By 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. (RELATED: Texas Court Reinstates Transgender ‘Child Abuse’ Policy)
This is a disgrace. The Times reports that in an online BBC article the pronoun of an alleged transgender rapist was changed from him to they and them. The change in the woman’s story was sought by BBC’s diversity team. Until the attack the lesbian thought her date was a woman.
— Kelvin MacKenzie (@kelvmackenzie) May 31, 2022
“[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.” (RELATED: Transgender Inmate Gets 7 More Years After Raping Woman In Jail)
“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.
