Fascinating article about the failure and complicity of the BBC regarding transactivism

[lcakethereforeIam]

In Unherd

https://archive.ph/hxJFg

https://unherd.com/2026/05/inside-the-capture-of-the-bbc/?edition=us

Long but worth a read.

I can't help thinking that BBC Verify is putting the shutters up because they couldn't find anyone who was brave enough or perhaps willing to look at an article and correct it to some equivalent of TWAM.

This is something repeatedly evidenced in the past couple of years particularly, here and in the US; the checks and balances do not work and do not trigger when they should to prevent what they were designed for.

And the issues are the ones that come up in the serious safeguarding reviews about 'why do we have all this safeguarding policy but people won't follow it and preventable disasters happen?'

It's always to do with people being unwilling to take responsibility and the flak of speaking out - often with the personal consequences being too severe. Everyone hoping everyone else will do something, and it won't hurt them. It's to do with ordinary working people left to manage the very challenging behaviour of very difficult adults with complex needs and personality disorders who do not play by the rules and produce an intensity and demand and neediness that tends to absorb everything and distract from other focuses. It's to do with fear about asking the difficult questions or drawing boundaries, when so many want to be nice and progressive and understanding, and find excuses and reasons to wait and see and think a bit more and give the benefit- and let things become out of control rather than intervene early.

It's a situation where nice, decent, well intentioned people have become fantastically useful idiots.

Glad someone's posted the link as I read it earlier as it is being shared on facebook

And whilst I appreciate that it is helpful to have this detailed record of the time scale, I cant help thinking that most people know this, even if from the TRA point of view they would tell it as their virtuous stand against the reactionary terfs etc..

But as it shows it is now so entrenched, not just as the article makes clear in management, but by a whole age group of employees who are still entrenched there and still adament they are right.

And even if shared more publicly will BBC viewers who accepted the pro trans position in past programmes change their mind?

I doubt it.

Will it make politicans be more likely to not take the TWAW position.

I doubt it.

And even other institutions that took Stonewall training at face value, may now have broken the link with Stonewall, but not the TRA agenda that they implanted.

I am not being negative for the sake of being negative, but with the fact that still so many are saying that they dont have to follow a Supreme Court ruling, will this change anything,

Or just get filed as another expose of what everyone knows, but prefer to carry on with the TWAW lies because they wont admit they were taken in in the first place.

Would be interesting to get a similar report from other broadcasters, eg ITV and C4 who went through and are still going through the same TRA pressures.

Just a random thought but if your MP is not publicly supportive of GC views, do you think if you sent it to them and (assuming) they actually read it, would it make them change their minds.

Do you think it will only stop when children (which hasn't happened yet) get through their school years and later university without having any of the trans narrative and agenda.

What happened at the BBC, C4, ITV, the Guardian is the same story. Some hardline activists, some well it might be right and I want to be on the right side of history, and other who dont care and those who actually disagree remain or are forced to be silent.

Why does this capture keep happening over and over again.

And as this thread is looking at, over aspects of diversity and inclusion just dont get a look in https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5530046-i-need-some-help-articulating-something-edi-and-lbgtqi-its-not-me-is-it

BBC Verify is an expensive farce. Over £3 million pa on a staff of 60 to spread disinformation with a figurehead in Marianna Spring lead who lied on her CV to get the job.

I heard the first, "flagship" episode of "Marianna in Conspiracyland" on Radio 4 in May 2023 and found it hard to believe. I was right to think something was off. The nonsense spouted was slated everywhere from the Daily Sceptic to the Morning Star.

BBC Spreads Fake News About Carl Benjamin in Flagship Podcast on ‘Mis-’ and ‘Disinformation’
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/18/bbc-silent-on-allegations-of-spreading-fake-news-in-flagship-podcast/

BBC Verify fails to verify its sources
Our state broadcaster is so excited about the dangerous fake news coming from the fringes that it has not bothered to fact-check wildly inaccurate Establishment research, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/bbc-verify-falls-its-own-conspiracy

There have been so many other "Verify fact-checked" stories since then that were either complete bollocks or seriously misleading, eg.

BBC Verify Forced to Delete “Thoroughly Wrong” Story Accusing Insurance Companies of Racism
Nov 2025
https://order-order.com/2025/11/06/bbc-verify-forced-to-delete-thoroughly-wrong-story-accusing-insurance-companies-of-racism/

Or were trivial, time-wasting non-stories "debunking" things like random, obviously AI-generated images that would fool no one and were not even in wide circulation.

Rod Liddle discerned the Achilles Heel of BBC Verify in 2023:

A reality check for the BBC: what they call ‘fake’ news is sometimes true after all

"The conduit (of truth) in question is Marianna Spring, who last year became the BBC’s first disinformation correspondent. Her job is to adjudicate on the veracity of everything, which may cause you to wonder how the BBC’s 1,999 other journos occupy their time — making stuff up?"

"This, then, is one of the problems with the reality check business: the people doing the reality-checking are not neutral. They are as partisan as any other journalist, and the notion that they can, as the former director-general Tony Hall once put it, “hang their political opinions on a coatpeg” when they enter New Broadcasting House is either naive or disingenuous. Frankly, there are no coatpegs big enough for the political opinions of some of those working there. I glance at BBC Verify every week or so, and I cannot remember a single occasion when the team adjudicated that the left was, on this rare occasion, quite wrong. Its decisions always serve to reinforce the BBC’s own viewpoint on any given story — chiefly because it is looking at the same source material as the other BBC journos."

https://www.thetimes.com/article/722fc7da-4f40-11ee-a041-9c691fc04ff2?shareToken=a8d70c4bba36994cad814bd631ceac8c&ver=article

So not a cat in hell's chance that they would do something useful like debunk any of the disinformation spread by the BBC about puberty blockers being "completely reversible", that there are 72 "genders", that anyone can be "born in the wrong body" or the mysterious rise in female paedophiles, rapists, voyeurs, nappy-fetishists, exhibitionists, murderers and perpetrators of violent crimes in general.

The thing that strikes me (and has struck me about countries such as Australia and institutions such as the NHS as well) is that where misogyny is embedded, misrepresentation of women’s rights will follow. And that has always been the case at the BBC. They are not diverse. There are – and have always been – white males at the top of the organisation (James Harding, Tim Davie, Matt Brittin and hosts of director generals and board members before them). Men are paid more and promoted more than women. Fran Unsworth was an exception, not the rule. The BBC had – and still has – women working for it who could see the decision to back trans rights was not impartial and was potentially disastrous in terms of its impacts on safeguarding and trust. But none of those women were in a position to be listened to. They were never promoted in the first place because – ironically on this issue – diverse is the very last thing the BBC is.

It's a really good article, but he missed off a crucial point which is that trans billionaire Jennifer Pritzker gave Stonewall £300 million to promote trans ideology.

It wasn't a natural progression because gay marriage had been achieved. It was a cynical, calculated move as shown by the Denton's documents.

Some of the world's best legal minds realised that by glomming trans activism onto gay rights they would be able to push through an ideology that people would otherwise have outright rejected.

I wanted to get a source for that Stonewall grant for something im doing but couldn’t find one. Do you have a link please?

while searching this interesting site came up. It seems to catalogue lots of grant giving to promote trans rights. Quite remarkable:
https://lgbtfunders.org/newsposts/record-breaking-grant-for-transgender-issues/

Exactly. It's both validating, but also frustrating because we have all been saying this for years.

Knotty, you could try looking at Jennifer Bilek’s work - she’s done a lot of research into the Pritzkers, eg:

https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/jennifer-bilek

thanks!

I like her definitions:

synthetic sex identities (SSI)

I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

Rob's a good journalist, proper BBC.
The mention of Frank Maloney (Kellie) reminded me of one of my peaking moments,
When I worked at the BBC he was a guest on a programme I worked on. One of the members of staff in the gallery just said in an offhand way "I find it hard to see him as a woman when he's always been Frank to me.' That was it.
A journalist, a member of the LGBT network, overheard him and reported him to management, He got called in by management and got told off. Never forgot it, like the bloody Stasi.

Thanks for posting and what an interesting read. Sobering to see that timeline and how such a massive public institution was captured.

Quite something to think this a mass movement and taking place all over the western world.

Will there be similar reviews and reports of how our NHS, civil service, justice system etc etc turned inside out and upside down to bend reality and truth so blatantly? It's staggering how it seemed the whole of academia, science, medicine, law, politics were led like sheep.

I just read this on my mail feed, and came to see if was on MN, not surprised than posters here are on the case. I often pass on tl;dr, but like others, found this well worth reading in its entirety, what a good piece!

Will there be similar reviews and reports of how our NHS, civil service, justice system etc etc turned inside out and upside down to bend reality and truth so blatantly?

There certainly should be! As always, the more sunlight, the better!

There should be and I hope there will be - I think that like the aviation industry we need to carry out detailed forensic investigations into why and how things in the public sector go wrong.

Sadly though, unlike the aviation industry (which actually implements useful findings from investigations), I think we'll get the usual plamás from the govt and the NHS etc about unforeseen consequences and about 'lessons are being learned' and then our public sector/civic society will go right back to doing things how they've always been done and nobody will have really learned how to avoid groupthink and ideological capture.

The article is excellent but misses out the fact that none of us who complained multiple times over the content of much of the material, were not treated fairly and if complaints ever got through the tortuous procedures, they were always dismissed. It would be sobering indeed to see the numbers involved.

Thank you, it was very much worth reading.

It comes as a relief to see someone confirming that it has been riddled with trans activists propaganda, and been ruled by certain groups of staff.

It is difficult to believe this reasoning even now:

It turns out that this concept of “due impartiality” is the crux of Unsworth’s explanation and defense of BBC News’ handling of the transgender story. Here’s how: “Impartiality only operates when you can look at evidence and facts and point to them as the basis of your reporting on this. And the facts at this point were incredibly disputed.”

^But this changed in April 2025, she tells me, when the Supreme Court made clear that a woman — for the purposes of the Equality Act — meant a biological woman. This provided BBC journalists with a “basis of challenge” against those who insisted men could decide to be women. Prior to the ruling, producers couldn’t judge if one assertion (“trans women are women”) was any more true than another (“trans women are not women, they are biological men”).
Can this absurd assertion really lie at the heart of the BBC’s trans tangle? Well, Unsworth tells me, “until the Supreme Court ruling on it, Keir Starmer himself was saying trans women are women”.^

How did the BBC not know in the first place that it is as untrue to have as a premise that transwomen are biologically women, as it is to hold to the principle that the earth is flat?

It is worrying to hear what Victoria Derbyshire promoted though.

That's a good point. From the article it seems it was the supreme court ruling that was the turning point. It was only after that clarity that the BBC felt brave enough for example to report factually correct biological sex when pertinent to a new item.

Very little was said about GC campaigning and the numbers of complaints coming from viewers and readers. Were all those letters and emails over the years just thrown in the bin? Did any Senior staff ever stop to even consider that what GC viewers were pointing out was actually the truth? It seems they were so convinced that going along with trans activism would ensure they remained on the 'right side of history'.

Also the part about the tv programs showing very young children born in the wrong body and how referrals to Tavistock doubled year on year following its broadcast. Referring the program as an advert for Mermaids. I remember similar with Jazz J in the US and others causing an explosion in very young children and their parents seeking gender affirming treatment. Such manipulation that was discussed here on MN.

I feel there's a lot it misses out. There's the way that Woman's Hour, for example, repeatedly platformed trans activist voices (people like Grace Lavery) while ignoring feminist voices.

Or the way that every time PM covered the issue of men competing in women's sport, they interviewed the trans activist Joanna Harper rather than a scientist such as Emma Hilton or a feminist campaigner such as Sharron Davies. Worse, Harper was presented as someone impartial with academic expertise.

Or the way they repeatedly referred to violent male sex offenders as "she" or "woman," respecting the offender's preferred identity rather than objective reality.

Or the time that Dave McMullan, a Today programme producer, said "I'd never put any trans women on alongside some horrific TERF."

I could go on, but really, the entire corporation was (probably still is) riddled with this insane ideology.

I agree, there is a lot missing, which is why I thought there is probably enough here for him to write a book. He could really get to the heart of all the different strands of the deliberate dismissal of reality manifest inside the BBC. (which I assume is still there, even now)

I, too, am worried about this. If the root cause of the capture is never exposed, there will be too much potential for another such ideology to take hold. Because even if this one is scrubbed out, those who thrive on this kind of chaos will find another route to it. As PP said (paraphrasing) there's always room for the next tranche of Stasi.

Perhaps someone could write to him to ask if he knew how many 100s of letters of complaint there were, including about the treatment of Jenni Murray, or the way they reported on the cat-liquidising and human- murdering male, Scarlett, as a woman.

He's on X. I don't have an account so I can't see if he's used it recently.

Yes, he's using it and has posted a link to the article.
I would like to think that Nick Wallis is having a cosy chat with him.