Sex, gender and the BBC

Have we just seen the BBC inch closer to impartiality?

I’ve got to say no. There hasn’t been a tectonic shift this week in the way the BBC covers sex and gender.  Signs of hope, yes, but rather in the way that green shoots have no choice but to go along with spring temperatures.  If the environment turns frosty again for reality-focused voices, the BBC’s minimal effort will certainly droop and probably die.

I’m going to pause in looking backwards in my posts, and examine how the principle of bias towards gender identity affirmation continues to dominate BBC coverage.

First up, the guilty plea of trans-identified male Andrew Miller, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-65610429 described by the BBC as a man wearing women’s clothing.  There was talk of this heralding a new dawn of accuracy and impartiality, of the BBC daringly breaching its convention of describing people as the sex with which they ‘identify’.   

It wasn’t the case. The BBC was following its news style rules, as usual, of using the pronouns requested by the trans person, including whether they are any kind of offender: rapist, murderer, abuser, consumer of child abuse images or kidnapper. 

Miller wanted male pronouns and his given name, so he got them, from the court and the BBC. Moreover, the BBC declined to headline him as trans.

This might have been the moment to explore whether it’s possible for sex offenders to wipe their convictions, post-release, by using transition to detach their ‘offender names’ from any connection with a new female identity, but the opportunity wasn’t taken. Perhaps it will still happen when Miller is sentenced.

The BBC’s decision to omit ‘transgender’ from the headline and top paragraphs is more significant. This was absolutely not an accident: ‘negative’ stories involving gender identity are scrutinised within an inch of their lives at the Beeb.  

In fact the word ‘transgender’ does not appear until the eighth paragraph, when it’s known that many readers don’t get beyond the first four or five.  That’s despite his trans status being real and relevant. 

Miller is definitely trans, according to the law and the Stonewall umbrella.  This  decision to drop down the use of ‘transgender’ looks like an attempt to dissociate him from what some activists would like to think of as the ‘genuine’ trans community.  

After conviction, there’s no contempt involved in using the case as the basis for publicly analysing the way that trans’woman’ status can breach boundaries and enable predatory behaviour, so reporting that status it really does matter.   

The fact that the BBC chose to minimise it makes me think they just didn’t know what to do with this as a story.  BBC editors in Scotland and London will have heaved a sigh of relief when he wanted male pronouns, after the mess they made of the Isla Bryson story: but were obviously afraid that describing him in the first order as ‘trans’ would unleash rage from activists.  ‘Man in women’s clothing’ was therefore seen as the lesser of two evils, and it definitely wasn’t ‘brave’.  

Perhaps this is the start of the BBC in every story distinguishing trans-identified men from men in dresses - with sex offenders, naturally, always falling into the second group.  It will be a rocky ride, if so.  The BBC has consistently failed to acknowledge the high proportion of sex offenders among male transgender prisoners, and that will surely have to change. 

The next day there was the ‘trans schools guidance’ story https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65473198 . Now this is a story which has been crying out for coverage from the national broadcaster.  Bear in mind the BBC actually has a hub called ‘Learning and Identity’ and this story sits squarely in the middle.

It’s perfectly placed to look into disturbing stories of children being socially transitioned without their parents’ knowledge, of pupils distressed by teachers pretending their sister or brother is the opposite sex, of the teaching materials and after school clubs that encourage children to believe that gender identity is real.  

Over the last two to three years there have been plenty of external calls, and internal pitches, for BBC journalists to look at this story.  They’ve been ignored, but the BBC was starting to run out of road, as more and more outlets began to investigate it.

So it’s a wonderful thing that they’ve finally produced something.  Not so wonderful that they chose to cover the story in a way that specifically and deliberately downplayed - and on some platforms left out - the deleterious impact on children.  If you think this was an accident, you’re wrong.  Nothing is an accident in the BBC’s coverage of sex and gender. 

The story published across multiple platforms was about the struggles teachers face because of the lack of guidance from government.  A survey of schools and teachers was conducted, a pretty major BBC investigation.  Amongst other revelations, it told us that nearly forty per cent of teachers would hide the fact that they’re affirming a child’s ‘gender’ from the parents.

This safeguarding scandal deserved attention but the correspondents did not pursue it. The way the BBC works, it will now consider that the story of ‘trans in schools’ has been covered, and it’s not likely to be revisited soon.

I’d love for the BBC to prove me wrong, and publish a first person parent or teacher account, or carry out a deeper investigation into this issue aside from the lack of government guidance. But this looks like a way of covering the story without publishing too much disturbing detail: a sign that the BBC still has no enthusiasm for challenging the affirmation narrative.

Finally, we learn that the second of the BBC’s thematic reviews on impartiality (the first was on climate science) will not investigate sex and gender, but migration. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/19/bbc-asks-author-controversial-race-report-assess-migration-coverage-samir-shah

It’s a huge disappointment. Assessing accuracy and impartiality on sex and gender is urgently needed, and something that could be done quite quickly, were it less dogged by extreme fear and interminable counter-factual activism. The BBC has turned its face away, again.

So this is why I don’t believe there’s been a step change in the BBC’s approach. It doesn’t mean that one is impossible, because it’s now clear the BBC is aware that it must at least look like it’s making an effort to report this issue more roundly. It’s an almost imperceptible move forward, but BBC reluctance remains too apparent.