Sex, gender and the BBC

This is my second Substack post, and having looked at the origins of the problems the BBC experiences in covering gender identity theory, I want to explain that change is possible, and what kind of change is needed.

Most people know I used to work for the BBC, and it’s normally seen as neither gracious nor forward-thinking to criticise your former employer. Certainly writing this is no kind of personal vindication: I’d rather not do it at all. The BBC was very, very good to me when I was seriously ill. But the BBC is still getting it so badly wrong on sex and gender that I have to write this. Unless serious and measured steps are taken by editors to address its unbalanced approach, BBC coverage will be left behind internationally as this medical scandal unfolds.

So I feel that some kind of distanced awareness-raising would be helpful: and besides, sniping on Twitter, while gratifying, is not always constructive.

It’s a depressing day to be writing it, after the announcement that Andrea Long Chu has won a Pulitzer Prize. But no one should be hopeless at this, and imagine that this is a sign that international journalism is finally fully captured. These things often happen because a very few activists, or perhaps only one, make proposals and suggestions that others are too ignorant or afraid to challenge. Fortunately, the immediate public backlash usually serves as an education.

Rather than writing about ‘capture’ at the BBC, I’ll continue to discuss bias and you can make up your own minds. Bias on gender and women’s rights at the BBC takes a number of forms. Here I’ll address the most obvious: a reluctance to cover stories which don’t affirm the gender affirmative line - basically bias by omission. There are dozens and dozens of stories the BBC has chosen not to cover, many of them given a significant showing in outlets like the Times and Telegraph, the Daily Mail, Sky, Channel Four, Times Radio, some of them simply going viral on social media. In a future post I’ll give a list of unsuccessfully pitched suggestions.

Why so much omission? It’s not a natural disaster, something that ‘just happens’, and it looks straightforward - there are two main possibilities. The journalists whose responsibility it is to cover this are either being blocked, or they simply don’t want to do it - it’s not enough of a priority.

There is only one other potential reason, and that’s the fall-out of previous BBC bias during the extreme gender affirmative years between 2013 and 2020. Some gender critical (shorthand for reality-focused) spokespeople or potential participants just don’t want to talk to the BBC any more.

This wouldn’t affect balance in news coverage, but the BBC has a particular fondness for the ‘lived experience’, the ‘personal journey’, a very intimate and powerful way of telling a story. For example, publishing a ‘lived experience’ of surgical transition regret would be a dynamic and potent contribution to the BBC’s gender coverage. That kind of feature requires much trust from the participant, and given the BBC’s shocking history of bias, it’s no surprise that the trust often isn’t there.

However this is less significant than the BBC’s habit over the years of rejecting, ignoring, or simply not seeking out the sorts of stories that have kept other outlets ragingly busy. And it’s rectifiable by nurturing even-handedness, trust and a balanced contacts book.

There are other ways of managing these paths to bias by omission.

The first would be to appoint a correspondent and producer to cover this subject, and only this subject. The issue falls under the remit of health, legal, identity, social affairs and politics. This means it can be batted from pillar to post if journalists in those hubs are reluctant to cover it: and if the current teams won’t do it, give it to someone who will. Someone who understands the facts around sex and gender.

However for this to happen, the people who’d appoint that correspondent team would have to not only understand but be able publicly to acknowledge the facts around sex and gender themselves. Where are the signs that the BBC is ready for this step?

It is absolutely baffling as a journalist to be told that the facts can’t be articulated because they are on one side of the debate, or that understanding and acknowledging the facts make it difficult to be impartial.

This is a foundational problem for BBC coverage of sex and gender. It has to be able to acknowledge these facts (sex is immutable etc) and not relegate them to the opinion side bar. It has to be able to distinguish between an agenda of fact-based neutrality and an agenda of belief activism.

This is really no more than common or garden critical thinking, and the BBC could do with a good hard dose of it.

The second path to managing bias by omission would be to produce those fact checks and reality checks that are so badly needed.

In a normal media landscape, this would not be insurmountable. The BBC even has specialist disinformation teams whose role is to separate fact from belief - including extremist belief. No journalist is meant to treat all beliefs equally: in the old saying, journalists aren’t supposed to simply report the argument between two people over whether or not it’s raining. They need to go to the window and look out.

The BBC is unfortunately refusing to even open the curtains. This is where something I call ‘accidental activism’ becomes important.

As a journalist, one brings one’s knowledge to work. That’s a basic requirement. You bring what you know to the desk. It’s your duty, it’s the basis of what you’re paid for. Then as an impartial journalist, you curate a range of views around it.

But if a journalist believes in gender identity theory - that the statement ‘trans women are women’ is true - it naturally follows that in their world it’s ‘knowledge’ they should be bringing to work. They don’t think of it as activism, and they don’t think of themselves as activists. In a way, they’re doing what they see as their job. They believe it’s true, and that it’s their duty to install it in their content.

Some may even say ‘my beliefs aren’t important: I’m professionally impartial on whether ‘trans women are women’’. But their beliefs are important, and they fundamentally don’t understand this. As soon as any journalist or editor is impartial about whether people can change sex, or whether sex is determined by the brain, they’ve picked a side.

If you think people might be able to change sex, when they can’t, and sex might be determined by the brain, when it isn’t, you’ve chosen the counterfactual position, and it determines everything from the stories you choose to cover, to the way you cover them, the wording you chose, the views you publish around them, and the tags and positioning with which you choose to promote them.

This is a block which the BBC is finding it impossible to overcome. Of course there are journalists at the BBC who understand that trans-identified men aren’t women, and of course there are those who believe ‘trans women are women’ and who’d regard it as defamatory if you said they didn’t.

But the real problem is that gender identity belief is the bedrock of the BBC’s editorial stance (see previous) and publicly acknowledging the facts would upend it. Changing that requires a degree of commitment which on current evidence simply isn’t there.