How trans activism took over the BBC

At a recent media conference, I bumped into Nathan Wren, the co-chair of BBC Studios Pride. Perhaps the most surprising thing of all about Nathan is that he works in the BBC’s science programming. You’d think promoting deeply unscientific ideas like gender identity would disqualify someone from such a role. The belief that people can literally change sex, or that they have a hidden inner self at odds with their biological body, is really the stuff of science-fiction shows, like Doctor Who.

Back when I made science documentaries for the BBC, like Horizon, we producers were drawn to any contested subject like catnip. Audiences were, too. Back then, the public trusted the BBC to investigate impartially and to deliver a judgement they could rely on. Today, Horizon could make a very gripping episode on whether ‘gender identity’ is a real thing. But somehow I doubt it will anytime soon. Because at the BBC these days it is near impossible to challenge any of the tenets of gender ideology.

The BBC’s capture by gender ideology first became clear to me in 2019, in its coverage of a story about archaeology. Scientists had discovered that a Viking skeleton, long assumed to be male because it was found with a warrior’s grave goods, was actually female. Immediately, trans activists on Twitter took this as an opportunity to argue that ‘she’ must have been a ‘he’ – a transgender man. I turned to Alice Roberts, often cited by the BBC as an archaeology expert, for clarification. But instead of rebutting the claims, she repeated them, saying that both gender and sex are socially constructed. Or as she put it, in gender jargon, quoting a fellow activist: ‘Sex and gender are best conceptualised as points in a multidimensional space.’

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