The media are still running scared of the trans lobby

Over the weekend, the Mail on Sunday published my investigation into trans activism inside Girlguiding, which raised some uncomfortable safeguarding questions. Specifically, why an individual, who had publicly posted highly sexualised content online, was accepted as a Girlguiding volunteer and later appointed to a 16-member steering committee tasked with advising the organisation on its future. This publicly available material included photographs of the individual engaging in provocative burlesque-style performances while wearing fetish-inspired clothing, as well as a video in which they appeared to simulate sexual acts.

The story has generated considerable attention on social media. But it hasn’t, as you might reasonably expect, been picked up by other national media outlets. To my knowledge, it hasn’t prompted radio phone-ins about safeguarding standards in youth organisations. There have been no outraged newspaper columns demanding answers. No politicians calling for inquiries. I don’t imagine ITV’s Loose Women or BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour will be discussing this story. I was invited on to GB News yesterday evening to discuss the story, but that was about it.

So why is the mainstream media largely ignoring a story that, in almost any other circumstances, would be regarded as an obvious matter of public interest? Because the volunteer in question was a man who identifies as a woman. And too many people in positions of influence now appear more concerned about being labelled ‘transphobic’ than about ensuring that girls and women are properly safeguarded.

As JK Rowling put it on X on Monday: ‘If an actual woman had behaved like this while in a position of authority over underage girls it would have been front page news on every paper. Men like this revel in the fact that people of influence are more frightened of looking illiberal than of endangering schoolgirls.’

She is right. As many have pointed out, had this been a story about a female teacher with an OnlyFans page, there would have been widespread media coverage.

I had the evidence for this story in March. It then took me four months to persuade a mainstream publication to publish what I regarded as an obvious public-interest story. To be absolutely clear, my reporting did not allege that this individual had committed any offence or harmed any child. There is no evidence that he did.

The question was whether someone entrusted with working with girls who publicly posts highly sexualised content online should be subject to greater scrutiny. After all, safeguarding is about recognising and managing risk before harm occurs.

The hardest part of this story was not establishing the facts. The evidence was there. It was persuading journalists to treat the story as a legitimate subject for public-interest reporting. This is tough to do. Much of the mainstream media appears to be ideologically captured, but even among the handful of mainstream outlets willing to take on these stories – the Telegraph, the Mail and GB News – there remains a fear of complaints and regulatory scrutiny.

Many journalists have told me privately that they believe media regulators such as Ofcom and IPSO are themselves ideologically captured on questions of sex and gender. Rightly or wrongly, that perception has created a culture of caution and self-censorship throughout the industry.

Indeed, when I saw an early draft of my Mail on Sunday article, it referred to an obviously male individual using female pronouns. I challenged this – not because I wished to be difficult, but because journalism is supposed to describe reality accurately. For a time, I feared I might have to choose between allowing the article to appear using language I believed was inaccurate, or seeing the story dropped altogether.

Eventually, I was told that the female pronouns would be replaced with ‘they’. Which is not ideal. But in the current climate, it felt like a small victory. This in itself tells us something extraordinary about the state of British journalism. We now have journalists who are afraid to describe biological reality accurately, even when biological sex is directly relevant to the story they are reporting. Not because they are stupid or don’t believe biological sex is real. But because they fear the professional and social consequences of saying what they know to be true.

In that respect, they are not so different from the whistleblowers I spoke to as part of my Girlguiding investigation. Past and present staff described an organisation in which many people believed biological sex was real, but were afraid to say so for fear of ostracism or losing their position. What’s ironic, of course, is that journalists should be outraged on their behalf. Regardless of their own personal beliefs on the matter, they should be defending those willing to speak uncomfortable truths, not enforcing the silence.

The greatest threat posed by gender ideology to journalism is not that it encourages journalists to write things they know to be false. It is that it teaches them that some truths are simply too dangerous to tell. When journalists become more afraid of being called transphobic than of failing to ask legitimate safeguarding questions about organisations entrusted with our children, journalism itself has a problem. And so do the children those organisations exist to protect.

Janet Murray is a freelance journalist and director of SEEN in Journalism.