The BBC style guide directs journalists to use preferred pronouns. This is systematic bias. It is reporting so-called “gender identity”, a contested and misleading concept, instead of sex, knowing that the audience will believe it means sex. Thus we get “Woman kills husband with samurai sword” and “Scarlet Blake confessed murder to her ex, court hears”. The details of both brutal killings suggest they were highly unlikely that they could have been committed by women. In fact both killers are men.

But the harm goes much deeper than misleading the audience. The BBC has promoted social and medical transition to children as a positive step, and represented puberty blockers as benign, a “pause button”. It has largely ignored evidence of harm, reporting on the Cass Review as if its main finding was that there were not enough gender clinics, and ignoring the scandal of the leaked WPATH files completely.

Sex Matters has written to senior BBC executives four times about this in the past two years, most recently since the leaked Prescott report which revealed that the board had been told of the problems months ago. With other concerned groups, we have met with senior BBC executives on several occasions. We have all contributed to style-guide reviews, made endless complaints and offered solutions. The BBC has so far failed to accept the severity of its failings, and has made only the slightest of changes to its reporting.

The Culture, Media and Sport committee had a chance to question BBC board members about this on 24th November when it met to discuss the Prescott report. Sex Matters sent a briefing to all committee members, asking that they explore this issue. Disappointingly, the committee did not do so.

The last time senior BBC executives appeared before this committee, in March 2024, Damian Green MP accused the BBC of institutional bias. He pointed to the BBC’s reprimand of Justin Webb for explaining that transwomen were “in other words, male” as a clear sign of bias. The director-general, Tim Davie, dismissed the issue as a culture war, saying people should just “be nice”. 

This time, the BBC’s representatives were not even asked about the misleading reporting of sex and the promotion of transgender identities.

The BBC must stop pretending that men can become women and that boys can become girls, or girls boys. It must start telling the full, unvarnished truth about how institutional responses to gender identity and transgenderism are affecting our society. 

This means rebalancing away from the endless diet of celebratory stories about people who identify as transgender. The BBC has a responsibility to report the truth about the impact of this on other people, and the challenges facing those who have realised “transition” was a mistake. It must change its style guide too, so that we can believe what we are reading. That seems the most basic requirement of an impartial news organisation. Is there the will at the BBC to do any of this?

The post Institutional bias at the BBC appeared first on Sex Matters.

Both Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, and Deborah Turness, chief executive of BBC News, resigned almost a week later – but BBC news teams reporting on the resignations have so far glossed over the role that transgender issues played. And the reply that Shah wrote to the committee does not acknowledge either the harm the BBC has done to its own reputation or the wider damage caused to its audiences by its long-term failures in reporting on sex and gender issues.

In the letter, Shah addresses in detail concerns about the broadcaster’s coverage of Trump and Gaza, but dismisses the disturbing findings and evidence reported by Prescott on the BBC’s coverage of trans issues, claiming that “much of the coverage met the BBC’s standards of impartiality and accuracy”. That defence ignores the stories that the BBC chose not to report on, and dismisses the damage done by years of misinformation about puberty blockers and medical transition.

The letter seems to show that the BBC is still in denial about the extent of its failures. Is the transactivist mindset so baked into the institution now that it is impossible for senior leadership, let alone journalists, to think objectively? Or is it too much to admit that the BBC has been complicit in promoting an ideology that has irreparably harmed vulnerable children, and set women’s and gay rights back decades?

Sex Matters wrote to the BBC’s board last week after the dossier was leaked, calling on its members to return the national broadcaster to its commitment to “pursuing the truth with no agenda”. 

The revelation that the BBC has been suppressing news about the dark side of gender ideology and instead serving up a diet of sunny promotional stories had come as no surprise. The alleged role of the “LGBTQ desk” as the graveyard for critical coverage of trans ideology, and of BBC internal staff networks as minders of other journalists’ stories, was well known. 

The dossier quoted David Grossman, the editorial guidelines and standards committee’s senior editorial adviser, who had warned that the BBC’s approach suggested that “the concept of gender identity is an established fact rather than contested”.

The culture and expectations at the BBC have been made clear by the proliferation of Progress Pride lanyards, management allowing trans-identifying males to use the women’s toilets, and a one-sided approach to complaints.

The dossier highlighted:

• stories raising concerns about the quality or safety of care given to gender-questioning children and adults receiving “little or no coverage”
• reporting that failed to reflect the experience of detransitioners
• more stories about the waiting times for people to receive care than examination of the quality of that care 
• a surprisingly high number of stories about drag queens 
• no coverage of the WPATH files leak which raised concerns about the quality of care given to gender-distressed children. 
• scant coverage of campaigning by, and the concerns of, gender-critical women
• failure to to cover the story of the Darlington nurses 
• no coverage on the issue of male police and prison officers being allowed to conduct strip searches on women and girls.

A significant reset is needed, which will take bravery and seriousness from the top. In our letter – as reported in The Telegraph today – we call on the BBC board to do five things: 

1. Root out the oppressive influence of transgender ideology in the organisation.
2. Replace activist language with normal language.
3. Stop normalising transgender ideology in BBC output.
4. Ensure that all BBC journalists can tell the unvarnished truth without fear. 
5. Retrain staff on core facts.

The post When will the BBC face up to the truth? appeared first on Sex Matters.

Watch the recording

Speakers

Dr Emma Hilton is a developmental biologist widely regarded as a leading voice on the science of sex differences in sport.

Her paper, ‘Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage’, co-written with Tommy Lundberg, is the most cited on this topic. Her work is cited in multiple international and national sports policies, and she is consulted by international sports federations and as an expert witness in the UK and USA.

Sharron Davies has been one of the UK’s most popular athletes since bursting onto the scene as a 13-year-old Olympian in 1976. Her international career as a swimmer spanned three decades, included numerous major titles and medals, and 200 British records. 

In 1980 she took a silver medal at the Moscow Olympics, finishing just behind Petra Schneider of East Germany, who has since admitted that her performance was heavily drug-enhanced, and this experience informed her recent book Unfair Play: The Battle for Women’s Sport.

Mara Yamauchi is a former elite marathon runner and a two-time Olympian, coming sixth in the Beijing Olympic marathon in 2008. She won the Osaka marathon in 2008 and was runner-up in London in 2009. Between 2006 and 2022, she was the second-fastest British female marathon runner ever (2:23:12). Her book Marathon Wisdom was published in 2022. 

She has spoken extensively in the media and at conferences on this issue. Her analysis of distance running events’ entry policies and results shows the unfairness of self-identification policies and non-binary categories, and their disproportionate impact on female competitors, and she has extensive contacts with female runners who have lost out to males in the Female category.

Further reading

One-page briefing on DSDs and women’s sport

Briefing on the Olympic boxing situation and the problem of male inclusion in women’s sport

Why sex matters in sport – publications and blog posts

Sex Matters’ expert team for sport

Resources for journalists

The post Sex Matters in sport – media briefing appeared first on Sex Matters.

The post The problem of male inclusion in women’s sport appeared first on Sex Matters.

The post Briefing on sport and DSDs (disorders of sex development) appeared first on Sex Matters.

But when it comes to reporting on issues of sex and gender, the BBC is neither accurate nor impartial. There is a strong tendency to present gender identities as if they were sex. References to trans identities are omitted, except where the trans person is a victim, where it becomes the story. When questioned about this, the Director General’s response was that we should all “be nice”.

There’s endless coverage of drag and Pride, which wouldn’t matter if the serious stories were also being covered alongside the froth. But it seems that a breathless celebration of gender-bending has supplanted any serious coverage. This pattern of reporting and non-reporting goes back a long way, but here are some recent examples.

An unreported healthcare scandal

The most serious omission is the failure to cover properly the scandal of how gender-distressed children and vulnerable adults are being treated. The Cass Review reported on the weak evidence for puberty blockers and misguided “diagnostic overshadowing” – ignoring all other problems and diagnoses when gender distress was a factor. The BBC reported Cass’s findings largely as a problem of under-capacity in NHS gender clinics and the report itself as inadequate. The NHS in both England and Scotland largely ended access to puberty blockers for gender distress; the BBC reported this neutrally but with little context. It could have said, for example, that NHS England’s specialist children’s Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock had evidence from its own study, which it had delayed publishing, that such treatment could harm more children than it helped. In any other area of medicine, this would surely have been worthy of the attention of the BBC.

In July 2024 a legal challenge was brought at the High Court against NHS England’s ban on puberty blockers for gender-related treatment. The BBC found it more important to report on how the cost of living crisis was affecting drag queens – in BBC Newsbeat, which is aimed at children.

Then there are the various revelations around the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the self-regulating and self-declared leader in “transgender health”. The BBC did not report on the “WPATH files” – leaked recordings and internal chats from WPATH which showed a casual disregard for patient wellbeing, together with open admissions from some clinicians that they had no idea what they were doing. Given the BBC’s great interest in access to transgender healthcare in the UK, such as in this recent piece about older male transitioners waiting for hormone treatment, it seems odd to have ignored this. A different “leaked emails” story was covered, one which aligned with the BBC narrative about children needing more access to gender clinics.

The latest WPATH scandal spans healthcare and politics. It emerged that a senior official in the Biden administration, himself trans-identifying, had leaned on WPATH to remove minimum ages for “gender-affirming” surgery. Rachel Levine, a late-transitioning man and father who advocates for children to be medically transitioned (which will usually render them sterile and asexual), is Assistant Secretary for Health in the US Department of Health and Human Services. Anyone interested in developments in trans healthcare, as the BBC had appeared to be, should be covering this story. But the BBC simply ignored it.

Meanwhile, on Saturday Kitchen, a programme watched by children, guests celebrated a young woman’s double mastectomy done on the basis of her identity as non-binary. There was nothing about the pain or risk, just a joke about how some people hadn’t noticed. If her distress was so great that she had to have her breasts removed, that seems worth a mention, perhaps along with the downsides, like not being able to feed a baby. But no. She was congratulated as a role model. 

Now you’re trans, now you’re not

A trans victim is always trans, a trans perpetrator rarely.

Murderer Scarlet Blake’s trans identity was not mentioned for months: his claimed sex was reported as if it were his actual sex. 

A “woman” in Brighton was charged with killing her husband with a Samurai sword; there was no mention of the accused “woman” being male despite his high profile as a trans-rights campaigner. In fact both the “woman” and the male victim had identified as women for years, but it seems that the victim had desisted. None of this was mentioned by the BBC.

Thus we have women flashers, rapists and murderers. These would be “man bites dog” stories – newsworthy because unusual – except that they are not. They are just more reports of male violence, but wrongly attributed to women. This is a compound problem, because it hides the fact that trans identification does not affect male offending patterns. 

When a trans-identifying person is a victim, though, their trans status is the whole focus. The BBC frequently reports stories of trans people, sometimes conflated with being drag, and generally with a narrative suggesting intolerance as the central issue. Here’s an example from sport: a sympathy piece for one player who can’t play in some women’s events because of not being female. There is no context, no objective information, as to why this is the case. 

The UK Sports Councils Equality Group’s 2021 guidance on transgender inclusion said that excluding men from women’s sports is both necessary and lawful for fairness in gender-affected sports. This is not even mentioned. Female darts players have spoken about this issue, including British former world champion Deta Hedman, who was of interest to the BBC in the past, but there is no mention of this or any attempt at balance in this piece. There are four separate references to abuse and harassment faced by the player, starting with the headline, but not one example is given. This is not informative or impartial. 

Tensions between trans demands and women’s rights

The BBC reports low-level anti-trans activity, such as damage to a Pride flag, objections to a Pride display in a bookshop, and vandalism of a rainbow pedestrian crossing. But actual violence against women speaking about their rights doesn’t seem to catch the eye of BBC reporters. A Let Women Speak rally in Brighton ended with women taking refuge from an angry pro-trans mob by hiding in a shop; they had to be escorted out by police van. There was ample video footage but it was not mentioned on the BBC. This was only the latest of several such incidents, including street protests at the launch of the Lesbian Project (reported by Pink News as a pro-trans protest); and smoke bombs used in a pro-trans protest against a medical conference called First Do No Harm as well as, some time ago, at a women’s rights meeting held near Grenfell Tower in west London. None of this was reported by the BBC. 

Legal battles

The BBC reported at least five times on the Elan-Cane case, in which a “non-binary” person wanted a passport with an X rather than M or F. But stories in which women win legal battles to protect their sex-based rights, or to oppose the imposition of transgender ideology in their workplace, are so rarely covered that when the judgment in the case of Roz Adams v Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre was reported, albeit on the Scotland page, it prompted an outpouring on Mumsnet. 

A glimmer of progress?

In June the BBC reported “Transgender woman guilty of rape after night out”. The BBC may well think this is progress. But many people will not know that a transgender woman means a man who claims to be a woman, and not the other way round, so those who see the headline may be misled. Those who read on will have found that “Lexi Secker” was “living as a man when she attacked a woman”. But it is still not clear whether this was a woman temporarily “living as a man”, or a man who later decided to “live as a woman”. The convicted rapist is reported as if he is now a woman, using female pronouns. Which is the real Lexi? It’s impossible for the reader to know.

The BBC needs to put accuracy ahead of ideology and propaganda

Our national broadcaster, which we all fund, should be setting the standard for impartial media reporting in the UK. Instead, it appears to be promoting an ideology, confusing readers, misleading the public, and hiding the truth. 

There’s a simple choice to be made at the BBC. Will it report honestly and clearly, ensuring that when it uses words like “woman” and “she”, these are accurate, carrying the normal meaning of sex, the one that readers will understand? Is it willing to report accurately, even if that may cast a trans-identifying person in a bad light? So far, it seems not. 

What can you do?

If you see something you feel is misleading or wrong, complain to the BBC. If you are a journalist or you are writing to complain you might want to use our media handbook.

The post Does sex matter at the BBC? appeared first on Sex Matters.

The BBC’s director of complaints has ruled that the presenter Justin Webb broke the BBC’s rules on impartiality when he commented, in a discussion about a women’s chess tournament on Radio 4’s Today programme, that “trans women” are male.

This is shocking behaviour from the BBC: the national broadcaster, funded by public money and obliged by its charter to be accurate and without bias.

The BBC ruling said that Webb “gave the impression of endorsing one viewpoint in a highly controversial area”. This is extraordinary. Some people think the earth is flat, but to say that it is round is not an endorsement of one viewpoint – it’s a statement of fact. “Trans women” by definition are people born male who now identify as women. Since sex cannot change, they remain male. Polling has shown that a third of people are confused about what “trans woman” means, so it was helpful and appropriate of Webb to explain. If this is not allowed, people will be confused and potentially misled by BBC news stories. 

This isn’t the first time Webb has been criticised for pointing out that sex is not the same as gender identity. Last summer he asked Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey if there should “be spaces where biological males cannot go” in reference to trans-identifying males. He also got into trouble for saying that Professor Kathleen Stock had been “falsely” accused of transphobia by students at Sussex University.

It’s not just the BBC

Almost without exception, media reports in the past fortnight of the conviction and then sentencing of murderer Scarlet Blake referred to Blake as a woman, mostly without pointing out that he was male or even that he was transgender. (The Daily Telegraph was a notable exception.) The standard media excuse for calling male perpetrators women is that the court referred to them as such. In the Blake case, the judge in court referred to Blake’s sex at birth and transgender identity. 

The media regulator IPSO has recently revised its guidance on reporting sex and gender, but it seems that nothing much has changed in reporting. Male crimes are still being described (and recorded by the police and the criminal justice system) as committed by women. 

What happens next?

Until there is a policy change, or BBC senior executives find the moral courage to allow honest reporting about this issue, nothing will change. Webb has had a telling-off and now has to be careful what he says on the radio. 

There is pressure from both sides on this because we all know how important it is for news – especially crime reporting – to be reported accurately, and in clear factual language that everyone can understand. Forcing presenters to use the language of gender ideology means that some people won’t be able to decode the story. It hides the facts. 

Sex Matters and other campaign groups have been working on this for a while. We won’t stop until we get honest, accurate reporting on this issue. 

What you can do

Complaints are taken seriously, if only because they create work for the organisation receiving them. The BBC compiles a daily report of complaints received by number and nature. Bias is considered one of the most serious failures, so it registers when a lot of complaints are received about any one report.

1. Complain to the BBC when you see a BBC story you think is biased or inaccurate. Start with the Scarlet Blake story and Richard Garside’s thread on Twitter. Don’t give up if you’re fobbed off at stage one. Push on to stage two and then the Executive Complaints Unit.
2. Complain to IPSO if you see reporting in newspapers or news websites that is biased or inaccurate. You may have to complain to the publication directly first; it’s usually easy to find an email address on its website where you can send a complaint.
3. Send your local newspaper, radio station or news website a copy of our media guide, which is explained here. 
4. Complain to the other broadcasters too (here are the contacts for Sky News, ITV and Channel 4). 

Use our bad media watch reporting tool to let us know when you see biased reports and find out more about making a complaint.

The post Bias at the BBC appeared first on Sex Matters.