Jo Swinson has finally made the BBC do its job on trans rights

Jo Swinson won’t be our next prime minister but her election campaign has achieved one significant thing already: she’s helped the BBC to start doing the job of journalism on trans rights issues.

The Lib Dems have taken a conscious decision to go into the election campaign as the party of trans rights and inclusion. They think that embracing the transgender issue plays well with the degree-educated, socially liberal voters in university towns.

I can’t judge how well the Lib Dem trans strategy is playing out with those key voters. I can simply assess the public results of that decision, which has been a string of frankly horrible broadcast interviews by Swinson and other Lib Dem candidates. This morning saw another such horror when Swinson went on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and was asked by Justin Webb if she accepted that ‘biological sex exists’ and that people are therefore either male or female.