Bullying, Cowardice, And Careerism Behind BBC Disinformation On Gender

The highest purpose of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is to “Pursue the truth with no agenda,” said its Director-General, Tim Davie, last week. BBC would do this “by reporting fearlessly and fairly.” In his speech, “A BBC For the Future,” Davie added that “Disinformation, propaganda, and partial news is [sic] weakening our shared understanding of the world, undermining trust in our institutions and our democratic process.”

To combat this disinformation, the BBC launched a special initiative, “BBC Verify,” last year. Last week, the BBC released a 9-page report to reporters that required a “careful and accurate use of language” regarding gender.

But according to current and former BBC journalists, the BBC itself is spreading disinformation, failing to pursue the truth without regard to any agenda, and behaving fearfully and unfairly on issues relating to transgenderism.

Three days before Davie gave his speech, The Times of London reported that BBC had buried a large package of investigative stories on the problems with giving children and adolescents puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in an effort to change their sex or gender. Former BBC journalist Hannah Barnes said, “The BBC didn’t really back our work at all.”

It’s true that BBC ran part of Barnes’s article. She told the Times that it “wasn’t blocked.” Barnes went on to write a book, Time To Think, based in part on her reporting, which started at BBC.

But Barnes told the Times, “There’s a really big difference [between running a story and properly projecting it].” Her documentary films “weren’t promoted across the BBC. It wasn’t like Panorama. You didn’t hear it on the news bulletins. You didn’t see it on the Six or the Ten [O’Clock News].”

And BBC buried a major part of her story, said Barnes. She had learned that the medical director of Britain’s main gender clinic, Tavistock, had “failed to mention a number of safeguarding concerns raised by [gender clinic] Gids staff in a review he had published of the service.”

The Times of London described Barnes’ scoop as “a turning point in the story: a revelation that prompted the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to conduct its own review, in which Gids would ultimately be rated ‘inadequate.’” The Times reported that none of it ran. Said Barnes, “It wasn’t anywhere on the BBC. The online piece was so buried that even though I had written it, I couldn’t find it.”

In response to our questions, a BBC spokesperson told Public, “The BBC is committed to reporting all stories impartially, in accordance with its publicly available editorial guidelines.” The BBC spokesperson referred us to BBC editorial guidelines, an article in Dateline about the 9-page reporting guide, and the transcript of testimony given by Davie and two other BBC executives to a parliamentary committee.”

For years, the BBC’s decision to refer to trans-identified men as “women” has inspired controversy. In 2022, BBC changed the pronouns of a trans-identified male attacker. The Times of London reported at the time that “The woman referred to her alleged rapist as ‘him’ but [BBC] insiders said that her words were changed to avoid ‘misgendering’ the abuser in an article on the corporation’s website.” BBC has, on several other occasions, referred to male rapists and male sexual predators of children using female pronouns

 The BBC Style guide requires BBC employees to use female pronouns with “a person born male who lives as a female… We generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question unless there are editorial reasons not to do so.”

Barnes isn’t the only former BBC reporter to level concerns at BBC for bias. “The BBC is telling its journalists to lie about a person’s sex under almost all circumstances if the person requests it,” wrote Cath Walton, who worked at BBC for 25 years before leaving in 2023.

“How is a presenter or reporter to explain why there is a controversy at all about trans-identified men in, say, women’s sports or prisons if they are unable to say that they are male?” Walton asked. “It should be a requirement, not a punishable offense.”

And now, another BBC journalist has decided to speak out, and agreed to record a podcast interview, which can be listened to above.

Sean McGinty, a local reporter based on Blackpool, said, “When I grew up, I didn't care who people shagged, what drugs they took, what they wore, what they identified as…. There's a huge gay community and a huge community of drag queens in Blackpool. A lot of cross-dressing. But then you see things that are not true being said.”

BBC had been one of the most trusted media companies in the world. Why is it now undermining its reputation on the trans issue?

“We have to be kind, and caring, and nice.”

According to BBC Director General Tim Davie, the reason for BBC’s use of female pronouns to describe male rapists, murderers, and sex offenders is, “We have to be kind, and caring, and nice.”

“Tim’s problem,” wrote Walton last week, “is that he’s being played…. Tim has fallen victim to a narrative that the truth is hurtful, so it’s better to disguise it, or leave it out altogether.”

But Walton suggests that what’s behind Davie’s efforts to be kind is cowardice and fear in the face of bullying activists. “He’s not an activist,” said Walton, “and neither is David Jordan, Head of Editorial Policy, who was sitting next to him [at the Parliamentary hearing] — but they obviously swim in a sea of activism… We have an Editor-in-Chief who thinks that telling the truth isn’t nice.”

The BBC isn’t so kind to reporters who tell the truth. After Walton tweeted about how calling non-trans individuals “cis-” was pseudoscience, she wrote, “I was put through a lengthy disciplinary process for saying truthful things about sex and gender.”

McGinty describes a negative internal reaction after he raised questions about the parents of trans-identified children. “We had a guest on,” he said, “and it was parents of what they described as a trans child. It was a few years ago. And this child, I think, was 10. It was like, "‘Oh, you know, what are the issues? Let's talk about it!’ At that point, I said, ‘Not all parents are good parents,” and it was like I'd set off a stink bomb.”

According to Walton, BBC’s decision to mislabel men as women resulted from a trans activist pressure campaign. “The phrasing inserted into the Style Guide in late 2013 was almost word for word a quote from activist Leng Montgomery—‘use the pronouns they prefer,’” said Walton. In 2011, BBC gave seed funding directly to another group, “All About Trans.”

The BBC didn’t just fund “All About Trans,” it also allowed the activist group to dictate BBC policy. “The ink was barely dry on the Equality Act before the BBC helped fund a group that became All About Trans,” Walton explained, “which subsequently had multiple meetings with BBC journalists, editorial policy executives and — crucially — the then Head of Online.”

A review of BBC coverage shows that it has, on multiple occasions, failed to safeguard children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults alleged to be trans, given the large and growing body of evidence showing high levels of mental illness and psychiatric disorders among trans-identified people. There is significant evidence that BBC has affirmed, in its reporting, gender ideology, which may have put a significant number of children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults at risk directly by affirming gender dysphoria and indirectly by putting them on a path to drugs and surgeries.

McGinty said that BBC had failed to “safeguard” children and adults with mental illness. “Most reasonable and decent broadcasters and news outlets consider safeguarding,” he explained. “They want to ensure that the people that contribute to the programs they make do not suffer any harm in any way. And I think that's been forgotten on this subject sometimes. I see clips of people who to me…  show all the signs of having some serious mental health problems. And I do know a bit about that because I grew up in a house with some serious mental health problems.”

To be sure, ideology is driving the demands by trans activists upon the BBC. “It’s clear now, however, that gender theory capture has crept up to the top of the BBC,” said Walton.

But careerism and cowardice are also behind BBC support for trans ideology. “I met Tim a couple of years ago to discuss this,” she said, ”and to ask that the Style Guide be updated to remove self-identification. Self-ID was installed in the Guide in 2013 after friendly meetings with trans activists, and is the root and source of most of the BBC’s biased reporting. It was suggested to Tim that it would be quite straightforward to initially just take this out… He made it clear that even this would be too much — that the ensuing ructions would be too difficult to deal with.”

Failure to Safeguard

Barnes and Walton left the BBC, while McGinty suspects his days at the organization are numbered. “I'm not here to whine about how difficult it has been for me internally,” said McGinty. “I have to face outwards. You've got to face out at some point. I've done it via Twitter to some degree. And that causes you problems within the workplace as well because there's a stream of ‘You can't say this. You can say this.’”

BBC has, in its reporting, lent significant credibility to the pseudoscientific notion that a person’s biological sex can be changed through drugs and surgery.  The BBC’s style guide requirement that its reporters use “preferred pronouns” is inherently inaccurate, misleading, and biased while requiring its employees to refer to male rapists as “she” and “her” is offensive to women.

The good news is that the BBC knows it has a trust problem. BBC’s bias on gender may be among the issues that have resulted in declining public trust in the media company. The share of Britons telling pollsters, “I trust BBC journalists to tell the truth,” declined from 50% in April 2020 to 42% in November 2021 to 38% in July 2023.

And BBC journalists are speaking out. McGinty said he decided to speak with me after BBC refused to cover the WPATH Files, which show widespread medical mistreatment in the name of “gender-affirming care.” The Times of London, the Economist, the Telegraph, and the Guardian all published articles about the scandal.

“Go to BBC.co.uk/news, put in capital ‘WPATH’ in, and you get one article, and it's a hit piece on Ron DeSantis,” said McGinty. “That's it. How many days is it? Now, it’s 22 days since [WPATH Files] was released. Now, are the BBC or anybody else under an obligation to report on this? No. But is it in the public interest? It has to be.”

Indeed, in the article to which McGinty referred, the BBC held up WPATH as a leading scientific and medical authority for the medicalization of children misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria. “DeSantis limits trans treatments,” reads the BBC headline. “The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH),” noted the reporter, “said the Florida bills would have ‘a chilling effect on the medical community by inserting politics into healthcare.’”

As for safeguarding, McGinty said, “You've got to safeguard the child. You've got to safeguard the mental health of that whole family. Like you've got to wonder what is going on when people are wanting to be on the television with their child talking about a five-year-old that isn't a boy anymore or something…. they need help. They don't need to be on the telly”

The BBC’s coverage is undermining trust from within. “The BBC’s job is first, to tell us the truth, and then to add evidence and context,” said Walton, even though “the News Style Guide… tells its journalists to lie about sex according to the preference of the subject, be they angel or demon. Of course there’s a caveat of ‘unless there are good editorial reasons.’ But as being a murderer and cat liquidiser — in the case of Scarlet Blake — didn’t reach that bar, it’s hard to see what would.”

McGinty agreed. “When a trusted news source… describes a rapist who clearly has a penis as a ‘woman’... I'm sorry, that's the line in the sand…. That's it for me. I'm not going to let that pass. And I think a lot of people felt like that…I just think we need to go back to biology and journalism.”

BBC has changed before. In 2020, the BBC, after facing criticism, stopped working with a transgender advocacy group. Given declining trust, more change is in store for all news media, BBC included. Director-General Tim Davie could take seriously his promise to “Pursue the truth with no agenda by reporting fearlessly and fairly.” If he doesn’t, he might not be the Director-General for much longer.

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