The BBC is spreading trans disinformation

It’s official: if you’re a journalist working for the BBC, you are now obliged to lie to your audience when discussing the trans issue.

This week, the corporation upheld a complaint against Radio 4 presenter Justin Webb. It ruled that he broke BBC impartiality rules when he pointed out that transwomen are ‘male’, even though this is a simple statement of fact.

In August last year, the Today programme aired a segment about the International Chess Federation’s new trans guidelines, which ban transwomen from competing in women’s chess tournaments. To clarify what this meant, Webb said the new rules would exclude ‘transwomen, in other words, males’.

A listener then complained to the BBC, accusing Webb of breaching impartiality rules. Supposedly, by calling transwomen ‘male’, he expressed his ‘personal views’ on the trans debate.

Astonishingly, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) has now sided with the disgruntled listener. It says that Webb’s comments ‘gave the impression of endorsing one viewpoint in a highly controversial area’.

But what Webb said was not a ‘viewpoint’ or an opinion. The only thing he was ‘endorsing’ here was the truth. It might be a difficult one for trans activists to swallow, but it is nonetheless a fact that transwomen are biologically male. No amount of hormones, surgeries or gender-recognition certificates can get around that. To state otherwise is a lie.

The BBC’s ruling is chilling. As Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at Sex Matters, points out in the Telegraph, Webb has essentially been punished for ‘simply doing his job’ – for helping listeners understand the story he was covering. After all, as McAnena explains, ‘a third of the population are uncertain what the term “transwoman” means’.

Of course, no one should be surprised at the BBC’s willingness to sacrifice the truth to appease trans ideologues. In recent years, the UK’s state broadcaster has zealously embraced gender ideology. Indeed, it routinely presents the crazed beliefs of trans ideologues as if they are facts.

Earlier this week, BBC News referred to the transgender cat-killing murderer, Scarlet Blake, as a woman, despite him being biologically male. One of its reports made no mention at all of the fact that Blake identifies as trans. Thus, viewers were given the false impression that a female had murdered a man in cold blood and put his neighbour’s cat through a blender.

Similarly, last week, BBC News viewers were ‘informed’ that men can breastfeed. Stranger still, the BBC invited on an alleged expert – an academic in ‘creative global health’ who identifies as nonbinary – who claimed on air that the discharge that sometimes emerges from transwomen’s nipples after taking certain hormones is actually better for babies than a mother’s breast milk. Naturally, this absurd claim went completely unchallenged by the presenter.

For an organisation that makes such a song and dance about tackling mis- and disinformation, the BBC seems more than happy to peddle falsehoods so long as they uphold the woke narrative. When licence-fee payers are forced to fund the lies of the trans lobby, the BBC can no longer claim to be impartial, objective or even factually accurate.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.