On March 5, 2024, a concerned member of the public—formerly a senior media professional—sent the WPATH Files to Fergus Walsh, the BBC’s Medical Editor. The files contained damning information, including admissions from WPATH members about the harm caused by their treatments and the influence of non-medical trans activists.
Despite the gravity and the urgency of the situation, Walsh did not respond. Six days later, on the 11th March, the same individual tried to send an email with an email summarizing key points from an interview with Mia Hughes, the author of the WPATH report, only to discover that their address had been blocked.
But there’s more. It turns out that Walsh is married to Dr. Véronique Walsh, the vice president of Gilead Sciences UK and Ireland. Gilead Sciences is a pharmaceutical company that set up a $4.5 million fund to “to improve the safety, health, and wellness of the transgender community, particularly in light of the disproportionate impact of HIV on transgender individuals”.
$4.5 million sure pays for a lot of ‘wellness’. Gilead uses its financial resources to establish itself as a dedicated ally to the ‘transgender community’, which is really a collection of autistic, troubled, abused or just confused young people, along with middle-aged autogynephiles who have nothing to do with them. Gilead’s TRANScend Community Impact Fund, launched in 2019, has distributed over $9 million to 26 organizations across the United States. While this fund ostensibly supports “strategic program development, capacity building, and direct services”, it of course does so while promoting a specific, contentious narrative around matters trans.
A few years ago, when the War On Women was just starting out, we published a report on Gilead, who were the subject of a mass tort, alleging that the company withheld safer HIV/AIDS drugs from sufferers and manipulated patent timing for profit.
Fergus Walsh served as the BBC’s medical correspondent from 2004 to 2020, when he took over as medical editor for BBC News. In the years leading up to his appointment and since, the BBC has produced only one major investigation into the use of puberty blockers and the ideological basis of ‘trans healthcare’. This was the Newsnight investigation into the Tavistock by Deborah Cohen and her producer Hannah Barnes, the genesis of her acclaimed book ‘Time To Think’. With a scandal of such proportions, you would think BBC News would have turned its attention to follow-up stories, but the BBC’s interest in the issue, never what you might call ‘burning’, disappeared altogether on her exit.
For years now, the BBC’s handling of the trans debate has been a disgrace. Prominent voices like Helen Joyce, Maya Forstater, Stella O’Malley, and Kellie-Jay Keen have been glaringly absent, even from shows like ‘Women’s Hour’. Their coverage reeks of bias, and this habit of lying by omission has done great damage to the BBC’s reputation.