The hurdles we face

Journalists have been telling us about their experiences in newsrooms across the UK

It is often asserted by trans rights activists and their supporters that gender-critical campaigners have no cause to complain about media coverage. Columnists including the Guardian’s Owen Jones have repeatedly alleged that opposition to gender-self ID and other trans activist goals amounts to “a media-driven moral panic”. Another Guardian writer, Jonathan Liew, recently described parkrun as having been been “doggedly pursued by protesters and the media, unhappy at its policy of allowing trans women to identify as female”.

It is true that the British press has, over the years since gender recognition reform became a hot topic, included some prominent gender-critical voices. The Times’s Janice Turner, one of the first journalists to write regularly about trans activism from a gender-critical perspective, has won prestigious prizes. And while both Suzanne Moore and Hadley Freeman left the Guardian after encountering hostility from colleagues, both write weekly columns for other newspapers. So are anti-gender-critical attitudes only an issue at the Guardian? Or have reporters, commissioning editors and feature writers elsewhere experienced similar treatment? 

SEENinJournalism has heard from journalists, mostly women, working in many different organisations. None has had an experience as extreme as Moore’s, who in 2020 faced a petition of more than 300 colleagues objecting to what was alleged to be the Guardian’s “pattern of publishing transphobic content” – days after she wrote a column objecting to the historian Selina Todd being disinvited from speaking at a conference.

But many journalists describe difficulties in presenting or discussing ideas for stories relating to women’s sex-based rights, or touching on areas in which trans and women’s rights can conflict – for example, sports. And some describe workplaces in which barely veiled hostility to feminists who support single-sex spaces has become the norm and appears to be accepted by managers.

“I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve suggested interviewing gender-critical campaigners,” says one SEENinJournalism member (who asked to remain anonymous). “There have been so many employment tribunals in which gender-critical women have been shown to have been discriminated against. But these seem to be acknowledged grudgingly, rather than celebrated as feminist victories.”

“I do go on suggesting things,” she added, “but it’s really demoralising when my ideas are not just rejected but seem to be disapproved of. People who think of themselves as liberal and progressive say that gender-critical voices are everywhere. But Helen Joyce, who wrote the book Trans, has still never been properly interviewed on the BBC or in the Guardian or Observer. Not once in all these years, even though she used to be a senior journalist at the Economist and is now a full-time campaigner [for the human rights organisation Sex Matters]. 

“I see reports of female athletes being beaten by trans-identified male competitors in the US all the time, and also reports of serious injuries. But these barely seem to be commented on in the UK media. It seems as though a lot of the talk about supporting women’s sports is just that, talk, and when there is a really tricky, important issue of policy to think about, editors and reporters mostly don’t want to know. Unless they just want to rubbish women’s concerns about safety and fairness, or accuse them of being aligned with Trump.”

Others have had similar experiences.  “I once said the words 'Kathleen Stock' as we were doing a story about whether universities had lost their way,” says one. “The room suddenly fell silent and everyone looked at their feet, fear in their eyes.  Total no-go area.  Couldn't even mention her name. It was as if I’d farted.

"I have to make sure all my editorial conversations are on email or WhatsApp or whatever, so there's a paper trail when I'm inevitably accused of being an activist just for trying to be impartial. It saved my skin a few times".

Another was disciplined for raising an impartiality concern that was eventually proven justified.  “It even led to a public correction. But nothing happened to the people who reported me and went ahead with publication despite being told they were breaching all sorts of guidelines. It seems astonishing that could happen, but it did.”

Others speak of pitching dozens of stories that are ignored, of having their suggestions blanked, or met with bizarre responses. ‘I was once told by a manager that his teenage daughter thought it was all fine.  What kind of editor thinks his decisions should be made by 14-year-olds?”

Another said an editor had raised his hands in the air and exclaimed ‘that’s offensive!’ when the biological sex of a trans person was pointed out.

We at SEENInJournalism want to support anyone who’s faced this kind of mulish, unbending resistance to efforts to address the problem of bias by omission or inaccuracy.

We know of many more similarly excruciating experiences.  These are the hurdles put in front of reporters, researchers, and TV and radio producers when they’re trying to achieve normal, accurate and balanced coverage of what are quite frankly really good news stories.  The mantra ‘no debate’ not only had a chilling effect on comment, it acted as a fire blanket on important journalism.

We will be highlighting more experiences in the next week. If you have your own to share, do contact us.