‘For the record, I knocked two out. One woman’s skull was fractured, the other not. And just so you know, I enjoyed it. See, I love smacking up Terfs in the cage.’
Can someone who says such things be considered a respectable commentator on women’s rights and interests? I suspect that most people who glory in battering women would struggle to get a hearing in national conversation on such topics, much less a slot on Radio Four. Yet this week the author of that quote, Fallon Fox, was invited on to the Today programme to talk about women’s sport and trans women’s right to participate in it.
Fox is a trans woman who served in the US Navy before becoming a mixed-martial arts fighter competing in women’s events, leading to the violence she described. Giving Fox airtime on the BBC’s most important radio outlet didn’t go down well with many people. Even one of the show’s presenters expressed concern about the booking afterwards.
This sort of controversy is not unusual. Some people think that the BBC’s coverage of sex, gender and trans issues is sometimes flawed. This is mainly because they believe it does not take seriously enough the concern that trans rights policies and practices can impinge on the rights and standing of women. I have often taken that position, though I also note that other people take different views.
Many people have strong opinions about the BBC. I’m generally supportive: I think having a non-commercial national media outlet is, on balance, better than not having one. Others disagree. The point of agreement is that the BBC – for now, at least – matters. The way it reports the world helps to shape our national conversation and our politics. This may change as generations pass and the habit of listening to Auntie dies away, but for now, the BBC, like it or not, is important.
It follows that the regulation of the BBC is important. The corporation must operate within a framework of rules, policies and expectations that ensure it does what it should: cover the world fairly and accurately. And impartially. It’s vital that the BBC doesn’t take sides, especially on contested areas and issues.
The BBC is overseen by Ofcom, the media regulator. This week it released research on the BBC complaints process and the perceptions of the corporation’s impartiality. This research matters. The BBC is always sensitive to political and other scrutiny – arguably too sensitive sometimes. Words from the regulator about impartiality are likely to carry weight with them – as they should.
I’ve written a bit about the BBC and impartiality, and discussed the issue with various senior people in and around the corporation. In previous years, parts of the BBC haven’t done enough to report accurately and fairly the range of opinions and views on the trans rights agenda and what some people see as its implications for the rights and standing of women.
Simply put, some BBC output has been unbalanced by the views of its staff, some of whom don’t think that ‘gender critical’ views are worthy of inclusion in public discourse. That’s not my conclusion, by the way. It’s something I’ve heard from multiple senior people at the BBC over the last few years. It’s also been reported by the BBC’s own Stephen Nolan in an excellent podcast series, which also considered Ofcom’s record.
Reporting on sex and gender isn’t easy. Much of the content is complex and requires extensive explanation for a general audience. There is a lack of objective evidence: reliable data are scarce, and few facts are accepted by all. Many of the participants in this debate approach it with passionate intensity and are very willing to direct complaints and abuse at journalists who say things they don’t like. On the trans rights side of the divide, there are some people and groups who regard the very fact of discussing these issues offensive – consequently they refuse to engage in public conversation.
In short, this stuff is hard for journalists to do well. And the BBC, heavy with younger staff who incline to sympathy with that trans-rights perspective, and institutionally sensitive to external pressure, finds it especially hard. So it would be a good thing for the BBC’s regulator to encourage and support it to bring some more balance and impartiality to its coverage of sex and gender.
Sadly, that’s pretty much the opposite of what Ofcom did this week.
I say this after reading the qualitative research report on which Ofcom based its statements about the BBC. Drawing on focus groups and depth interviews with selected members of the public, that report gives a strikingly one-sided view of the sex-gender issue and the BBC’s coverage of it.
It is not controversial to say that the ‘trans issue’ is a contested one, where opinions divide. Some people think the BBC leans towards gender critical views. Some people think it’s biased towards the trans-rights view. It follows that impartial journalism about this issue should reflect that spectrum of opinion. (This is possible even for those of us who write opinion-editorial pieces. I think it’s pretty clear that I have views on this topic, but I hope I’ve never failed to note the contrary views that exist.)
In this context it is surprising, to say the least, to read Ofcom’s research on public perceptions of the BBC’s reporting of contentious issues including sex and gender and find not a single reference to gender-critical views of that coverage. If that Ofcom report was the only evidence you had about perceptions of the BBC’s coverage of the trans issue, you’d conclude that the only criticism anyone had was that that the corporation was too sympathetic to nasty Terfs and often transphobic.
Here are just a few of the numerous quotes it includes on the BBC and sex-gender issues:
‘Often when BBC report trans stuff, it’s immediately “look at this transsexual five-year-old” or “people are going to steal your children” I currently boycott BBC news; I don’t watch it all. It is a personal and political choice because of the way they have handled transgender issues across the platform. There seems to be a real bias. There is an internal memorandum within the BBC that if you’re going to have a transgender person talking about transgender rights, then you absolutely have to have someone on the other side talking about how there shouldn’t be those rights. I made the decision about two years ago to not deliberately watch BBC news… The BBC did kind of side with [a commentator] over her kind of anti-trans statements, and I kind of realised that I think I disengaged with the BBC around about that point.’
To repeat, there is no reference in the 91-page report to ensuring the representation of gender-critical views, a worldview that has been found by the courts to be legitimate and legally ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’. The closest the report comes to acknowledging any difference of opinion on the trans questions is a paragraph that snidely brackets people who want balanced discussion of gender issues with racists:
Some audiences at times felt the BBC had acted inappropriately by including extreme views that they saw as unacceptable, such as when Nick Griffin was included on a BBC Question Time panel in 2009. Some participants, including some trans individuals, also felt the BBC allowed unacceptable views on air by ‘always including’ people who were against trans rights. However, others saw the inclusion of such voices as an important aspect of freedom of speech.
To write a report about impartiality that is not itself impartial is quite an achievement.
How did that Ofcom report end up so lopsided? I suspect the answer lies in its methodology.
As well as 15 focus groups with people drawn from the population as a whole, the Ofcom researchers sought out people from groups they thought most relevant to the impartiality topic. So they also did two focus groups with black people, two with Muslims, one with Jewish people, and two LGB groups.
They also did some individual depth interviews with trans people, as well as the ‘digitally excluded’, people over 65 without internet access.
By my count, six of the 150 people interviewed for that Ofcom report were transgender. That’s 4 per cent, a share well above the 1 per cent of the UK population that is sometimes estimated to be trans. (We’ll finally get some better data on this when Census 2021 data starts appearing later this year.)
Over-indexing minority groups in qualitative research is perfectly respectable to ensure proper coverage of their experience. But – and I write as the director of a think-tank that routinely uses qualitative methods in its research – it must be handled with care. Especially in a case such as this, since it risks bringing distortion and skew to an area in need of clarity and balance.
That is what seems to have happened here. It’s also why methodology matters so much. A single ‘depth interview’ can take as long to conduct as a focus group session with six or more participants. My guess is that the Ofcom researchers spent more time talking to those six trans respondents (around six hours) than they did talking to black people or Muslims (two focus groups for each, meaning a maximum of three hours for each) and far more than the 90 minutes or so they spent with their Jewish focus group.
This may help explain why trans voices sound so loudly in the Ofcom report, which doesn’t just quote trans people raising concerns about the BBC but also about ‘the media in general’.
For the sake of clarity here, I should say I’m not criticising the Ofcom researchers for listening to trans people. I think it’s good that they have done so. My criticism is that the effect of listening to one group and not others skews their overall research, with potentially negative consequences for its quality and impact. If the BBC takes this report as an instruction from Ofcom to tip the balance of its gender coverage further towards a trans-rights stance, that coverage will be worse.
The Ofcom report quite reasonably boosts the voice of trans people on BBC sex-gender coverage. It is right that those voices should be heard and considered in this context. But the same Ofcom report also quite unreasonably fails to reflect the views of people (most of them women) who take the gender-critical view of that same coverage. I think that’s a pretty serious mistake for the regulator overseeing the country’s most important media outlet to make over such a sensitive and contested issue.
Last year, Ofcom left a diversity scheme rule by trans-rights charity Stonewall, saying that as a regulator it must ‘remain impartial and independent at all times’. Sadly, I don’t think that Ofcom’s qualitative research report on perceptions of the BBC meets that standard.
Even more saddening is the wider context of that report.
This week, in order to bring impartiality and balance to coverage of trans issues and womens’ rights, the BBC gave prime airtime to a person who speaks openly about enjoying breaking women’s bones and ‘smacking up Terfs’. And in the same week, this report by the BBC’s regulator on impartial coverage of those issues was released that not only fails entirely to mention women’s legitimate and legally-protected concerns, but effectively tells the corporation that its coverage doesn’t lean far enough towards one side of that contested issue. It seems depressingly possible that at least some people at the BBC will read the report as encouragement to the corporation to do more to smack up those awful Terfs – figuratively speaking, of course.
For those of us who want this issue to be debated calmly, reasonably and impartially, especially by Britain’s public broadcaster, this is troubling, to put it mildly.
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