Is the BBC scared of the transgender debate?

I like the BBC. I like the idea of a national broadcaster and I like a lot of BBC output. I admire many BBC journalists – the Corporation employs some of the very best. I am not a Beeb-basher, not least since so many of the people who bang on relentlessly about the BBC’s supposed biases are stupid or horrible or both. I say these things because for all my affection for it, this is an article about an area where the BBC is sometimes getting things wrong. Some recent BBC coverage of transgender issues fails to meet the usual standards of its journalism. Those failings, in turn, raise some wider questions for the BBC on this topic.

The first piece that isn’t up to scratch is this Reality Check about transgender prisoners, published earlier this week. Reality Check, when it’s good, is first-class public service journalism, the sort of rigorous, evidence-based analysis that British journalism and politics desperately need more of. This isn’t good. The piece purports to test an estimate made by Fair Play for Women (FPFW), a feminist group, that 41 per cent of trans women in jail are sex offenders. That’s significantly higher than the 15 per cent of the whole prison population jailed for sexual crimes.

FPFW is concerned that allowing male-born sex offenders to be imprisoned with female-born inmates (who are vulnerable and very often have been victims of sexual abuse) puts women at risk. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not pretending to be neutral here: I think that concern is a valid one and I’m not convinced current prison policy has sufficient regard for the wellbeing of female prisoners in this context. (There’s more to come on this issue, incidentally, but much of it is subject to court action and can’t yet be reported.