#BBCWatch

The season bursts into life with daily transphobic dramas all across the UK

jane fae
6 min readMar 11, 2023
Image of the New BBC Broadcasting House. Captions in the form of a dialogue: Speaker 1: “So, no public comment on controversial culture war issues?” Speaker 2: “Correct!” Speaker 1: “But how do we know what’s a controversial culture war issue?” Speaker 2: “The government will tell us…”
Adapted from BBC New Broadcasting House by Zizzu02 (2013): available under Creative Commons 3.0 License

This week, the BBC doubled down on its demand employees stay neutral on culture war issues in the run-up to an election likely to feature a lot of culture war. If they genuinely intend to enforce that across the board, that might not be a bad thing.

Because who would not welcome a period of silence from the transphobes?

Sadly, cynical ol’ me suspects this rule won’t be applied in an even-handed fashion. It will be used to clamp down on the likes of Gary Lineker… but not Andrew Neil!

So perhaps it is time to keep a closer eye on the BBC.

Now read on…

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How can i put this? The BBC has trans…. issues? No. Trans… problems? Nah.

Stop mincing words, jane. The BBC is a dumpster fire of unreconstructed bigotry and misinformation when it comes to trans folks. More of that in a minute.

That’s why, at the end of this piece, i will be asking you, dear reader, to join me and Trans Media Watch in a new project: #BBCWatch. It will be a bit like SpringWatch, which looks out for signs of spring; CrimeWatch, which keeps an eye on criminals; and Watchdog, which does much the same for Crufts…

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jane fae

Feminist, writer, campaigner on political and sexual liberty who also knows a bit about IT, the law and policing. Not entirely serious…