Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg February 15

Thank you very much for covering the complex issue of child ‘transition’ on Sunday February 15.

We understand that you’ve received a great deal of pushback from gender identity activists over this interview, and that the expectation of this pushback was likely the reason for hosting an unbalanced panel and associated failure to challenge or explore key points in the interview. We’ve seen a great deal of that pushback already. Most of it is incoherent.

The BBC has previously and internally acknowledged that balancing the ‘body count’ of complaints is not the key to impartiality, which comes only when an item is curated around a foundation of fact. Complaints must be considered according to their credibility, not volume, persistence and the fear they instil. With that in mind we’d be grateful for your patience in looking at our concerns.

The salient (and indisputable) fact for this item was that no child has an opposite sex brain, ever has, or ever will. It’s empirically and necessarily impossible for anyone, adult or child, to have an opposite sex brain.

The team’s producers should have realised and highlighted this. It’s not an extreme position, any more than it’s extreme to say that the Earth is not flat. Yes, they’re very decided and immovable positions, but it’s an error to ascribe this immovability to extremism rather than objective observation.

Unfortunately the interview was predicated on the belief that there’s such a thing as ‘true trans’ (or ‘wrong body’) people. For the purposes of Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, it then followed that a cohort of children, however small - ‘true trans’ children - can be rendered content only by pubescent medical interventions that will lead to lifelong pharmacological dependence and the likely removal of sexual function and fertility.

This is an opinion which it is due for the BBC to air, and which should be aired, but which is not due to be treated as a fact. It should have been presented as an opinion, and challenged as an opinion. Instead the interview was built on that controversial and disprovable view.

Unfortunately again, no evidence was provided for this position during the interview. But more importantly, it wasn’t sought by Laura. She should have asked Baroness Cass for evidence that such a true trans cohort exists - after all, the perfect opening was offered when she spoke of ‘brutal’ medical interventions.

Instead Laura’s question: ‘How do we know which children?’ made the false and dangerous assumption that some will benefit from these ‘brutal’ protocols.

You will have considered this question from Laura to be quite tough and impartial, because of its implicit acceptance that not all children who are said to be ‘trans’ will benefit from social transition.

But it is built on the same extremist ‘opposite sex brain’ belief shared by your team and your panellists, Emily Thornberry and Billy Bragg. We hope you’ll be able to understand your programme’s partiality when you note that Laura, the Baroness, Thornberry and Bragg were all biased in favour of affirmation for some special children - with the only variation being how many and which ones.

You had not a single safeguarding guest, prepared to articulate the fact that no child is born in the wrong body. The Reform guest was not a safeguarding expert, and was wildly outnumbered anyway.

Programme research was poor on the flaws in the Pathways protocol, what it will measure, how children are being recruited, why clinicians have concerns, how it secured ethics approval, and what happened to the previous data on thousands of medically transitioned children.

Laura’s comment that only clinician concerns are legitimate was weak, to misleading (the judicial review is partly brought by parents and a detransitioner, for example). She did not explore the impact of compelled speech and compliance on other school pupils, and she did not explore whether Baroness Cass would like to see social media grooming or misinformation to be included in online harms.

But she did explore and reinforce the smear about both sides being extremist, and weaponising children, without asking for examples to back up the claim.

Meanwhile the panel: it was chosen for its activist nature - you don’t get Billy Bragg on without understanding how rude, aggressive and extreme he’s been on this issue. Perhaps the researchers really didn’t, in which case it would be an extremely poor job. Laura was not well enough briefed or researched to debunk Bragg’s shocking ‘suicide’ claim: nor his ‘we don’t hear from trans people ’ claim: nor Thornberry’s ‘most marginalised and vulnerable’ claim.

It was a terrible error to open up the question to these ignorant and ill-informed people, with just five minutes to spare, and was obviously a performative gesture aimed at making peace with those gender identity activists who were likely to be enraged. It must be very disappointing that it didn’t work, though it did give the team something for the complaints unit to distribute.

We do however hope we’ve been able to help you understand how your programme was biased, not only by the panel, but by being based on a framing that there really are children who were ‘born in the wrong body’.

We believe this bias also contributed to your view of Hilary Cass as a mildly ‘gender critical’ contributor who needed ‘balancing’ at all by two extreme identity activists: rather than an advocate for a medical experiment on pubescent children who should have been balanced by safeguarding campaigners.

The distaste for the Cass Review by LKS was clear in April 2024. It did not interview her at the time, and didn’t even ask Victoria Atkins about it when she guested the Sunday after its publication.

Now that it’s clear the Baroness approves guidance which legitimises social transition by schools (sometimes in secret), and approves some children being given puberty blockers, LKS introduced the Baroness and her Review in glowing terms, and approached its interview with her as an apprentice approaching the oracle.

It is proper to interview the Baroness about her important work, and her sincerely held and well researched opinions. It is not due to build your interview on affirmative bias, failure of research, fondness for extremist contributors and fear of identity complaints activism.

You will still be thinking :- ‘They all hate us, so we must have got it right’. We would request that you abandon this simplistic response, and ensure there is someone on your team who is unafraid to say that sex is real, there are only two, you can’t swap, and you can’t have an opposite sex brain. Only then will you be able to frame the issue impartially in future.

If you have no one is prepared to articulate these facts out loud, you must surely know you have quite a big problem when it comes to looking at sex and gender stories without bias.

Thank you so much for your patience and attention.