James Kirkup James Kirkup

Jo Swinson has finally made the BBC do its job on trans rights

Jo Swinson won’t be our next prime minister but her election campaign has achieved one significant thing already: she’s helped the BBC to start doing the job of journalism on trans rights issues.

The Lib Dems have taken a conscious decision to go into the election campaign as the party of trans rights and inclusion. They think that embracing the transgender issue plays well with the degree-educated, socially liberal voters in university towns.

I can’t judge how well the Lib Dem trans strategy is playing out with those key voters. I can simply assess the public results of that decision, which has been a string of frankly horrible broadcast interviews by Swinson and other Lib Dem candidates. This morning saw another such horror when Swinson went on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and was asked by Justin Webb if she accepted that ‘biological sex exists’ and that people are therefore either male or female.

Her answer: ‘Not on a binary.’

She then talked nonsense about chromosomes and chucked around some scientifically illiterate babble and talked about ‘cisgendered women’ before declaring: ‘This is not a scientific debate.’

Which is actually true. It’s a debate about law and policy and politics and one that too many people have avoided because of the extraordinary levels of vitriol involved. Because some of the actors are very, very keen to avoid public scrutiny or discussion.

I have written before about how the BBC has sometimes failed to cover the trans issue properly, or even at all. Some BBC output has been hopelessly lacking in basic critical analysis. Sometimes the corporation has simply ignored matters of real public interest.

There are lots of reasons for this, but I don’t fault individual BBC journalists. The corporation employs some very good journalists who have long been keen to do their jobs and scrutinise this issue as they would any other, but who have not always been able to do so in a corporate and editorial culture that has sometimes discouraged such acts of journalism.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in