Charlie Walsham - 12 April 2024
What must it feel like to realise you are part of an organisation that has placed so-called progressive values ahead of evidence, risking real-world harms to countless vulnerable young people?
In the wake of the publication of the Cass review into gender identity services for under-18s in England, I know exactly how that feels. No, I’ve not been moonlighting for the now defunct Tavistock clinic: I work as a journalist for BBC News.
Regrettably, 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.
Well before Dr Cass got to work, BBC employees started putting their preferred pronouns in their email signatures. Given the increasingly polarised political debate over self-ID, these virtue-signalling postscripts made a mockery of the BBC’s neutral remit; they also exerted an unspoken pressure on colleagues who resisted this posturing.
When Dr Cass began her work in 2020, after an alarming spike in the number of gender-questioning patients being referred to the NHS, mainly teenaged girls, what was the BBC doing? Was it providing an evidence-based corrective counterweight to the toxic trans extremist narrative gaining traction online?
Nope. As children spent even more time on screens thanks to the Covid-19 restrictions and school closures, the BBC Teach website was hosting an educational film in which young children were told there were over 100 gender identities.
As Dr Cass tried in vain to wrest data from the uncooperative Tavistock clinic to assist her work, the BBC was doubling down on its adherence to the cultish self-ID doctrine, depicting in news reports sadistic male murderers and devious rapists as women so as not to offend these odious men; victims be damned. This approach by a news organisation on any topic, let alone a hugely disputatious issue, looks like pure propaganda.
Despite having a well-funded Verify department, the BBC has made no attempts to set out the cold, hard scientific reality that modern medicine has found no way of changing a healthy biological male human into a woman, or vice versa.
Neither has the BBC’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent ever tried to interrogate the often-aired claim that ‘trans women are women’, a favourite slogan of the charity Stonewall, which the BBC was closely affiliated with as recently as late 2021.
Even simply looking the other way was not enough for the BBC. Instead, it signalled what looked like a complete abandonment of accuracy on the trans issue when it upheld a complaint against the Today programme’s Justin Webb for daring to say that trans women are ‘in other words, males’.
Now, 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.
On the day of her review’s publication, Radio 4’s Today programme broadcast an interview with Dr Cass. With the measured and level delivery one would expect of a respected clinician, she detailed some of her shocking findings, from the rocketing number of troubled teenage girls seeking gender dysphoria treatment to the fact there is no good evidence puberty blockers are a safe treatment for young people wishing to transition.
She refused to opine on whether her review had uncovered a scandal. The author Helen Joyce was far less reticent when, nearly three years after publication of her book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, she was finally invited on to the BBC to talk about the issue.
She told the 5 Live breakfast programme the report was: ‘A stinging indictment of the NHS, of the regulators in healthcare, the politicians and the media, including the BBC… all of whom have looked away as a medical scandal unfolded with vulnerable children at its heart.’
In a move characteristic of the intellectual level of 5Live debates however, Joyce was only allowed to speak after listeners had been subjected to the views of former Big Brother contestant and transgender celebrity Hallie Clarke. Clarke declaimed she had always known that she ‘wasn’t in the right body’ because she used to dress up in ‘blonde wigs’ and wore pink as a young child.
Nicky Campbell was up next on 5Live, hosting his weekday phone-in. It soon became clear that there was relief among callers that the BBC was finally waking up and smelling the coffee. One mother told Campbell how her daughter’s school had connived with the youngster, who began questioning her gender after being ‘horribly bullied’. The school allowed her to use a different name and referred her to a gender clinic without her mother being informed.
Mercifully, the story had a happy ending. The teenager narrowly avoided gender dysphoria ‘treatment’ due to long waiting lists and had grown into a young woman who was now a ‘happy and thriving lesbian’, content in her own body following ‘lots of counselling’.
‘Thank goodness I didn’t take her to one of those private gender clinics,’ her mother said. ‘She could have been prescribed hormones; she could have gone down the wrong path. Thank goodness we didn’t do that.’ This brave mother then gave words of advice to other parents of gender-confused children: ‘Watchful waiting. First do no harm.’
Another courageous woman, one of the few BBC journalists to emerge with credit from the gender treatment scandal, also appeared on the airwaves. Hannah Barnes, formerly of Newsnight but now associate editor at the New Statesman, wrote Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children.
She told Woman’s Hour the disturbing findings of the Cass Review had been known for a long time.
‘For those who have followed this for many years, there are no surprises in there but it’s quite shocking to see it laid out in such devastating and comprehensive detail… For the Prime Minister to say a spotlight has been shone (on the issue), well, yes, but it’s been shining in the background for a long time and really we probably should have acted long before this.’
A brave mother and a courageous journalist. Perhaps in future, BBC editors should be guided by these fearless women, rather than fretting about ‘misgendering’ killers and sex offenders.
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