BBC pauses LGBT training to ensure it upholds women’s rights

The BBC has put its transgender diversity training on hold to ensure it complies with the UK Supreme Court’s ruling on women’s rights.

A Freedom of Information request found that the BBC’s ‘LGBTQ+ Allies’ and ‘Trans Insights’ diversity, equality and inclusivity (DEI) workshops have been paused to ensure their language complies with the judgment. The courses ‘BBC and You’ and ‘Inclusive Leadership training’ have been amended to remove references to gender “self-identification” and preferred pronouns.

In April, the UK’s highest court ruled in favour of For Women Scotland’s appeal against Scottish Government guidance that allows men who identify as women to take women-only positions on company boards. Judges stated that the terms ‘woman’, ‘man’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex.

Legal obligations

A BBC spokesman commented: “We are not rowing back on our inclusivity training – we have simply paused two of our courses while we await final guidance from the Government following the Supreme Court ruling.

“Once we have this, we’ll ensure our training and the language it uses are updated to meet any legal obligations.”

He added: “We fully intend to comply with the law once guidance has been approved by Government, while ensuring that we provide facilities that respect the needs and rights of all staff and visitors to our buildings.”

‘Ideological capture’

Susan Smith, Co-Director of For Women Scotland, said: “For some time, insiders and licence-fee payers have been concerned about the level of capture which gender identity ideology has achieved in the purportedly unbiased BBC.

“Our only surprise is that there were just four courses which gave rise to concerns; we also wonder if the corporation offered training for ‘allies’ on any other protected characteristic.”

She continued: “We hope that they will come clean about the extent of this training and move urgently to ensure that staff are apprised of the realities of the law so that they can adhere to the Supreme Court ruling and ensure better, fairer reporting on this subject.”