versa.

Neither has the BBC’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent ever tried to interrogate the often-aired claim that ‘trans women are women’, a favourite slogan of the charity Stonewall, which the BBC was closely affiliated with as recently as late 2021.

Even simply looking the other way was not enough for the BBC. Instead, it signalled what looked like a complete abandonment of accuracy on the trans issue when it upheld a complaint against the Today programme’s Justin Webb for daring to say that trans women are ‘in other words, males’.

Is the ship slowly turning, then? Yes, they had Hannah Barnes on Newsnight, asking Where have the media been?

On the other hand here's their  most prominent story on the subject today – Gender care review disappointing, says trans man:

Trans young people say they feel "disappointed" and "ignored" by the Cass Review into gender care.

One man, 19, who was part of the review's focus groups, said the positive lived experiences of trans children who had been able to access puberty blockers was not included in the report.

Not much change there, then. It's too ingrained.