Laurel Duggan
The BBC reportedly changed quotes from a rape victim to avoid using male pronouns to refer to a transgender attacker, according to The Sunday Times.
The outlet’s diversity team reportedly wanted to avoid “misgendering” the attacker in a 2021 story about lesbian women being pressured to have sexual encounters with men who identify as transgender women, according to the Times.
Some senior journalists were concerned that the BBC’s policy of using an individual’s preferred pronouns got in the way of accurate and unbiased reporting.
“[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them],” the purportedly altered victim quote read. “I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a ‘woman’ even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me.”
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The victim used “he” and “him” pronouns to refer to the biologically male attacker in her original quote to the outlet, according to The Times.
The BBC style guide recommends that writers use transgender individual’s preferred pronouns rather than those that reflect their sex.
“They were originally all male references but the woke bros at the news website wanted to make them female because of misgendering,” a person with knowledge of the matter told the Times. “It’s quite shocking. I can’t think of any other situation where we would change the words of an alleged rape victim.”
The BBC directed The Daily Caller News Foundation to its 2021 statement about the article but did not comment further.
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