Sex, gender and the BBC
Why is the BBC going wrong in its coverage of the political furore over women's rights?
It’s not new to observe that the BBC is failing its public remit when it comes to reporting around sex and gender. Many women have already given up any semblance of trust in its coverage. I did, when I worked there. One thing I know is that all the ‘gender critical’ side has ever wanted is genuine impartiality on this, a default to accuracy, and a fair crack of the whip when views on the issue are being curated. But it has been disappointed - and dismayed, not to say rendered aghast - time after time after time.
I’m writing this, partly to get it off my chest, but mainly to help observers understand what has happened to bring us to a point where that part of the audience which understands the facts around sex and gender are so disengaged, they no longer even complain about biased coverage, let alone believe a word of it. I’ll make more than one post, but this one will start by looking at the origins of the problem.
The BBC’s Editorial Guidelines https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/guidelines enshrine trust, accuracy, public interest, impartiality, education and information at the heart of what should be its offer.
Where are they then, when it comes to coverage of sex and gender? No special insight is particularly needed: BBC output tells the story here. They are all built around a framing of sex self-identification, and the apparently extraordinary difficulty of acknowledging the indisputable facts that sex is immutable, binary, and based on reproductive role.
A mature editorial conversation about coverage of sex and gender would be based on these facts, and the need to relay them accurately, but would expand to consider how journalistic accuracy might need to be restricted, case by case: for example, by law, or by a need for caution or sensitivity. The result would be what the BBC calls ‘due accuracy’.
But you can’t even start that conversation in spaces where the facts can’t be articulated at all. In spaces where complaints, black marks, potential disciplinary actions, and fear of being accused of activism and career-blacklisted hover in the air. At this point we can say it’s pretty obvious that in the media, these conditions are not restricted to the BBC. What’s true is that the BBC has a very special, public duty to strive harder to inform and to be impartial. Why is it failing?
We must go back a decade to see where it started. Sex self-identification was inserted into the public-facing BBC News Style Guide https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsstyleguide/g/ in 2013. There were a number of significant events in that year, ahead of the Style Guide rewrite. They involved the campaign group All About Trans, which was set up with seed-funding from the BBC and Channel 4 a couple of years earlier.
This might seem too long ago and far away to affect current BBC editorial policy. But what was installed in the Style Guide then has survived a number of rewrites and is still there today. I get frustrated when people say it’s just media archeology, time to move on. The decisions made ten years ago affect coverage now, every day.
The events of 2013, or ‘interactions’, as All About Trans described them, included AAT activists enjoying an outing to the London Aquarium with a BBC Controller and two commissioning executives, a meeting with a Complaints Team editor, a meeting with what AAT claimed to be ‘BBC editorial executives’, and afternoon tea at the Langham Hilton Hotel with the BBC’s then Online Editor.
(All the reports of the interactions have now disappeared from the AAT website. At one point one could search it for BBC interactions and retrieve 67 hits, including with regional newsrooms and programmes like Newsnight. It’s all gone now.)
Wonderful access, for a young organisation, that most lobby groups can only dream of. Anyhow, according to AAT, one of the activists told the ‘editorial executives’: ‘When in doubt, ask the person how they would like to be referred to’. There was such confidence around the ‘rightness’ of this that it was all out there in the public domain. And yet somehow it went under the radar of most of us.
So it came to be. Late 2013, the wording was inserted into the Style Guide. And surprise surprise, the BBC has found that it’s easier ‘to do’ than ‘to undo’. Removing it now would generate immense resistance and even uproar - despite the fact that it’s now a controversial political position. And while it’s there, it’s the BBC’s default terminology.
The current wording is: ‘A person born male who lives as a female, would typically be described as a transgender woman, and would take the pronoun ‘she’. And vice versa. We generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question, unless there are editorial reasons not to do so. If that’s unknown, apply that which fits the way the person lives publicly’.
There’s no explanation of the legislation around gender reassignment, public order and harassment or the Equality Act, or even ‘the way of living publicly’ which might help to inform decision-making. No explanation of the Maya Forstater ruling which protects truthful statements around sex and gender.
And when it comes to ‘editorial reasons’ for discarding Self-Id, we now know that the BBC does not consider rape, murder and child abuse to be sufficient cause to describe men as men, and women as women. It’s hard therefore to imagine what possible ‘editorial reasons’ could be found to justify abandoning Self-Id within BBC editorial output. Inevitably the BBC is left in an extreme and activist position: what has become known as ‘dying on rapist hill’.
The BBC is telling its journalists to lie about a person’s sex under almost all circumstances, if the person requests it. The ‘editorial reasons’ caveat simply allows the BBC to claim that it’s not ordering its journalists to lie, it’s only advising them to do so.
In reality what it means - as many, many complainants have seen - is that anyone with oversight on sex and gender decision-making is able to refer back to the Style Guide: as if it were some kind of natural law, a situation which can brook no remedy. Write to the BBC about a male sex offender being described as a woman, or men being included in 100 Women, or 50:50, and you’ll be referred in such a desultory manner to the Style Guide, you can almost read the shrug in the email. ‘It’s the Guide’s fault. What can one do?’
It doesn’t have to involve putative armies of transactivists at the BBC - self-identification of sex is now the BBC default, has been for ten years, and a journalist or sub would need to find extraordinarily strong grounds to choose to reject it when writing a story. If they decided to do so, they’d then have to argue the toss with senior editors about it - which, on a subject as convulsive and career-killing as sex and gender, would not be an inviting prospect.
This is the position we’re in right now, this is where we find ourselves. But the BBC’s hands are not tied. It is in this position because it chooses to be. It could row back those decisions of 2013 , and it could create an entirely defensible new policy which puts the facts back at the centre of the Overton Window - and every day that it doesn’t is an active choice. All that’s needed is impartiality, and for that you have to start with the facts.
That’s enough for one Substack: there’s lots of other stuff to say, including about resolving the problems, and this is just a start. But it’s already too long - more to follow.