Does sex matter at the BBC?

The national broadcaster’s mission is to provide “impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain”. It is obliged by its charter to be accurate and impartial. Accuracy is something you might expect of any news medium, but the BBC has constant pressure to ensure that it is politically impartial as well. 

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. Then the General Medical Council withdrew scandal-tainted “GenderGP” doctor Helen Webberley’s licence to practise. 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.