A BBC journalist has called on the corporation to improve its reporting surrounding transgender issues.
The reporter, who goes by the pseudonym Charlie Walsham, said the BBC had not addressed the “cold hard reality that modern medicine has found no way of changing a healthy biological male human into a woman, or vice versa.”
It comes as the corporation has been criticised by both sides of the debate in the last five years surrounding the issue of trans rights.
In 2022, a BBC article claiming some lesbians feel pressured into sex by trans women did not meet the broadcaster’s standards on accuracy following backlash from LGBT+ campaigners.
The corporation has come under fire for its reporting around trans issues
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The reporter “Walsham”, writing in The Spectator, said: “I believe there is a straight line between the BBC’s capitulation to extreme trans rights ideologues and the disturbing findings in Dr Hilary Cass’s 388-page report.
“Crucially, what Dr Cass has exposed was only able to happen because of a skewed and distorted national conversation around the issue of sex and gender, a narrative I believe aided by the nation’s broadcaster. Dissenting voices have been marginalised, castigated, cancelled, silenced.”
Earlier this year, the BBC came under fire after it found it breached its own accuracy rules after it failed to mention that murderer and cat killer Scarlet Blake was a trans woman in initial reports of her conviction and sentencing.
The broadcaster received a wave of complaints about how Blake’s trans identity was not mentioned in an online article on February 23 and during the BBC News at One bulletin three days later.
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Protests have been held outside the BBC Broadcasting House in central London
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BBC Broadcasting House
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In 2022, leading European LGBTQ+ group ILGA-Europe claimed that LGBT+ employees were quitting their jobs at the BBC over its “transphobic reporting” and said that an anti trans-rhetoric is having a “real negative impact” on people’s lives.
Executive director of ILGA-Europe Evelyne Paradis said: “The spread of anti-LGBTI and trans exclusionary rhetoric outlined in this report has a very real negative impact on people’s lives.
“In country after country, we see how it negatively impacts people’s mental health and their sense of safety, their access to employment and the overall ability to progress much needed legal protection.
“At this moment in time, it is essential we remind politicians, media, academics – and sadly even some civil society actors – that real people’s lives are at stake in every country across the region, because of the political scapegoating of LGBTI people.”
Wilshaw praised the broadcaster’s approach to the findings in the Cass report
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Retired consultant paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass released a review
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Wilshaw added: “Thanks to the diligent and courageous work of Dr Hilary Cass, the BBC has been forced to reflect on its sins of commission and omission, and platform some sane voices on the subject.”
GB News has approached the BBC for a comment.
It comes as transgender commentator Katy Jon Went has warned that the NHS must be “extremely cautious” when it comes to transgender children, following the release of a new report into the health system’s services.
Went added that the language surrounding puberty blockers and the belief that “puberty goes on pause with puberty blockers is kind of pretty much gone for good around this”.
