Female staff at the BBC complained to editors for years that the publicly-funded British broadcaster had been hijacked by the “trans” agenda, newly-leaked emails dating back to 2020 show.
In the emails, female staff complained that biologically male transgender sex offenders were being referred to in stories as women, and that articles were avoiding the use of the words “girls” and “women” when discussing topics such as menstruation and birth control, according to the Sunday Times.
Staffers emailed leading male BBC executives, including new acting head of news Jonathan Munro, director of news Richard Burgess, and digital news editor Stuart Millar, but felt that they were ignored or rebuffed, the outlet reported.
The women also described a culture of fear at the BBC, where even veteran reporters didn’t dare to stray from the position on trans issues, lest they be branded “transphobic,” the Times reported.
BBC editors were also accused of ignoring stories that could be seen as critical of the transgender movement, even if they had been widely covered by other news outlets, according to the emails, which were sent over the past five years.
“Any questioning or insufficiently enthusiastic championing risked being labeled as bigoted … It felt like activism, not news,” one BBC staffer told the Sunday Times.
Amid the coverage of Karen White, a biological male who identified as transgender before sexually assaulting two inmates at a female prison, the BBC referred to him throughout as a woman.
When Samantha Smith, at the time an editor at the BBC, raised with senior managers that White should have been reported as a man, the conversation was instantly “shut down,” she told the Sunday Times.
“Trans women are women,” she was told, adding that she felt she was being labeled as a “bigot” who needed to be “reeducated,” under the BBC’s Orwellian regime.
Smith has since left the BBC, but her claims that the broadcaster was taken over by an extremist trans agenda were far from unique.
Whistleblower Sue Evans, who exposed a medical center’s use of puberty blockers on child patients, claimed the BBC had been “infiltrated by activists,” during an interview with the Telegraph.
An internal memo revealed that all trans stories were subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBTQ reporters hired as gatekeepers at the BBC, who refused to cover gender-critical stories.
“In news, we have taken a number of actions relating to our reporting of sex and gender including updating the news style guide and sharing new guidance, making our Social Affairs Editor responsible for this coverage, and where there have been concerns about particular stories, we have addressed them,” the BBC said in a statement.
It comes amid further damaging allegations of ideological takeover and editorial malpractice at Britain’s taxpayer-funded public broadcaster.
President Trump is planning a $5 billion lawsuit after the BBC edited footage of his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, for a documentary.
And the BBC’s Arabic Service has been accused of broadcasting pro-Hamas propaganda, and of refusing to report on the Israeli hostages, Deadline reported.