The BBC - what next

Yesterday’s Telegraph story confirms the worst - systemic bias favouring pro-trans narratives over a decade. Change is happening, but is it fast enough?

Does the BBC want to be saved from itself? Because we at Seen in Journalism have been trying - as have hundreds if not thousands of you. The BBC has been offered the simplest, most defensible solutions to the problem that exploded all over the Telegraph and Ofcom yesterday - its obsession with the counter-factual, harmful and activist nonsense of gender identity theory.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/98dfaa106022a7ba

From inside and outside it’s been urged to revert to the original principles of decent journalism. Establish the facts, tell the truth, and curate a range of views around them. For years these voices have been begging for change.

Ever since the BBC’s James Purnell, leading an entirely unnecessary LGBT progression review in 2018, declared that ‘an organisation that appears to have a heteronormative culture is not going to cut ice with 18-24 year olds’ - we’ve been trying.

(Ludicrous and negligent man. We remember him staring vacantly off screen during a so-called ‘listening session’ on his BBC pronoun edict, every employee encouraged to breach impartiality rules by submitting fealty to belief in gender allyship. Did he care? Of course not. He left, and didn’t take pronouns with him. You’re all stuck with ‘BBC she/hers’ for ever.)

But in 2025 we still have, as the Telegraph revealed, a content and editorial culture which can’t even acknowledge that there’s zero proof that gender identity exists. And no one will admit it’s ‘spurious and offensive’ to suggest that men are women. Staff are reprimanded in fact for stating the opposite, that they’re not. Pages bulge with trans sympathetic content. Only this week BBC Suffolk ran a five-minute promo feature for a charity that transitions children. (The presenters are helping to raise money for the charity funding it.) At the same time, BBC Politics was ignoring the fact that that EHRC guidance on the Supreme Court judgment is being delayed for likely a year. Just - not bothering to even glance at the story.

The bias isn’t a historical problem. It’s happening now.

The Telegraph expose reveals that a file detailing the BBC’s many failings on coverage of sex and gender landed in June, after months of collating evidence. By then it was at least six weeks since the Supreme Court judgement and still nothing had been done by the BBC to change its use of ‘preferred pronouns’ (which are still in place).

From the Telegraph account, we recognise a lot of that evidence and those arguments from meetings we’ve had, emails we’ve sent, points we’ve made.

So here’s the gap between the BBC’s understanding and your understanding.

The BBC believes that having commissioned this report, it has acted. Having had listening sessions, it has ‘acted’. It has ‘done something’. It’s now ‘due’ for it to wait for EHRC guidance. As with all sclerotic bureaucracies, it equates talking about doing something, and having a review, to actually doing it.

There are people inside the BBC who are working really hard to make a change, and that includes senior executives. We’ve always been reluctant to name the names of the most egregious offenders because it leads to jigsaw identification of the decent ones, and we need the decent ones to keep going.

Stuart Millar is a name some have mentioned. Yes, he and Richard Burgess turned down coverage of the family impact of ‘transition’, saying it was ‘contentious’. Yes, ‘Learning and Identity’ editors rejected many story pitches relating to the emerging gender scandal, and to the silencing of women, from 2019 to 2023. Yes, separately a pitch to online to cover a dozen ‘gender critical’ court cases was rejected, and the pitcher accused of behaving inappropriately. There’s more, all recorded and filed away.

Leaving aside the blame game for now, what matters most is making sure change results from this expose. It’s a grand story, but the scoop part is the memo and the coverup, because let’s face it everyone already knew. Certainly every one of our followers did.

Every one of you could have explained how to solve the problem a lot cheaper than the average salary of a senior editorial adviser and a review team.

‘Stop pretending that gender identity is real and that people are the opposite sex. Produce fact checks on biology and the law. Drop preferred pronouns. Allow your journalists to treat it like a normal story and report the scandal’. It’s that simple.

But there are already signs the BBC is unchastened. Look at its statement.

‘We have taken a number of actions relating to our reporting of sex and gender including updating the news style guide’

The news style guide has required the use of ‘preferred pronouns’ since 2013. This has not changed.

‘and sharing new guidance’

‘New’ guidance was published by Jonathan Munro in December 2023. It was deeply flawed, subscribed to gender identity theory, is now out of date and has been hidden on the BBC intranet. There’s been nothing since. In addition the main ‘trans fact check’ on the website hasn’t been updated since May 2024.

‘making our social affairs editor responsible for this coverage’

This is a clear attempt at dobbing in. It’s not true. It’s revisionism.

All the relevant hubs are supposed to be responsible for this coverage, with none as gatekeeper. When the ‘identity’ roles were downgraded or disappeared, it was acknowledged that the story touches on health, education, politics, women, unions, LGBT, children, safeguarding/social affairs, and so on. All the hubs should contribute coverage. The story is too big otherwise. It’s not the job of one team or correspondent.

If this is the groundwork to blame a lack of coverage on anyone other than the wider news executive, and every single hub editor, it can stop now. We have the receipts. Politics, Health, Education - you abandoned your posts. You are to blame.

‘Where there have been concerns about particular stories, we have addressed them’

Half true. Some editors have, in the face of opposition, tried to address some concerns.

‘We continually review our coverage to reflect developments such as the recent Supreme Court ruling’

While it’s true to say that sex and gender guidance is being reviewed - once again, this is not action, and six months is a very long time to correct a very obvious mistake. As they’re pushing back the timing to wait for the EHRC guidance - completely unnecessarily - the BBC has done nothing with its guidance to reflect the ruling.

Resistance will continue. The Executive Complaints Unit is a mess, with a profound lack of understanding of this issue. In our view it should be disbanded and Fraser Steel, who heads it, sent out to grass.

Pride forums are still awash with male producers and programme staff discussing unofficial tactics to keep gender critical voices off air - Sex Matters Org being enemy number one. (They really don’t like Maya Forstater. It’s the informal black list that ‘doesn’t exist’)

Staff members at all levels who either identify as trans or have trans-identified family members have an unholy and chilling effect on coverage.

Because they are believers - you, the audience and licence payer, are not to be told the truth about gender identity theory and its harms in case their feelings are hurt. It goes without saying that this needs to stop.

But this Telegraph expose is a game changer because it does mean the BBC can never again publish with impunity the sort of unadulterated drivel we have seen so much of since 2015.

We want to see fact checks, and we want to see harmful content removed, and we want preferred pronouns abandoned.

Those people inside working hard to sort this out - we know you’re there, and thanks. For the rest - know that you don’t have any deniability. This can’t be blamed on anyone else.

And finally - the Telegraph itself still complies with preferred pronouns. It too should think on.

There’ll be more to follow as we go through files and notes. These are our first thoughts. Let us know what you think in the comments. And thanks for reading.

(NB: all the links and images will have to be added properly later.)

Photo by Brooks DeCillia on Unsplash