James Kirkup wrote about the BBC fact check referred to in thread. The Spectator, August 2018:
'Is the BBC scared of the transgender debate?'
(extract)
"Some recent BBC coverage of transgender issues fails to meet the usual standards of its journalism. Those failings, in turn, raise some wider questions for the BBC on this topic.
The first piece that isn’t up to scratch is this Reality Check about transgender prisoners, published earlier this week. Reality Check, when it’s good, is first-class public service journalism, the sort of rigorous, evidence-based analysis that British journalism and politics desperately need more of. This isn’t good. The piece purports to test an estimate made by Fair Play for Women (FPFW), a feminist group, that 41 per cent of trans women in jail are sex offenders. That’s significantly higher than the 15 per cent of the whole prison population jailed for sexual crimes.
FPFW is concerned that allowing male-born sex offenders to be imprisoned with female-born inmates (who are vulnerable and very often have been victims of sexual abuse) puts women at risk. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not pretending to be neutral here: I think that concern is a valid one and I’m not convinced current prison policy has sufficient regard for the wellbeing of female prisoners in this context. (There’s more to come on this issue, incidentally, but much of it is subject to court action and can’t yet be reported. But I think there are some awkward questions coming for prison chiefs and politicians alike, in due course.)
The BBC seeks to test the FPFW figure of 41 per cent mainly by way of official Ministry of Justice figures, released following a BBC request under the Freedom of Information Act. Those figures show that 60 of 125 transgender inmates were serving sentences for sexual offences. That’s 48 per cent. That is, to put it mildly, a striking figure. But having obtained that information, through good and proper journalism, the BBC Reality Check team goes to great lengths to tell readers to discount it. The piece is laden with caveats and warnings about those figures, some of which are badly flawed. For instance, the repeated insistence that “we don’t know the gender of the perpetrators in these cases”.
The implication there is that some of the 60 trans sex offenders might be transmen, people born female and now identifying as male. Put simply, this is bordering on offensive, the sort of “Reverse Victim and Offender” tactics that a certain sort of man uses when debating issues of violence against women. Because the sort of fact-checking analytical journalism that Reality Check is supposed to do would show the only reasonable interpretation of those figures for 60 sex offenders is that they relate to people born male who now identify as female.
I say that for several reasons. First, the sexual offences committed by those 60 trans offenders:
27 convictions for rape (plus a further five of attempted rape)
13 convictions for possessing, distributing or making indecent images of children
13 convictions for sexual assault or attempted sexual assault
Nine convictions for causing or inciting a child under 16 to engage in sexual activity
Seven convictions for sexual activity with a child
Seven convictions for indecent assault or gross indecency
These are crimes that are overwhelmingly committed by male-born people, also known as men; a vanishingly small proportion of sexual offence convictions are against women. The latest prison population figures show that of the entire female prison population, only 128 were sentenced for sexual offences. So unless there’s evidence to the contrary (and the BBC certainly hasn’t found any), it’s reasonable to start from the assumption those 60 criminals were born male.
Second, the known facts of transgender inmates in the prison estate. It is an established fact there are some male-born people in the female estate: that’s the whole point of this debate. But are there female-born people in the male estate? These would be people who were born female and later in life identified themselves as male and were sentenced to a custodial sentence, exercising their right under current prison policy to request to serve their sentence in a male prison alongside male-born prisoners. As far as I can establish, there are no such inmates; Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform, one of the country’s leading authorities on the prison system, also says: “I’ve not heard of trans men going to men’s prisons, they simply would not be safe.”
Yet the Reality Check team seems not to have even tried to check these things. Instead they are inviting readers to infer that it’s possible that a significant number of those sexual offenders might be people were born female and now identify as male. That is poor journalism that verges on being misleading.
There are various other evasions in the Reality Check piece, all seeming to try to lead the reader away from the obvious conclusion that the Fair Play for Women figures were essentially accurate and that a disproportionately high number of transgender prisoners are in jail for sexual offences.
Just for good measure, Reality Check (a supposedly objective fact-check) chucks in a bit of commentary from Jane Fae, a “transgender journalist and campaigner” making the wholly subjective assertion that the public will “misinterpret” those official figures and that “the fall-out in terms of violence and abuse will, in some cases, be significant.” Perhaps that is a valid case to argue, but it is not one that belongs in a Reality Check piece.
In truth, the public is in little danger of misinterpreting those figures, or even of knowing about them, because the BBC did its best to bury them. While most Reality Check pieces are featured on the homepage of BBC News, this one was not apparently placed there at any point. BBC News has made little effort to publicise what might reasonably be considered newsworthy information about a matter of public interest.
The overall impression given is that someone at the BBC set out with the hope of debunking that Fair Play for Women calculation, but uncovered evidence suggesting that calculation was perfectly reasonable, then made significant efforts to avoid saying so or telling anyone that, yes, a lot of male-born offenders who identify themselves as women are in jail for sexual crimes, including crimes committed against women." (continues with discussion of BBC coverage of non-binary cllr Gregor Murray)
blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/08/is-the-bbc-scared-of-the-transgender-debate/