Feminist Legal Clinic

I spoke with BBC Insider “Charlie Walsham” on Editorial Bias and Institutional Cowardice, about the insanity at the corporation since gender lunacy invaded. X handle: @CharlieWalsham_

JB: When did you first notice the BBC treating the trans issue with special editorial protection? Obviously, the BBC had already been clamping down on sex-realist feminist protests against trans ideology. That had been building since roughly 2012-2014 when trans rights activism accelerated.

CW: I came late to understanding this particular issue. I’ve never supported trans ideology, but I was slow to notice the BBC’s selective impartiality. COVID woke me up to how the BBC’s duty of impartiality appeared to be applied very selectively to certain issues.

The first time trans issues registered on my radar was during a late shift in late 2019. I saw American news coverage because of time differences. Kamala Harris was running to become the Democratic nominee for the 2020 US election. She failed, and Biden got it instead. But on this news clip of a CNN town hall debate, she announced herself with her pronouns, and I thought: what on earth is that about?

I was thoroughly on the liberal left side of the argument because, before COVID, I wanted a happier world with gay rights and less intolerance.

But after seeing that Kamala Harris moment and the BBC’s subsequent coverage of trans rights—portraying it as a new frontier of civil rights whilst essentially erasing gay people, and treating the dangers to children, and the obvious conflicts with women’s rights, as completely secondary—my attitude began to change.

JB: Give me an example of this bias in action.

CW: On the One O’Clock News, as recently as 2024, there was a story about a murderer—someone who hit another person over the head with a bottle and pushed them in a river. It was reported that a woman had done it. But the perpetrator was a man who identified as a woman.

A biological man who declares himself a woman—even a rapist—suddenly becomes a woman in BBC reporting, and everything else becomes irrelevant. But the entire foundation of credible journalism collapses if we can’t state basic facts.

I’ve raised concerns with senior editors, and I do get the sense that not everyone is a true trans activist. Some people my age do have concerns, but they’re all afraid.

Q: Afraid of what?

CW: Afraid of a senior boss aligned with this ideology, or afraid of junior staff from a generation where these views are dogma. It’s political positioning. And it’s worse with trans ideology because it fundamentally undermines reality.

Q: What about children? You mentioned that as a particular concern.

CW: The Cass Review documented a massive jump in adolescent girls seeking gender interventions. It went from roughly 50 pre-pubescent boys to about 3,000 adolescent girls in 15 years. That’s a scandal and an abuse crisis.

There are now kids on puberty blockers for gender distress—distress often caused by TikTok algorithms and reinforced by BBC articles celebrating people like Elliot Page.

I want the BBC to survive. But if it continues peddling this content, I’d rather it end than persist in harming society. It’s that serious.

Source: (6) How Did the BBC End Up Transed Up The Wazoo?

Raging runners are planning a mass protest calling on Parkrun organisers to stop allowing trans competitors who were born male to register as female. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled last year that the term woman refers strictly to the biological sex assigned at birth, making it against the law for organisations not to provide single sex spaces for women.

It was a decision the Government said brought clarity to female sport, after several sporting bodies had already banned transgender women taking part in female events. But Parkrun is now coming under renewed scrutiny. In 2024, the BBC reports, the charity deleted all records from its website when campaigners previously demanded it exclude transgender athletes from its women’s category.

Parkrun began with just 13 runners at London’s Bushy Park in 2004 but has grown into one of Britain’s largest grassroots sporting movements. Participants can run, jog, walk or volunteer.

Fiona McAnena, from the Sex Matters campaign group, said the message from parkrun to women and girls at the moment was “your achievements don’t matter” and that they were putting men’s “feelings head of yours”.

In his recent EUobserver opinion, Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, Michael O’Flaherty, argues that “attacks on LGBTI people are the warning sign of a wider backlash against democracy”.

Yet O’Flaherty shows remarkably little interest in their different causes. Instead, he treats a particular understanding of what he calls “LGBTI rights” as a measure of democracy itself.

The conflict between women’s sex-based protections and gender identity was publicly debated, subjected to judicial scrutiny and ultimately resolved by the country’s highest court. Here the alleged democratic regression consists, apparently, of women winning a case.

A grassroots women’s rights organisation challenged government policy, raised its own funds, fought through the courts and secured a Supreme Court judgment affirming sex in equality law, with lesbian organisations intervening to defend their rights to same-sex association.

To portray this as democratic regression is not only incoherent, but profoundly misogynistic.

There is a further irony in O’Flaherty invoking the Yogyakarta Principles, which he helped draft, as his “essential guidebook”.

Principle 31 of the Yogyakarta Principles plus 10 calls on states to end the registration of sex in identity documents and as part of legal personality.

Yet removing sex as a legally-recorded category would deprive states of a basic means of implementing obligations built precisely around sex, including those arising from Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the EU treaties’ commitment to equality between women and men. The principle he champions would make key parts of it impossible to implement.

The Yogyakarta Principles are not international law. They are a privately drafted document with no treaty status, and O’Flaherty knows this.

It is a false and dangerous vision in which one group becomes “officially human” at the expense of another: women and girls, whose human rights were only recently secured through sex-based protections in law.

Source: Right of Reply: Attacks on LGBTI community are warning sign of wider backlash against democracy – EUobserver