'Media capture by gender identity theory and the role of the BBC'
The experience of guest contributor @RipxNutmeg who has spent years monitoring bias on sex and gender
Anyone who’s interested in stories highlighting
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the danger to women and girls by the ideology that calls trans-identified men ‘women’ may have noticed just how much the BBC pops up in stories in recent years.
Last week it was revealed that the BBC’s new Director of Sport has said that men competing in women’s sports is not a “big problem”, and when tennis legend Martina Navratilova - someone who thinks it is a big problem - looked him up on X, she discovered, she said, that she was blocked by him.
While this may have been inconceivable a few years ago, it seems par for the course in 2024.
One of the first times many people became truly aware of the extent of the capture of the UK’s public service broadcaster was in August 2018 when a paedophile was jailed for 22 years for falsely imprisoning, electrocuting and raping a 10-year-old girl. The story was one of the most shocking in modern British crime history but it didn’t even make its local news on BBC Coventry & Warwickshire.
It’s never been revealed why the BBC didn’t report on the conviction when it happened. A few days earlier, the Green Party’s equalities spokesman, Aimee Challenor, a cross-dressing young man who says he’s a woman, appeared on BBC Radio 4 show Woman’s Hour to discuss transgenderism. The invite came shortly after he had accused the BBC of ‘transphobia’ for not asking him for his opinion on a transgender issue.
The paedophile who had been jailed was Aimee’s father, David Challenor. The rape and torture had taken place in a ‘torture den attic’ that he had built in the house he shared with Aimee (now Aimee Knight), who said he didn’t know about the allegations in full when he chose his father as election agent. David Challenor had pretended to be a female baby when he raped the child.
Only when Aimee ended his bid to become deputy leader of the Green Party in the wake of the conviction a few days later, did the BBC publish a story about the Challenors. And even then, incredibly, it didn’t state what Aimee’s father had done.
Two days later, that article was edited to include two brief, vague sentences outlining some of David Challenor’s convictions. However, a week later the BBC published a much longer story featuring an interview with Aimee in which he accused the Green Party of transphobia for suspending him to investigate his appointment of his father as his election agent.
In the same year, 2018, the BBC created the page ‘transgender people’, a resource in which every news story it publishes about the subject can be found in one place. At the time of writing, just six years on, that site has 977 stories in it. Almost all of them are either gushing examples of something we’re meant to find inspirational, or tales of victimhood.
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For example, the BBC published two “inspirational” stories about two different trans-identified opera singers, while it also covered the case of a 19-year-old cross-dressing man who wasn’t able to buy a drink in a Wetherspoons because he didn’t look like his photo ID, including the words “she…was in tears”.
These are a tiny fraction, but classic examples, of the BBC’s gender affirmative journalism. Similar but separate pages on, for example, ‘drag queens’ which features more than 200 stories, and ‘Pride’, which features more than 750 stories were also created in 2018, and one on ‘LGBT’ was created in 2022, which already has just under 1,000 stories in it.
These topic tags only include online stories, and don’t feature the scores of BBC television and radio broadcasts in recent years profiling ‘trans’ people, often overtly aimed at children.
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I’ve written about some of them here, for example the three-part series Not Your Average Family and the soap opera Doctors.
While it’s not possible to list all the examples of transgender propaganda by the BBC in the last few years, I’d like to highlight just some of the stories I’ve seen that have particularly stuck in the memory.
In 2019, Dave McMullan, a duty editor, producer and reporter for Radio 4’s Today programme, amid criticism that the BBC was only airing one side of the trans debate, tweeted
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that he vetoed allowing a woman, or as he called her, ‘horrific TERF..can’t remember her name. An academic’ alongside a trans-identified man on a radio debate, adding that it would be like putting a black man with a racist.
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Back in September 2018, the BBC appointed its first ‘gender and identity correspondent’, Megha Mohan, and in December that year Ben Hunte was named the corporation’s first ‘LGBT correspondent’. Ben in particular had had limited experience of journalism prior to their appointments to new, senior roles.
Megha’s work in her new role included ‘Pre-colonial communities’ history of gender fluidity’ and 'Why I invented Non-Binary Day'. In 2019 she reported that 1.7 percent of the world’s population is intersex. When people complained to the BBC that this was a false claim, the BBC ran a fact check on it, and admitted it was about 100 times out, but failed to remove the original claim or explain that it wasn’t true.
Ben Hunte’s work included inappropriate and much criticised coverage of Mermaids (currently under investigation by the charity commission), and trans activist Munroe Bergdorf, and in 2020 he wrote that puberty blockers lower the risk of a child taking his or her own life. The BBC (much) later admitted the article “went beyond what was editorially justified”. Hunte left the BBC in 2021.
Other extreme examples include:
· The BBC changing its story and headline about a paedophile to remove references to his job as a drag queen and his role with Pride
· In a story about the death of a drag queen, which included tributes, the BBC didn’t mention that he’d been convicted of child rape.
· A medical programme aimed at children in which a doctor advised a girl, who was wearing a chest binder which was causing her severe spinal pain and breathing difficulties, to “keep using chest binders but try different ones”
· The BBC covered a story about a man who sexually abused a four-year-old. But because another man, who called himself ‘Naomi’, was also jailed for inciting the crime, the BBC’s headline was ‘Predatory woman who incited man to abuse child, 4, jailed’
· BBC Sport wrote a glowing profile of trans male weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, suggested it isn’t clear if men are physically stronger than women, and when people complained it issued a statement that criticism of the article constituted hate and accounts will be blocked and reported.
· The BBC presented a 'non-binary genderqueer social researcher' as a medical expert, allowed her to state that drug-induced 'milk' from men is "at least, if not of higher quality" for a baby as milk from its mother, and didn't challenge her properly on false claims. It took four months for the BBC to agree this was a breach.
· The BBC said the criticism of Doritos for employing a cross-dressing male influencer - who posted about wanting to do ‘depraved things’ to a girl aged 12 and mocked rape victims - to advertise its products was "led by right-wing activists".
· The BBC using phrases like “she was biologically male at the time of the attack" in a report on a rapist
· The BBC’s initial response to the Cass Review - despite its significant findings on child medical ‘transition’ - was to have in its headline ‘Toxic debate letting down gender care children’
· The BBC published at least two biographies on transgender influencer Paris Lees. The first, in 2013, mentioned his criminal history. The second, in 2019, did not. It’s now preparing a dramatisation of his book ‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’. Paris was one of the activists who met the then BBC Online Editor in 2013 to tell him how the BBC should refer to trans people - advice that was written into its Style Guide that November.
· The BBC told presenter Justin Webb that his description of 'trans women' as "males", which was both factual and relevant to the story about men in women's sports, did "not convey an entirely accurate impression" and therefore upheld a complaint against him
Earlier this year the BBC issued its third apology to JK Rowling in 14 months, after it inaccurately said her "derogatory comments" would constitute a hate crime. The previous apologies both came after it accused her of "transphobia". This came after it ran a radio programme in which a “non-binary person and wannabe wizard” discussed whether it’s OK to read Harry Potter books in spite of the author’s views.
The ideological capture of institutions like the BBC, and OFCOM, which is meant to regulate it, has happened under the Conservatives, who supposedly have disdain for it. We can only imagine how what will happen under a new government which doesn’t look like it will have any appetite for calling it out.