 The BBC has been forced to edit a 4,000-word article deemed transphobic after it emerged. One of the key interviewees have described trans women as vile, weak and disgusting and had been accused of sexual misconduct. The piece in question, published at the end of October, warned that lesbians were being pressured into having sex with trans women. It's an incredibly incendiary piece to give you an idea of the article. I'm going to show you how it starts. So this is the start of this 4,000-word article. I've had someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler, says 24-year-old Jenny. They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler. That was so bizarrely violent just because I won't have sex with trans women. Jenny is a lesbian woman. She says she is only sexually attracted to women who are biologically female and have vaginas. She therefore only has sex and relationships with women who are biologically female. Jenny doesn't think this should be controversial, but not everyone agrees. She has been described as transphobic, a genital fetishist, a pervert, and a turf, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Now, of course, those tweets are completely vile. Not nice to say the least to receive. Does that warrant a big article about this, you know, this phenomenon of trans women pressuring lesbians to have sex with them? I'm not sure. As I say, whilst this piece is bound to provoke a lot of fear surrounding trans women, its evidence base is really, really weak. To ground its argument, the article cited seven tweets from mostly anonymized accounts. It included a number of anonymized interviews, like the one I've just shown you, and it spoke to a number of anti-trans activists. It also included the following bit of quantitative data. The author Caroline Lowbridge writes, Hearing about experiences of lesbians being pressured into having sex with trans women led one lesbian activist to begin researching the topic. Angela C. Wilde is co-founder of Get The L Out, whose members believe the rights of lesbians are being ignored by much of the current LGBT movement. She and her fellow activists have demonstrated at Pride marches in the UK where they have faced opposition. Pride in London accused the group of bigotry, ignorance and hate. Lesbians are still extremely scared to speak because they think they won't be believed because the trans ideology is so silencing everywhere, she said, goes on. Angela created a questionnaire for lesbians and distributed it via social media, then published the results. She said that of the 80 women who did respond, 56% reported being pressured or coerced to accept a trans woman as a sexual partner. While acknowledging the sample may not be representative of the wider lesbian community, she believes it was important to capture their points of view and stories. Yes, the national broadcaster is now basing stories which portray minorities in an extremely negative light based on self-selecting Twitter surveys from people who we can assume are probably already hostile to that minority because they're following someone who's part of an anti-trans organization. Of course, the BBC would say this is acceptable because the piece also used qualitative evidence, namely interviews. Yet here they had another problem because, ironically, given the theme of the article, one of their interviewees had herself been accused of sexual misconduct. The original article featured quotes from Lily Cade, a porn star who stars in lesbian movies. She was quoted because she had refused to have sex with a trans woman porn star for which she received criticism on Twitter. After the article was published, it was reported that Cade had in fact apologized in 2017 after receiving multiple allegations of sexual abuse. Cade then went on, so this was after the article was published, to make violently transphobic comments on her blog and on her Twitter. These included the following. I should warn you, this is really quite shocking and horrible. So she on her blog wrote, If you left it up to me, I'd execute every last one of them personally, cancel the ever living fuck out of this, cancel this so hard that no man dare walk the path of the trans woman in public ever again. Enough is enough. Lynch, Caitlyn, that's Caitlyn Jenner, Lynch, the sisters, Wachowski. So that's the trans women who directed the Matrix. Lynch, Laurel Hubbard, she's the trans weightlifter and Lynch Fallon Fox, who is a trans MMA fighter. Following these quotes coming to light and the abuse allegations, the BBC have edited out Lily Cade from the article, from their original article. So it's been edited. They posted this update under the articles. This is how the story now appears on the BBC website. Update 4th of November, we have updated this article published last week to remove a contribution from one individual in light of comments she has published on blog posts in recent days, which we have been able to verify. We acknowledge that an admission of inappropriate behavior by the same contributor should have been included in the original article. That edit, of course, is is welcome from the BBC. However, it doesn't answer the most important questions that the case of Lily Cade raises. Namely, why in a four thousand word article making very damaging claims about a minority group with the only sources of evidence, some tweets, a laughable survey and interviews with a small number of women, at least one of whom has admitted sexually inappropriate behavior and is an extreme and violent transphobe. Ash, this article received twenty thousand complaints. It's clear why it did. What did you make of it? So I spoke about this article at the time when it came out on the 26th of October, because just giving it a first read, it was abundantly clear to me that it fell short of every editorial standard in the book. The first is that it is predicated on this poll, which, as you point out, is a self-selecting poll. So it was circulated by somebody who is known to have very trans-hostile views amongst their social networks and only had a sample of 80 people. Now, a sample of 80 people, if you're doing very detailed and ethnographic and rigorous work, can be useful. But if it's something like a Twitter poll, I mean, a Twitter poll at all shouldn't be used as the basis for any article. But if it's something like a Twitter poll, it is not only unreliable. It may actually be actively misleading because you're drawing from a pool of people who are participating precisely because they already share a particular point of view. Let's take, for example, if I was to put out a Twitter poll today and it said, who would you prefer to be? Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson. The likelihood is that because of the kind of following that I have on Twitter and the kind of networks it would be reaching, that Jeremy Corbyn would win by a milestone. That wouldn't be a reliable poll over and above, say, the 2019 general election result or the kind of polling which is put out by YouGov or anybody else. You'd see how dreadful it is if I gave to you the example. You know, the BBC has decided to do an article about Muslims. And in order to do so, they interviewed Tommy Robinson and all of Tommy Robinson's friends who say that Muslims do, indeed, present a unique threat to, I don't know, white British people. You would say that's not a reliable article. And not only that, it can be considered inflammatory or inciting, you know, hate crimes or violence against this minority group who has been so thoroughly demonised because people whose entire reason for being this hostility towards that group have been given given the platform and the legitimacy of an outlet like the BBC. So purely from a journalistic perspective, I thought that this article was very dangerous and it was shameful for the BBC to have to publish it. Let's then move on onto the content of the article, which is this matter of people saying that they have felt pressured into sex by transgender women. So this was something which I also spoke out about at the time. And because of what I said, I'm still receiving emails on like a daily basis from mostly men who present themselves as gender critical, calling me rapey, saying that, you know, I'm essentially a betting rape, because all I said was nobody should be pressured into sex for any reason. You have the right not to have sex with anyone for any reason. However, if what you're doing is going around saying, I don't want to have sex with anybody from this group of people because I find them so disgusting, because I don't think they're really women or because I don't think they're really human, that that speech act might be indicative of bigotry, not whether or not you want to have sex with somebody, but simply that you go around saying the fact that you don't want to fuck them is in is itself a common on their humanity or whether or not they should be able to live as they are. And the parallel that I drew was to do with race. So, Michael, I don't feel offended in the slightest that you don't want to have sex with me. However, if you spent the entire day posting on Twitter that not only would you not want to have sex with me, that you wouldn't want to have sex with any Bengali because they're so disgusting. You hate their skin color. They just don't look like they're humans to you. I would say maybe that's a bit racist. And I do think that that's a fair comparison to make, which is where whether or not you want to have sex, the particular minority group is deemed as evidence of whether or not they're fully human or indeed fully women. No one is saying that there is a moral obligation to have sex with transgender people if that is not where your desire leads. But an awful lot of people, that is where their desire leads. There are an awful lot of lesbians out there who do and want to have intimate relationships with transgender women. And that's completely fine as well. But the minute you put that argument, which is, look, people's desires are different. It's going to lead you in different directions. You don't have no obligation to have sex with anybody. But the fact that you don't want to have sex with this individual, you don't want to have sex with anyone from this minority group. It doesn't make them disgusting. It doesn't make them wrong. It doesn't make them less human. The fact that you get such a wave of abuse from people who describe themselves as gender critical, which really just means, you know, transphobic, I think it tells you about the actual purpose of this discussion, which isn't about is it or is it not OK to pressure someone in sex? Obviously, the answer is never OK to pressure anyone in sex. It is using this presentation of trans women as uniquely sexually predatory in order to roll back on the rights that they've secured and to curtail any rights that they might achieve in the future. They ultimately took out this one interview, as we've explained, but they defended the article. They kept it up and this is the BBC response. The article was carefully considered before publication, went through a rigorous editorial review process and fully complies with the BBC's editorial guidelines and standards. Some argue that the article is flawed because it is based on a survey of 80 people. The article itself states there is little research in this area that the survey featured was conducted on social media and is therefore self selecting. And even the author of the survey admits it may not be a representative sample, so we admitted the limitations of it. Furthermore, there is a link to the detail of the findings which enables the reader to make up their own minds about the replies the sample generated. But the article is more than just a survey. The journalist work involved months of speaking to many people about the topic and the article includes testimony from a range of different sources and provides appropriate context. You might wonder here why if she'd spent months researching the piece, she hadn't come across easily Googleable information which would reveal that one of her interviewees had been accused of sexual assault, which is probably relevant information when that is the theme of your article. A Guardian report on the row provides some more shocking details actually about this story. So they write on Wednesday, Chelsea Poe, a trans porn porn performer, said she had told the BBC journalist behind the article that Kate had been accused of sexual misconduct and was no longer working in the porn industry, but said she had not been quoted in the piece. A source at the BBC said the journalist behind the story had spoken to Poe, but an editorial judgment was made not to quote her because the general conversation was deemed not relevant to the piece. While this article really only quoted people who were quite hostile to trans people who were sort of buying into this narrative, they did interview a trans porn performer, but they didn't feature any of her answers. And what's more, that trans porn performer has said that she told the journalist that one of the other interviewees had been accused of sexual abuse and the journalist didn't think to mention it. And the BBC have now admitted that should have been mentioned. So the question to the BBC, if you admit that that should have been mentioned, that context should have been given, then what's your account of how the journalist didn't think to include that? Look, I don't want to play libel bingo, so I'm going to direct to my comments generally rather than at this particular journalist. There is a media interest in utilising feminism and discourses which have developed through feminism about sexual harassment, sexual abuse and wielding them to demonise transgender people. All right. That is a thing which is happening, not just at the BBC. It's also happening at The Guardian. It's happening in all of these discussions around self-identification and access to same sex spaces. And it is a way of using the language of liberation for intensely reactionary purposes. Take an outlet like Women's Hour, which recently featured interview with Kathleen Stark, who recently resigned her post at Sussex University. Now, I'm not going to get into the rightness or wrongness of Kathleen Stark or her resignation. What I will say is how many times have you seen a transgender woman on Women's Hour talking about the issues that she faces? Or how many times have you heard a story on Women's Hour about transgender women struggling to access health care or the increased rates of domestic violence or sexual violence that transgender women experience? You've never heard it. And I know for a fact that certain stories have been pitched to Women's Hour about experiences of transgender people, transgender people trying to access health care. And quite simply, they were rejected because the line was, I just don't think our audience will be particularly interested in this. So you have deliberate media gatekeeping to exclude trans sympathetic stories from their platforms, while I think offering proportionate and sympathetic coverage towards people who articulate transgender points of view. This is an editorial perspective, which runs writ through British media. And I think it is shameful. I think it is dangerous. I think it is insightful towards a minority who already face heightened rates of violence and abuse and harassment, but it is also atrocious, journalistic practice. And it is robbing the audience of the ability to make an informed decision about what they think about this issue.