Ex-BBC director: ‘Pro-trans bias pervaded corporation’

A former BBC Director of News and Current Affairs has revealed how the trans agenda played a significant part in driving her from the corporation.

Fran Unsworth, who stepped down from the top job in 2022, told UnHerd that it was relentlessly difficult dealing with “progressive editorial issues and the bullying around them”.

She pointed to a pervasive “social phenomenon” at the BBC, which prioritised being “kind to transitioning people” to such an extent that “maintaining impartiality became quite difficult”.

Bullying

In an interview with ex-BBC editor Rob Burley, Unsworth said: “It was bullying. But it wasn’t just the trans issue. There was lots and lots of bullying going on about all sorts of things: people didn’t want to hear from certain points of view; they’d ‘no platform’ them”.

“The world went mad, and the BBC, because it is part of the world, went a bit mad with it. This was going on in every institution in society; there was a kind of national bullying going on.”

Regarding the transgender issue, she explained to Burley: “As you well know, editorial decision-making in the BBC isn’t top-down. It’s about editors deciding what they want to put on their programmes. And one of the big factors in it is because they took so much heat whenever they went near this subject.”

However, according to Burley, Unsworth believed that the 2025 Supreme Court ruling on biological sex provided BBC journalists with a “basis of challenge” against those who championed transgender ideology, prior to which the facts “were incredibly disputed”.

Responding to Unsworth’s allegations, the BBC said it has “taken a number of actions relating to our reporting of sex and gender” and continually reviews “coverage to reflect developments such as the Supreme Court ruling”.

Pro-trans censors

In a leaked BBC document seen by The Daily Telegraph last year, journalists warned their executives that LGBT “desk staffers” were “keeping other perspectives off-air”.

Michael Prescott, who worked at the corporation as an advisor on the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC), told the newspaper: “The allegation made to me was stark: that the desk had been captured by a small group of people promoting the Stonewall view of the debate”.

“There was also a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories, usually news features, celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity.”

Blinkered

The 19-page document also referred to an investigation conducted by EGSC senior editorial adviser David Grossman into BBC coverage of trans issues.

Grossman found “unintended editorial bias”, an absence of “significant voices”, “little or no coverage” questioning the quality of care given to gender-confused children, and a disproportionate coverage of drag queen stories.

The leaked memo also said beliefs on gender identity were often reported as “established fact rather than contested”. Too many staff, it argued, “have never considered the idea of ‘gender identity’ to be either spurious or offensive to many people”.