I guess not strictly news - but with all of the vitriol I have seen in discussions on the Israel situation, that have boiled down to arguments over wording, I feel that this take from the BBC is worthy of some discussion.
Mods, feel free to remove if this is not newsy enough.
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Got a link or a citation?
I’m almost certain I remember there being more “”“both sides are valid/we’re just being informative”“” articles about trans people more recently, but here’s an example of one from a couple years ago that was so controversial it got its own Wikipedia article: “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women”
You claim the BBC are “suggesting that trans people are deviants who are going to ruin the moral fabric of society”, yet this is the best example you can find? Such bold claims require proof, are you sure you’re almost certain you remember the articles, or could you have read a comment parroting this narrative with no actual proof?
I literally replied to two other comments with an example. I’ve deleted the original post because I’m starting to get nasty DMs and I’m really not interested in continuing this now. Here’s the link if you want it, unless you’re just here to be a shithead, in which case fuck off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/“We’re_being_pressured_into_sex_by_some_trans_women”
That article has been edited multiple times due to an influx of complaints. A fuller timeline can be found documented in videos here: https://youtu.be/b4buJMMiwcg
The original article is based on poor premises, elevates the voices of explicitly hateful people, mislead the reader to a false conclusion that trans women are coercing lesbians into sex, platformed a known sexual-assaulter who called for the execution of all trans women. And finally the BBC also just straight up lied about if they interviewed trans people for the article.
It’s genuinely a terrible piece of journalism that the BBC should be utterly ashamed of.
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From the wiki:
…On 31 May 2022, the BBC released rulings from the Head of the Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) that stated that the article was a “legitimate piece of journalism overall” but that it had breached the BBC’s standards of accuracy in two ways. Firstly, the headline “gave the misleading impression that the focus of the article would be on pressure applied by trans women” when the actual article focused to an equal degree on “internalised pressure experienced by some lesbians as a result of a climate of opinion … within the LGBT community”.[5] As a result, the title of the article was changed to “The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”.[7] Secondly, the head of the ECU found that the coverage of the Get the L Out survey “did not make sufficiently clear that it lacked statistical validity”. The wording of the article surrounding the survey was subsequently altered.
I’m aware of the history of the article. The original article was significantly worse, as my comment stated.
But even above that, the article still should not have seen the light of day. It was based on a terrible premise to start with. A similar article would not have been written about other marginalised groups, and if it had it would have rightly been lambasted as absurdly bigoted. The BBC does not write articles like “do people of X race commit crimes?!”
And the fact that the BBC found Lily Cade to be a worthy contributor, even after they were informed of her history of sexual assault, raises so many red flags.
I’ve asked for examples of these articles, and nobody has ever been able to produce them.
It was an article that implied that trans women were coercing sex from lesbians.
Now the article was based on a poor premise to start with, “Do some \ do ?” is almost always going to be “yes” because there are bad people in basically every demographic. That doesn’t mean we go around writing fearmongering articles about those groups. But it gets far, far worse.
The article was based on a survey of 88 women from a group called “Get the L out”, whose entire purpose is trans exclusion. So heavily sampling bias to start, to say the least. The group, and the survey, also considered things like saying that trans women are women or can be lesbians to count as “being coerced into having sex with trans women”, because implying that trans women are women means that they can be lesbians means that they are within the broader dating pool of lesbians, and to them that amounts to coercing lesbians to date men. Which is obviously absurd and not what a normal person would think of when hearing “coerce into sex”. So the survey was deeply misleading and not at all what the headline implied.
The second main contributor to the article was adult actress Lily Cade. Who has admitted to sexually assaulting multiple women. Which makes her an odd choice for an article about sexual assault, don’t you think? These assaults were known long before the article was written, and came up with a Google search. Odd that it slipped through the BBC’s rigorous editorial process. Cade also went on a rant a few days after the article was published, where she called for all trans women to be executed, and called for several named trans women to be lynched. The BBC cut her contribution with a vague message not explaining why.
The BBC also claimed to have reached out to prominent trans women who speak about sex, and claimed that nobody agreed to speak with them. Which was proven to be a lie when Chelsea Poe, a high-profile trans woman who speaks about sex and relationships, revealed that she had in fact been interviewed.
Genuinely one of the most disgustingly biased pieces of “journalism” I’ve ever seen.
Part of the problem is that when you have a significant number of news sites fueling anti-trans hate, either directly or indirectly, it all starts to blend together. Nevertheless, here’s an example from a couple years ago, though I’m almost certain I’ve seen similar articles more recently.