The BBC changed the pronouns of a transgender rapist in the testimony of a female victim, removing all references she made to the rapist being male.
According to The Times, the article published in October of last year originally entitled “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women,” featured testimony from lesbian women who felt they had been socially pressured or literally forced into sex with a transgender individual who was biologically male.
The testimony had been pulled from a survey by the lesbian group, Get The L Out, who collected anonymous responses from social media. One of those anonymous respondents had this to say:
“He threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with him. I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so he was a ‘woman’ even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout, so I agreed to go home with him. He used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing his penis and raped me.”
However, in the article that was eventually published by the BBC, all references to the transgender rapist being male made by the victim were erased, with the BBC replacing words like “him” and “he,” with “they” and “them” in an apparent nod to the pronoun requests of the rapist.
“They were originally all male references but the woke bros at the news website wanted to make them female because of misgendering,” one source with knowledge of the matter told The Times. “It’s quite shocking. I can’t think of any other situation where we would change the words of an alleged rape victim.”
Angela Wild, one of the co-founders of Get The L Out, was furious with the BBC for changing the quote from her study. “It’s really unethical and disrespectful to the victim,” Wild said “It’s a form of gaslighting for a woman who has already been through sexual violence.”
Sources at the BBC said the quote was “the subject of heated debate prior to publication,” and that it clashed with the BBC’s style guide. Said style guide was influenced by the BBC’s “central diversity team,” in order to ensure that “inclusive language” was boosted by the news organisation.
The style guide was updated in November 2020, and states that “where possible, use the term/s and pronoun/s preferred by people themselves, when they have made their preferences clear.” An internal document seen by the Times went further, saying that the BBC should “normalise” the use of transgender pronouns both “explicitly and implicitly.”
In response, the BBC said that it was “routine” to have “editorial discussions about different stories,” and that their only intention “when deciding on language is to make things as clear as possible for audiences.”
However, following publication of the Times article, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Department actually ruled even more in favour of the perspective of transgender individuals. 20,000 people, including BBC employees, had complained about the article, claiming it was “deeply flawed” and “incredibly dangerous” for the transgender community.
The headline was changed on Tuesday to instead read, “The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women,” to give the impression that transgender people were not doing the pressuring themselves. They also added a section that criticised the statistical validity of the original conducted survey by Get The L Out.
A section from a lesbian woman telling her story was also removed by the BBC, because said woman had allegedly posted “transphobic” comments following the article’s publication. This occurred shortly follwing initial publication, and was upheld by the ECU.
