Tag Archives: helen belcher

This week has been coined Trans Visibility Week. It comes round each year, just before the annual Trans Day of Remembrance, when we honour those who lost their lives in the previous year just for being trans.

So, what’s happened in this Trans Visibility Week?

There’s been an almighty row at the BBC, and Vice has reported that LGBT+ staff are leaving in droves. There have been a couple of fiery meetings between the BBC Pride group and management, and in one of them, Tim Davie (the Director General) reportedly said he was worried about the perception that the BBC is transphobic. Well, Tim, I think it’s way beyond a perception.

We’ve had those opposed to trans equality appear on programmes like Wednesday’s Politics Live. We’ve had an appalling piece a couple of weeks ago, which framed trans women as predatory sex offenders – a piece which had to be amended when one of the three contributors not only admitted to predatory sexual behaviour herself but went on to call for the lynching of all trans women. Note – amended, not withdrawn – despite a letter with over 20,000 signatories being sent to the BBC. And we had a BBC podcast attempting to smear Stonewall, seemingly for no other reason that it campaigns for trans people.

When I appeared before a parliamentary inquiry into trans lives in 2015, I noted that certain BBC programmes couldn’t portray trans people without being slightly incredulous about them. In 2017 the BBC tried defending a documentary which was trying to rehabilitate a Canadian doctor who had been criticised for essentially carrying out conversion practices on trans people. Earlier this year, I complained that the Today programme was using the term “biological males” when it meant trans women – and was met with the response that, yes, the phrase did mean trans women and, no, it wasn’t transphobic and didn’t deny trans women their lived experience. Excuse me!