The BBC has gaslit the public over trans

So Tim Davie has resigned as director-general of the BBC, and Deborah Turness has left her role as the BBC’s head of news. On Sunday, Davie said he took ‘ultimate responsibility’ for ‘some mistakes made’ at the public broadcaster – by which he presumably means broadcasting doctored footage of the speech Donald Trump made on the day of the Capitol riot in January 2021, and allowing the Beeb to repeatedly violate its own impartiality obligations, particularly in covering Israel’s war against Hamas. Some mistakes indeed.

These failings were revealed in a leaked internal memo written by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the BBC. Originally circulated among senior BBC managers before being passed to, and eventually published by, the Telegraph last week, the memo exposed something else, too – the BBC’s love for the womanly willy.

Indeed, Prescott had a great deal to say about the broadcaster’s embrace of trans ideology. His memo revealed that a team of ‘specialist’ LGBT reporters at the BBC had ensured that gender-critical perspectives were kept off-air, resulting in a ‘constant drip-feed of one-sided stories… celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity’.

The sense that the BBC has been captured by trans ideology was reinforced just last week, when it upheld 20 complaints against veteran news presenter Martine Croxall. Croxall’s offence was correcting the term ‘pregnant people’ with ‘women’ during a live broadcast in June. The broadcaster found that her facial expression – she rolled her eyes as she made the correction – gave ‘the strong impression of expressing a personal view on a controversial matter’. In effect, Croxall – a news presenter – was reprimanded for stating the truth.

Davie’s and Turness’s resignations should be welcomed by anyone who thinks that telling the truth should be the first obligation of journalism. As the SEEN in Journalism group (of which, for transparency, I am a member) recently reported, Davie has long been a little too close to the trans lobby. In 2010, when he was the BBC’s director of marketing, he gave a speech at the Westminster Policy Forum on the ‘LGBT Community and the Media’. According to a write-up by Trans Media Watch, the BBC had been ‘working quietly behind the scenes… to put together simple guidelines that would help broadcasters avoid giving unintended offence to their transgender audience’.

That ‘quiet work’, as we now know, metastasised into a suffocating dogma, in which not offending trans activists mattered more than reporting facts. Soon, male rapists and male child abusers were routinely referred to by their chosen female pronouns. Scandals, from the experimental medical interventions on children at the Tavistock clinic to cases of female nurses being forced to share changing rooms with male colleagues, were reported reluctantly – if at all.

Perversely, transgenderism has done the public a service by exposing who can and cannot be trusted. If a politician, public figure or journalist cannot state that men do not give birth and lesbians do not have penises, they cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything else. There is no middle ground: the reality that humans come in two sexes is a matter of fact. The views of trans activists may be aired, but they deserve no more credence than any other bonkers belief system.

April’s Supreme Court ruling, which confirmed that sex was a matter of biology in law, not opinion, offered the BBC the perfect chance to reset. Instead, the corporation has doubled down. When the crimes of violent male trans offenders are reported at all, they are still referred to by their preferred pronouns. Meanwhile, men who identify as women continue to use female toilets at Broadcasting House, and staff who object are told they can simply work from home.

No one becomes a journalist to lie, and most hacks like to believe they are nobly holding the powerful to account. Yet under Tim Davie, the BBC shielded bullies and activists, and gaslit the public. His departure gives the corporation one final chance to recover its purpose. If his successor cannot stamp out bias and restore intellectual honesty, the BBC will not survive. Nor should it.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of the upcoming book, Pornocracy. Pre-order it here.