The lowdown on a BBC climbdown
Guest post: One member's story of raising safeguarding concerns about shocking content
Trans 101 is a multi-part online series of short films presented by the “filmmaker, vlogger, and transgender rights activist/advocate” Kate Adair. They were first platformed on the BBC Scotland strand The Social in 2016/17, just around the time referrals of children to gender clinics were skyrocketting.
Recently, one of the films, Trans Kids, has been quietly disappeared. Audiences eager for the advertised “lowdown” on "trans youth" are greeted with an apology that the content is “not currently available”. Other films in the series, though, are still here for their viewing pleasure.
The BBC hates taking content down. That’s understandable. Plenty of crooks and villains would love the evidence of their wrongdoing wiped from the record and it’s right in those circumstances for the BBC to strongly resist.
Then there’s perception. Whatever the reason for doing so - and sometimes it’s just temporary and precautionary - wiping content looks like an admission of serious editorial failure. And often, the content will already have been widely disseminated through social channels, so the impact of removing it from BBC platforms is limited anyway.
One can also argue that when the BBC has cocked up, it’s good we know about it. Rather than wiping stories, the best course of action perhaps is to provide a prominent on-screen correction or clarification.
But Trans 101 - Trans Kids is gone, vamoose, no more, on BBC platforms at least. Why? Well, the BBC won’t say. SEEN in Journalism asked the press office for an explanation, but was told the BBC wouldn’t be commenting on the matter.
What we do know though is that, despite receiving a detailed explanation of its serious safeguarding, and other, failings, senior management at BBC Scotland refused a request 18 months ago to take the film down and to review the entire Trans 101 oeuvre.
The saga tells us something about how the BBC deals with editorial complaints. And it gives reason for both hope and despair to journalists who care about truth, accuracy, and not producing content which, unwittingly or otherwise, harms children,
My interest in Trans 101 started in March 2022 when I complained about this article on the BBC website which, at the time, falsely stated that puberty blockers were reversible.
My complaint went unanswered for months. So I contacted the BBC’s Safeguarding unit. They also took several months to respond. When they finally got involved, the article was amended. But it was too late of course. For more than six months, the BBC had knowingly made false and dangerous information about child healthcare available to audiences.
I started looking at other BBC content which made similar misleading and dangerous claims. There was plenty of it - but Trans 101 stood out as blatantly irresponsible. There were 15 films available in the Adair strand at the time, all but one of them straight propaganda for the mad idea that you can change sex.
In Trans Kids, presenter Adair offers medical advice and opinion to children and their parents. Adair is not a doctor. He’s also, quelle surprise, not very nice to women who attempt to uphold their sex-based legal rights.
Children are the target of the Trans Kids film. It’s produced in a fast-paced, jump-cut, yoof style and Adair makes a direct appeal to the “trans kids” in his imagined audience.
He fills the gender bolleaux bingo card with alarming efficiency. So we have the obligatory leveraging of suicide myths, puberty blockers are “nothing more than a pause button”, “gender” is “determined before birth”, legions of children including toddlers are now apparently free to “come out” as “trans” because of “a change of attitudes”, and parents “who enforce the assigned at birth gender on their child, no matter what” get a ticking off.
Parents as the baddies, false facts, magical answers to non-existent problems - it all smacks of a cult. An idea Adair nods to - but only so he can mock it: “No, it's not because they're being brainwashed by some secret Illuminati trans agenda…”
It was screamingly obvious to me that this content contravened BBC editorial guidelines on impartiality, accuracy, and harm.
Before leaving in 2020, I’d worked at the BBC in senior editorial positions and so I knew how grindingly slow and defensive the BBC complaints system could be. Now I also had first-hand experience as a civvy of being roundly ignored by it.
So I wrote directly to the Senior Head of BBC Scotland Productions,Anthony Browne.
My thinking was that a chummy approach along the lines of “look here, old boy - you've got an editorial shitshow on your hands” might speedily curtail the ongoing harm from the content.
Here’s my email:
Dear Anthony,
I hope you are well. I am a former colleague although we never met. Until I left in 2020, I was a BBC current affairs editor and, before that, a correspondent and reporter.
I am writing about this content https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0636tcr. The content contains a number of significant inaccuracies, factual misrepresentations, and relevant factual omissions in the context of offering advice on care of children and young people experiencing gender dysphoria. Tonally, it is dismissive of any approach other than that of the presenter's. It is not made clear in the content that the presenter is an activist and that they have no medical or other relevant specialist qualifications to advise on the emotional, mental, or physical health of young people.
This content is aimed at young people. The issues with it are so serious that it amounts to a safeguarding risk as well as being in contravention of numerous editorial guidelines.
I am therefore requesting it be removed from the website and, given the seriousness of the editorial failings, that a review is carried out of all The Social content related to the same or similar issues
But my appeal to a fellow hack to do the decent thing failed. Browne wrote back two days later saying that in order to provide an “efficient and fair service to all” he had referred my complaint to Audience Services. I’d been assigned a case number CAS-7310049-N4D7C9 and I’d get a response in due course from the BBC Complaints Team.
I was not surprised, but I was disappointed. When I was an editor, I was always pleased when complainants wrote to me or my team directly. Nine times out of ten, issues could be addressed in an informal way. Often the complainant simply wanted to let off a bit of steam. I’d get our lovely presenter to phone them up for a chat and it would make their day. Sometimes of course they’d have a valid point, and we’d get a chance to line up our defensive ducks for the inevitable inquiry or work out how best to cough to our errors and oversights and make amends.
Perhaps Browne was too busy to ask Sally Magnusson to give me a bell. Or maybe the Savile-esque echoes of my allegations spooked him and he wanted expert support. Or perhaps he’d tossed my email into the spam folder marked “Ghastly Transphobes - Do Not Touch With Barge Pole”.
Since he didn’t engage with the substance of my email, I’ll never know. But whatever the reason, the next stop for CAS-7310049-N4D7C9 was a “Stage 1b” complaint to the BBC Scotland Complaints Team. They replied a couple of weeks later having landed on a novel explanation for the film’s shortcomings - its loon presenter.
We acknowledge that when being transferred onto the BBC website from the original source, the fact that this is a personal response from a contributor could have been more clearly signposted. To clarify this we have adapted the description of this piece to say:
“There's been a significant rise in children and families seeking support as more and more kids come out. A change in attitudes, especially amongst younger people, allows them to be more open and discuss their gender issues. Kate's here to give her personal response to these issues in Trans 101.”
Of course, this wording just repeated and compounded several of the offences I’d complained about. And there were no responses to my request for the video to be de-platformed, or to the substance of my complaint. This was because…
Without specifics on the part you consider to have “inaccuracies, factual misrepresentations, and relevant factual omissions” there is little more we can add to this response at this point.
So in order to progress my complaint, the BBC required me to fact check its journalism - a somewhat surprising request given I was no longer on the payroll. But pulling apart nonsense is very much my metier, so I set to it with gusto. Three weeks later, I submitted a 29-page complaint. My own 101 lowdown, if you will, but without the funky jump cuts.
I drew heavily on the excellent work of others, most notably the recently-published Cass review interim report, and the resources of Transgender Trend, who had themselves been writing to the BBC for years about similar matters. I transcribed and dissected the Adair video line by line, pointing out every inaccuracy, distortion, and safeguarding failure, meticulously sourcing my evidence. I even acknowledged the occasional line which might just about be construed as reasonable opinion - although of course that raised impartiality concerns since no countervailing views to Adair’s had ever been promoted by The Social.
I channelled 25 years of licence fee-funded journalistic training into that complaint along with a hefty dose of good girl syndrome. Surely, I thought, evidence, common sense, and sheer bloody effort on my part would win the day.
The BBC replied in mid-December. My complaint, it said, had been discussed with the executive editor with responsibility for The Social, and senior management at BBC Scotland.
They’d not upheld a single syllable of it.
The next step was to appeal to the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit. But I was losing heart.
Since my 29-page opus had failed to do the job, I reckoned I would need to spend at least another two days rewriting it before submitting to the ECU. Should it be twice as long or should it be shortened by half? How had I failed to convince them on even the most obvious points such as the dangers of leveraging suicide myths and encouraging children to distrust their parents?
And even if the ECU had agreed to consider my complaint (they screen requests first), it could end up in the hands of someone relatively junior. Why would they overrule BBC Scotland’s top team?
I also knew that true believers occupied senior positions at the BBC. Back in 2018, at an editorial meeting, I raised the coverage of the rapist Stephen Wood, aka Karen White. I queried why BBC News was referring to him as a woman. A departmental executive sitting opposite me gasped and barked “Trans women are women!” I picked my jaw up off the floor and barked back: “Not according to biology!” The chair of the meeting issued a panicky plea for us all to “be kind!”
Smarting and bewildered, I tried to take up the Wood/White case and its wider implications for journalists with the BBC’s specialist editorial advisors. Were we now, I asked, expected to call any man who demanded it, a woman?
These colleagues, who’d previously delighted in chewing over thorny editorial conundrums involving everything from Northern Ireland politics, to secretly filming snake oil merchants, or accusing MPs of serious wrongdoing, now mysteriously overlooked my emails, or batted my queries off to more senior staff who wrote cryptic replies querying my “beliefs”.
By late 2022, all the signs were that swathes of the BBC still didn't get it. BBC Education, Children’s, TV, the website, R4 Comedy - it was all awash with content which affirmed the delusions of vulnerable children and young people. And BBc News considered the batshit notion of gender identity worthy of not one, but two correspondent roles.
The 20-day deadline to take my complaint to the ECU came and went. The year turned and the video remained up, available for any vulnerable child, young person, or despairing parent to consume at will from the nation’s most trusted news source.
I felt bad for dropping the ball and not giving the ECU a shot. But fast forward to September last year and CAS-7310049-N4D7C9 had one last, short-lived, revival.
The BBC, especially its news division, had made a number of significant changes and clarifications to similar content. It made me hopeful that the penny had finally dropped in the upper echelons that encouraging vulnerable children into a lifetime of unnecessary drugs and surgery maybe wasn’t a great idea.
I was advised by the complaints team that the ECU might consider my case if I wrote directly to the unit explaining why I thought there were special circumstances to do so. I duly sent an email, but received no acknowledgement or response.
And then, out of the blue, Trans 101 - Trans Kids was erased from The Social website. It’s still available elsewhere of course - 63k views so far on Facebook alone - but at least the BBC is no longer promoting it on its own platform.
I’m not sure exactly when the off switch was flicked. The trigger may well have been the publication of the final Cass report in April with its devastating analysis and conclusions. I don’t know if my complaint and maybe those of others contributed to its demise. Perhaps the fact that some ghastly old Karen bothered to compile a 29-page dossier lodged itself in the back of some bigwig’s head; perhaps it was actually just a huge waste of my time.
Either way, it would be good to know the rationale. People need to be sure that when they contact the BBC, in good faith and to raise matters involving the safety and wellbeing of children, they’ll be taken seriously. But more importantly, there is a host of other affirmational content on the BBC website still freely available to children and young people. If Trans 101 - Trans Kids is now beyond the pale, then why is this still available, and this, and this?
Not one more child should be exposed to the dangerous, magical-thinking, gender claptrap which has been published by the BBC in the past decade. It’ll no doubt be painful, and even potentially humiliating, but all of it should now be rooted out and, quietly or otherwise, disappeared.
Good, solid and persistent pressure from you paid dividends, but it sounds like that pressure has to be unremitting.
Not having a telly since 2005, this tripe from the BBC mercifully passed me by.
I'm amazed they had the brass balls to call it "101" the number of the prison cell in Orwell's "1984"!
In which the hero is tortured to break his spirit, so he will believe any old baloney the Party pumps out, like "2 + 2 = 5". Could they have been more blatant in admitting they were promoting a brainwashing cult? Even the smirking denial from the presenter that it IS a cult - classic 1984!