The capture of British media

The trans Taliban stuck the boot in the so-called free press, and the damage is lasting

*This is a piece I wrote in 2020, and not much has changed since*

In 2008 I was nominated for a Journalist of the Year award by Stonewall. Votes had come in from the general public rather than Stonewall itself, so I figured, I had a fighting chance of winning. I have long been vocal about my displeasure with Stonewall, namely that it prioritised rich gay men over lesbians.

I first about my nomination when I read in the gay press that a ‘nasty transphobe’ should not have been included in the list. There was outrage, even at that stage, that I might win. My crime? In 2004 Guardian Weekend Magazine published my column on the madness of men identifying as women, and how the diagnosis of transsexuality was based on dangerous and outmoded sex stereotypes. What the trans cabal did not know was that I had published, a year earlier, a big piece in the Sunday Telegraph magazine on those that regret sex change surgery, but it was never put online. I will return to the theme of transgender ‘regret’ later.

I turned up to the event to be greeted by 200 transgender activists and their allies holding up placards with slogans such as ’Bindel the bigot' and shouting ’no platform for bigotry’. This protest marked the birth of the modern day transgender movement. I was told by one of the judges, confidentially at the time, that I was a clear winner, as I had received more than twice the votes of the runner-up. But Stonewall was concerned about vilification by the gay press, which it relied on to promote its work and secure funding. The prize, therefore, after a toxic row in the Stonewall offices, went to the Daily Mirror’s Dr Miriam Stoppard, who is neither a journalist or linked in any way to lesbian and gay rights.

Back in 2008, apart from the handful of articles I had written on the topic, the mainstream press was not interested in the issue of transgenderism. The gay press has always been poor quality in the UK, and tended towards lifestyle and fluff articles, but was partly responsible in promoting the idea of the LGBTQQI+ alphabet soup. But until very recently, most media outlets run only one side of the story, that of extreme transgender ideology.

On 27th March 2018, the splash headline on the front page of The Sun was “Tran and Wife”. The paper reported that Hannah Winterbourne, an Army officer, had married Jake Graf, a film director. Winterbourne is female. Graf is male. Both claim to be the opposite sex.

Winterbourne and Graf at one of those awful awards

According to a subsequent BBC report on the story, the headline “faced a backlash online”. In the words of the New Statesman: “The Sun’s transphobic front page mars a couple’s wedding day.”

The “backlash” reached Parliament.  The following month, the Home Affairs Select Committee summoned editors from the Sun, the Mail group and the Express to account for their output on issues including transgenderism.

Paul Clarkson, then managing editor of the Sun, mounted a strong defense of the paper’s coverage. Winterbourne and Graf had initially approached the Sun, he said - they wanted the story to be printed. Warming to his subject, he then revealed more than he might have intended:

“Every word, headline and image were passed by transgender groups pre-publication.”

Perhaps the significance of that sentence might not be obvious to non-journalists, but to those in the trade, it is fairly shocking. The Sun, the biggest-selling paper in Britain, and the baddest feral beast in the newspaper jungle, gave full copy approval to campaign groups.

Not that Clarkson was alone. Peter Wright, “Editor Emeritus” at Associated Newspapers and a former Editor of the Mail on Sunday, said his group was very keen to have its journalists receive training and guidance from trans advocacy groups. Or rather, more training.  “We have talked to them in the past and taken advice,” he told MPs.

Of course, these admissions went unremarked upon and unreported. It suits none of the participants to admit that the supposedly mighty newspapers that are commonly accused by activists of whipping up a climate of transphobic hatred are, in fact, so meekly compliant that they let transgender groups vet their reporting and train their staff.

Where did the Sun and Mail get the idea to ask trans lobbying groups how to write about trans issues?

I would hazard a guess that the impetus came from IPSO, the toothless press regulator. Its Guidance on Transgender Reporting includes a list of “resources” for editors to consult:   All About Trans; Trans Media Watch; Stonewall; Gendered Intelligence; Mermaids.

With the exception of Stonewall, none of those groups is large. At the time, Mermaids had a full-time staff of three, whose activities involve lobbying politicians and the NHS to make it easier for children to get puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones. It also organised training events for dozens of public and private sector organisations. 

Susie Green, celebrating medicalising kids

That IPSO guidance was written in 2016, before the emergence of organised women’s groups arguing that allowing men to “self-identify” as women and claim the legal status of women might well have some consequences for those born female.  Even though those groups have plainly established that there is a debate here, that there are two sides to this argument, Ipso still concerns itself with just one side.  IPSO’s message to editors is clear. Upset the trans lobby and you’re in trouble. Upset the women by ignoring their worries and nothing will happen.

The 2016 guidance was written by Charlotte Urwin, IPSO’s at the time, head of standards.  Urwin has praised Mermaids for its work, publicly thanking the group “for hosting a very thoughtful meeting with parents of transgender teens full of rich discussion about the particular challenges their families and children face.”  She made no mention of concerns raised about the group’s overstating of the risks of suicide among trans teenagers, the pressure it puts on parents to “affirm” gender changes (phrases such as “better a live daughter than a dead son” are common among its supporters) and no mention of its lobbying activities. Instead of treating Mermaids as what it is - a participant in an active debate about policy and law that journalists are covering - Urwin helped paint Mermaids as a welfare organisation, pure and simple.

Urwin has since overseen a review of IPSO guidance on trans issues, the premise of which seems to accept the narrative promoted by many advocacy groups, that a rising tide of media coverage is inherently linked to the vulnerability and harm of trans people

In May 2019 Urwin wrote:

“I believe – based on our internal monitoring – that coverage of transgender matters has changed in recent years. But I know that this is heavily contested by transgender individuals; those who support them; and by journalists reporting on this topic.”

The way the media covers transgender people and gender transition can have a significant impact on individuals and social attitudes, and also continues to generate wider debate. It raises difficult questions about the balance between being aware of the impact of press reporting and commentary on potentially vulnerable individuals, and ensuring that it is still possible to report freely on these social issues.”

One newspaper editor says that Ipso is “completely one-sided” on trans issues. Because the regulator starts from the position that trans people, individually or collectively, are frail and require special protection from harm, it naturally inclines to uphold complaints about trans reporting and commentary.

Of course, not all papers are covered by IPSO.  The Guardian, via its Reader’s Editor, regulates itself.

Katharine Viner

It can certainly push the trans agenda without encouragement from the likes of IPSO.

The paper used to have a number of feminists on staff who expressed grave doubts about the consequences of allowing men to “identify” as, and be accepted as, women. But few of them can say so. In 2020, all UK staff received an email about the new Guardian Style Guide. They were instructed to use the term ‘cis’ when referring to a person who is ‘not transgender’. 

Owen Jones, the transactivist and part-time columnist has significant influence at the paper on all things (pro) trans. In October 2018, editor Katharine Viner authorised an editorial that attempted to argue that both sides had a point and perhaps dialogue and compromise might be in order.  “Feminists are entitled to question whether such changes could adversely affect other women,” the leader daringly suggested. "This is a complex issue that society needs to consider thoughtfully.”

Hardly incendiary, but enough to set the fires burning among younger staff members and writers, especially in the US, where the paper has a large staff and a continued ambition to be taken seriously by the sort of people who still think the New York Times is a good newspaper.

Two of those Guardian staff published a Guardian op-ed accusing their own paper of bigotry over trans issues. “The editorial’s unsubstantiated argument only serves to dehumanize and stigmatize trans people,” they wrote.  Jones, of course, gave his strong approval to his 918,000 twitter followers. 

But if Viner was, at one time, trying to strike a balance, the BBC appeared to not even try. Among its appointments around that time were Megha Mohan, the corporation’s first “gender and identity correspondent” and Ben Hunte, “LGBT correspondent”.

Hunte thought nothing of attending Pride marches as a participant and also reporting on those same marches. “I’m reporting on issues that we as a community are facing,” he has said.

As inexperienced as they were, Mohan and Hunte were appointed to cover one of the most contentious issues of the day for one of the world’s biggest media outfits.

There were several attempts to interest the pair in a range of relevant issues, such as detransition/transgender regret; the cotton ceiling (lesbians being pressured into sex with trans-identified males); the battle over single-sex spaces; and drag children. But nothing happened.

More experienced journalists at the BBC consider it neither professional nor prudent for the Corporation to appoint such inexperienced correspondents to represent particular “communities”.

But many staff say BBC executives are obsessed with generating “content” that chimes with the mores of younger audience.

Privately some BBC suits give an explanation closer to home.  Internal staff surveys show that as many as 2% of all BBC staff “identify” as transgender.  The Corporation’s LGBT staff forum is willing and able to flex its muscles over editorial decisions that displease members. “We have to tread very carefully to avoid complaints from them” says one of the BBC’s most senior editors.

The Times and Sunday Times is regularly accused of rampant transphobia for the simple reason that it covers gender critical perspectives on the trans issues, often exposing harm to children and the danger faced by abused women using single sex refuges and other safe places.

The Times is a rational broad church newspaper. It believes in dissecting shibboleths. It tends to not be tied to progressive platitudes like the Guardian, and is free from the left’s main self-constraint: the fear of being on the “wrong side of history”. Free Speech, the right to be offended, reason, science, rational argument. These are the mainstays of the newspaper.

Janice Turner is known for tacking the transgender orthodoxy head on: “As the person who first started discussing it at The Times, I was coming from the left. As a feminist and a Labour supporter. My politics, against racism, homophobia and other bigotry, are well documented. So it wasn’t like I was right winger. Which is the reason why, I think, that it had traction in the newspaper. It was a feminist critique.”

Turner benefitted from being given the space, over many columns, to unpick the irrationality of extreme transgender ideology in a humane way. “There are real people, human beings involved” says Turner, “Trans people have the right to live dignified lives free of discrimination and prejudice. I have this in my mind at all times when I am critiquing the misogynistic extremes of the movement.”

Clearly, Turner is a critical thinker who has refused to swallow the pro-Mermaid ideology, namely that gender-non-conforming children are transgender and should be referred for medical treatments, as opposed to being allowed to be who they are. Newspapers such as the Daily  Mirror publishes uncritical and extremely positive stories on the lobby group because its journalists appear to go with the narrative of “brave and stunning” and “save the poor little child” so often heard from those that do not understand gender ideology.

Another committed transgender ally keeping Owen Jones company at the Guardian is commissioning editor Chris Godfrey, Turner’s brilliant, painstakingly researched article on the huge increase in girls seeking medical transition to live as boys was nothing more than “vile, transphobic trash”. Turner’s heartbreaking piece exposed the ways in which misogyny and anti-lesbian bullying m on a path to becoming trans men.

Godfrey, who I discovered has blocked me on Twitter despite me having had no interaction with him, was a staunch defender of James Makings, the man responsible for appointing transgender model Munroe Bergdorf as the LGBTQ ambassador for NSPCC Childline, a children’s safeguarding charity. It soon transpired that Bergdorf had recently suggested that children having a hard time at home should get in touch privately over social media. A kerfuffle ensued, and Bergdorf was dropped, with screams of ‘transphobia!’ appearing all over social media.

Plonkers at Pride

Makings was then identified as man that happened to be gay who had made amateur porn of himself masturbating in the toilets at his job at NSPCC. Makings, who told his viewers that he had gone to work that morning wearing his rubber fetish gear under his regular clothes, eventually came under scrutiny by bosses for his behaviour, after feminists and child protection experts asked the reasonable question as to Makings’ suitability for his role at a children’s charity.

Godfrey tweeted in response to the calls to fire Makings: “Transphobes are now targeting the gay man who hired Munro Bergdorf at the NSPCC because they found pictures of him online in fetish gear. The assumption is that because he is a gay man who is into fetish gear cannot be safe around kids. This is homophobia at its most vile.”

The ‘Vile, transphobic trash’ written by Janice Turner on the massive increase in young girls transitioning turned out to be a vital piece of journalism for those many professionals that had serious concerns about the huge spike in numbers. Turner revealed that, “teachers noting a sudden clique of transitioning girls, parents whose girls abruptly identified as boys and several senior gender specialists...all wish to remain anonymous for fear they will be accused of transphobia, vilified, even sacked.”

It was also one of the catalysts for the recently launched movement to support ‘de-transitioners’ - young lesbians who medically transitioned to live as men and later regret it. As Charlie Evans, founder of the Detransition Advocacy Network tells me, “Turner’s piece, and the work of other journalists that dare to expose the reality of medically transitioning helped me and the dozens of other young women recognise that they could live as happy lesbians, and that testosterone and double mastectomies are not the solution.”

Journalisms first obligation is to tell the truth. We are meant to ‘do no harm’. Capitulating to bullies – those that seek to control the agenda through instilling fear and issuing threats of retribution - is the opposite of what journalists are meant to do. This issue has put the spotlight on who has courage and who is a coward.