Helen Joyce is pissed off at the BBC.

In May, shortly after appearing on Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, I wrote about what a depressing experience it had been. I mentioned that I would be putting in a formal complaint about the way the show misrepresented me in an interview the following week with Sacha Deshmukh of Amnesty, formerly of Stonewall, and predicted that my complaint would get nowhere.

And sure enough it got nowhere.

I’m really not joking when I say that I would like the BBC to be defunded – on my specialist subject, sex’n’gender, it has been nothing short of a propaganda arm. It’s directly responsible for much of the social contagion that has seen trans identification rise so much among young people, for the staggering degree of misinformation about human biology that we see all around us, and for the enormous harm done to women by presenting the unreasonable and narcissistic demands of a tiny number of deranged men as the biggest human-rights issue of our times. We’d be better off without it, and every licence-fee payer would be £174.50 a year better off too.

I’m resharing my original article today for two reasons: first because of an excellent open letter just published signed by several organisations, including Sex Matters, the one I work for, calling on the Beeb to stop doing this. You can read it on SEEN in Journalism’s Substack.

The second is because because of the shocking decision – genuinely, even when I think I can no longer be shocked, it turns out I can – at the highest level in the Beeb to call the Minneapolis shooter “she/her”, and to knock back complaints about its decision to do the same with a British trans-identifying man who killed his husband with a samurai sword.

There were complaints and the BBC responded as it always does. They’re just being polite, you see. It’s like when somebody asks you to pass the sugar. You don’t say sugar is empty calories, you just pass the sugar.

The Beeb says that its style guide requires journalists to refer to people as they wish to be described, and that when it comes to criminals, it uses the language that is used in court. This amounts to saying: “We have a shitty internal policy that prioritises a fringe counterfactual belief system over accuracy and impartiality – which are legal requirements in our charter – and if an arm of the state, namely the criminal-justice system, decides to gaslight the nation, we will too.”

Accuracy in news organizations is so over-rated, don’t you think?