Paris Lees: What It Feels Like

Our concerns about promotion of the series

The TV series 'What It Feels Like for a Girl' based on the book by Paris Lees will soon be hitting our screens, and there is likely to be an accompanying press round.

We’re concerned that coverage around the launch of this series may not hit the bar of ‘balanced and appropriate’ - or take account of the extreme offence it has caused and is likely to cause. So we’ve contacted about two dozen team leaders, programme editors and presenters - all of whom could be involved in the promo - to explain what we’re worried about.

The commissioning, development, production and broadcasting of 'What It Feels Like For A Girl' is deeply controversial, and not the normal press round content. There are a number of issues.

• What It Feels Like For A Girl is a novel memoir based on Lees' teenage life. We know that Paris was not a girl teenager (and is not a woman now). He has never known 'What It Feels Like For A Girl'. The implicit claim that he was a girl is not only not true, but viscerally offensive to large parts of the BBC audience. These people are neither bigots nor ignorant: they are simply aware that girls are different to boys, and growing girls face very, very different problems and issues to growing boys.

• Paris' experience is of horrific homophobic abuse and bullying as a gay, gender non-conforming teenager. He calls himself a rent boy, and was highly vulnerable to child predators. The vulnerability is real, but it is not the experience of a teenage girl. There is no doubt that it is a legitimate and tragic subject for a novel/memoir, but it is not the experience of a girl. In fact it could be seen as erasing homophobic abuse and exploitation, and reframing it instead as a gender identity issue.

• There is growing evidence that teenage trauma can be a driver of transgender identification. This is an important issue worth more exploration than unquestioning acceptance of the 'born in the wrong body' narrative.

• Lees' concept of 'womanhood' seems to be based on demeaning, regressive, sexist, outdated stereotypes. He wrote: 'In Ibiza I was catcalled, sexually objectified and treated like a piece of meat by men the entire week, and it was absolutely awesome'. He claims to represent some women, saying: 'We do have some things in common, such as growing up as girls who have to learn to deal with street harassment.' Paris has this in common with no women and girls: being a girl in this position was not his experience. The optics in particular of a male interviewer asking another man about 'what it's like for a girl' are troublesome.

• The abuse Paris suffered does not entitle him to be treated as if he'd been a girl, and to appropriate that experience. Nor does it entitle him to claim immunity from challenging questions around what male 'gender transition' means for women and girls, and how it serves to make them even more vulnerable. The point being made is that Paris’ activism has made it easier for men to enter women's spaces such as prisons, toilets, changing rooms, sports and rape crisis centres. He says he has left his activism behind, but its legacy joins with the activism of others to result in the diminution of women's sex-based rights.

• Paris claims to be in a 'marginalised' group. It's possible that he has confused the word 'minority' with 'marginalised'. As we have recently seen, transgender people and transgender activists are not marginalised (BBC coverage here). Gender identity has primacy over sex in almost every area of public body policy, with accompanying disbenefit to women. The very fact that a man is being lionised over women for his claim to be a woman, is an indicator of social power. It’s not the status of a marginalised group.

• Talk of 'affirm your child or they may become suicidal' is not only dangerous but evidence free. The BBC has already had to issue a correction about this after making overblown claims on an edition of Hard Talk. Any claims of this nature need to be strongly challenged and dismantled, including those that include a personal experience of an interviewee. As we see from the linked study - personal experiences cannot be extrapolated to a population.

• Paris Lees was one of the campaigners who urged the BBC to adopt the activist language that it will be required to use in its coverage - one of the main reasons that the lexicon is limited, and efforts at balanced coverage will be harder. It may 'drive Paris crazy to be thought of as a trans activist' but that is what he was. He was part of a group whose work now directly affects how the BBC will cover the launch of his TV series.

• Paris, like many gender identity activists, is apt to make the hyperbolic claim that knowing that people can't change sex is equivalent to stating that 'trans people don't exist'. This is not the case. It is merely a statement that they haven't changed sex, and can't do so, which is very different.

• Paris has also claimed there is a generational divide between those who believe in gender identity, and those who understand the reality of sex. What is more likely is that older people are more secure, and able to express their views amid a rage of cancellation. Repercussions are real: however there is also growing anecdotal evidence that Gens A and Z are changing direction, so that unquestioning gender identity affirmation looks increasingly outdated.

• There will be victims of gender identity activism in the audience: women who have had to share private facilities and refuge spaces, who have suffered in their jobs for not using gender compliant language, who have even lost their jobs for pointing out that sex matters more than gender identity in the workplace, in health settings and in prisons. A hagiographic feature of Paris Lees' false claim to have been a girl will be traumatising.

• There will also be young people who are transfixed by the alluring 'born in the wrong body' narrative embraced by Paris. It would be a breach of editorial safeguarding implicitly to encourage them towards a path of medicalisation in imitation.

  Finally - we don’t call for voices to be silenced. We want contributors to be included - to be added - to reflect these points, we want to see wild claims swiftly debunked, and we want accuracy at the forefront.

  We think our concerns are valid - they’re certainly sincere - and we hope the BBC will take them seriously. They aren’t trivial, we’ve made them in good faith and we think the BBC will take them in good faith. When the series is launched, we’ll find out if they have.