BBC Transphobia Part 4: The ECU Response

Content warning for transphobia, descriptions of violence & sexual assault.

ECU Response

Trans Activism UK Response

Ofcom complaints form

BBC Complaints page

Wonderful background art by Skutch:

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Text of my new complaint:

The ECU finding titled “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women, bbc.co.uk Finding by the Head of the Executive Complaints Unit (ECU)” contains a serious oversight.

As explained in the finding, the article originally titled “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women” received complaints about incorrect pronouns being used when referring to trans women. The ECU addresses these complaints by referring to quotes from a contributor named “Jennie,” who speaks about threats from an unnamed third party referred to as “they.” The ECU conclude that Jennie “said nothing to indicate that the comments in question were made by a trans woman, and the Head of the ECU saw no basis for assuming that they had been. Consequently, he did not accept that this was an instance of misgendering.”

The finding furthermore states that the Head of the ECU “... found no example of misgendering or bioessentialist language in the author’s own words.”

My complaint is that another instance of misgendering that matches these exact criteria is found in the article, in the author’s own words, and has been overlooked by the ECU. This is the relevant passage from the article:

“Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date.

"[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them].”

As we can see, the article specifies that the person in question is in fact a trans woman, but then goes on to refer to her as ‘they’ several times in the next paragraph. Additionally, these are the “author’s own words,” as the original text being quoted used ‘he’ and ‘him.’ By the criteria the ECU finding uses to identify misgendering, (using ‘they’ to refer to someone known to be a trans woman) this passage counts as misgendering.