Radical: The BBC, Pink News and how, in reporting on the Gender Recognition Act, the media has shown shocking inaccuracy

Jun 23, 2020 by Jill

from Radical:

Victoria Hewson is a solicitor and Rebecca Lowe is the former director of FREER, and a former assistant editor of ConservativeHome. Together they found Radical, a campaign for truth and freedom in the gender recognition debate.

On June 15, The Sunday Times reported that, according to leaked documents, “Plans to allow people to change their legal gender and ‘self-identify’ as a different sex have been scrapped”.

These plans had been developed under Theresa May’s government, and would have allowed people to change the sex on their birth certificate without a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Readers of this column won’t have been surprised by the news of a U-turn on these plans, however.

Such a move was strongly hinted at by Liz Truss, the minister now responsible, in a speech this April, in which she underlined that the present government’s approach to the future of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) would be guided by the need to protect single-sex spaces, and maintain “proper checks and balances” in the system.

Subsequently, last week’s leak – the details of which remain unconfirmed by the Government – provoked anger from LGBT groups in all the main UK parties. Representatives from the Conservatives, Labour, SNP, Liberal Democrats, Greens, Alliance Party, and Plaid Cymru, published a joint letter.

However, the letter’s substance – and media reportage of it – exemplifies the way in which so many public statements about these matters are rife with bad information, particularly regarding current law and practice.

Read here