We are doing everything we can to help the BBC understand that maintaining an editorial policy of self-identification of sex is untenable.

There is urgency.  A review is underway, that will set new sex and gender guidance in stone.  The BBC is not like other news outlets, which are more fluid, whose processes are less public, which can move a few steps forward, a few steps back: and can wait a a few months to see how the wind blows, before making a commitment.

The BBC’s public remit means the pressure is different.  It owes us more, and is on a deadline - it has to respond to the Supreme Court judgement. Very soon, the updated EHRC code will be published, the Sandie Peggie case will be concluded and any reasons for delay will have evaporated.  And whatever the BBC decides, everyone will know about it.   

This will have been brought home very clearly this week to those writing the new guidance, when the Telegraph headlined the BBC's continued defence the use of inaccurate pronouns in the case of Joanna Rowland-Stuart.

The BBC originally headlined Rowland-Stuart as a wife and a woman.  After an outcry, the piece was edited to call him a ‘trans woman’.  This happened before the Complaints unit formally had time to respond, so it’s an indication of an internal acknowledgement that calling him a wife and a woman was a step too far, and that some of the public anger was justified. But it still used female pronouns, and did not explicitly state that he’s a man.

It seemed this could be the BBC’s planned solution to its decade-old problem with self-identification of sex. Always tell the audience if a person is trans - but don't require information about their sex, and keep pronoun self-identification in place. That was never going to be good enough, and the BBC has just had a taste of exactly how the public will respond.  We predict it will lead to a significant uptick in 'defunding' along with global embarrassment. 

 But there’s inconsistency. The BBC has decided that nappy fetishist  Abi Taylor doesn't deserve the respect of preferred pronouns, but violent offender Zoe Watts and killer Joanna Rowland-Stuart do.  It starts to look like a ‘sliding scale’ - not only a deeply unpleasant and counter-factual approach, but also completely unworkable.

Let’s briefly clear up two points: the defence of ‘court language’ and the reference to the condition of ‘gender dysphoria’.

Firstly, no legal obligation exists. There is no risk of contempt.  Secondly, just as a man with a GRC is a man with a GRC - a man with ‘gender dysphoria’ is a man with ‘gender dysphoria’. Not a woman. 

The furious reaction to the BBC’s decision to defend self-identification of sex in defiance of April’s Supreme Court judgement was entirely natural and predictable,.   And this is just one story, and one newspaper reporting one response to one complaint.  Imagine the public contempt if the BBC announces that this will be editorial policy for the foreseeable future, approved at the highest levels of BBC leadership. In effect, that the BBC decides it knows better than the Supreme Court.

There's one further point: the anger did not just come from campaigners who understand sexed reality. Transgender activists were enraged that the headlines were altered to insert the word 'trans'.  Unfortunately for us, the bar the BBC hopes to clear on ‘balance’ often consists merely of generating the same levels of opprobrium from both sides, however irrational one side is. 

When it comes to accuracy, however, it must not be balanced by inaccuracy.  Truth is binary.  We are currently doing everything we can to help the BBC understand that defaulting to sexed language is not not just defensible, it's the only way forward.  

Credit - always - to those members of the public and those organisations which complained.