The wokeness never ends. According to The Times in the UK, the BBC actually changed the testimony of a rape victim to protect her transgender attacker from being misgendered.
Here’s the story:
The BBC changed the testimony of a rape victim after a debate over the pronouns of her transgender attacker, The Times has learnt.
The woman referred to her alleged rapist as “him” but insiders said that her words were changed to avoid “misgendering” the abuser in an article on the corporation’s website.
The BBC article replaced every reference to “he” or “him” with “they” or “them”. A source said the quote was the subject of heated debate prior to publication. Some journalists argued that the quote should remain intact, while others said it should reflect the trans woman’s preferred she/her pronouns.
It comes amid growing concern among BBC staff that an internal diversity team is influencing what journalists can report, preventing them from covering gender identity issues accurately and impartially.
The victim’s quote was published last year in an online BBC News article about lesbians being coerced into sex with transgender women.
An anonymous participant told researchers: “I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so he was a ‘woman’ even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout, so I agreed to go home with him. He used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing his penis and raped me.”
“They were originally all male references but the woke bros at the news website wanted to make them female because of misgendering,” said a person with knowledge of the matter. “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 said: “It’s routine to have editorial discussions about different stories. Our only intention when deciding on language is to make things as clear as possible for audiences.”
I went back and found the original article on the BBC’s website and here’s how they edited it. Notice the many [they]’s and [them]’s and [their]’s throughout the quote:
“[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them],” she wrote. “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.”
It’s unbelievable that they would alter a quote like this to protect a transgender rapist, just because he’s so-called ‘transgender’.
And who else are they protecting by making these edits? Themselves. It seems to me that they are afraid the transgender mob will come after them if they don’t kowtow to their pronoun demands. So this is more than about being woke, in my opinion. It’s also about cancel culture and social media.
That said, while the woke editors and internal diversity team at BBC clearly won the day, I am glad that there was at least a debate and that some journalists argued against, even if they were overruled.