The BBC’s Ministry of Truth: When Britain’s Public Broadcaster Decided Women Don’t Exist

“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
— George Orwell, 1984

BBC Caught in Its Own Web of Newspeak: When Saying ‘Woman’ Becomes a Thoughtcrime

What does a woman need to know to understand she is a woman? According to the BBC, apparently nothing at all. Because if you know what a woman is, if you dare to say that women are adult human females, you have committed the cardinal sin of our age: you have noticed reality.

When newsreader Martine Croxall changed the phrase “pregnant people” to “women” during a live broadcast, she wasn’t editorialising. She was stating a biological fact so obvious that every civilisation in human history has understood it without needing a committee meeting. Yet the BBC found her guilty of expressing “a controversial view about trans people.” Twenty complaints were upheld. Her crime? A facial expression that suggested she knew what a woman was.

The #BBC has turned impartiality into ideology, and biology into blasphemy.

Freedom is the freedom to say a woman is a woman…#MartineCroxall #BBCNews journalist pic.twitter.com/b0bjzbAa8H

— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) November 7, 2025

George Orwell warned us about this in 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” The BBC, our publicly funded broadcaster, has become precisely the institution Orwell feared. It has decided that material reality is now a matter of editorial policy, subject to complaints procedures and impartiality reviews.

A leaked memo reveals how the BBC’s trans coverage has been “captured by a small group” enforcing ideological conformity, and punishing presenters for stating biological facts.

Now, a leaked 19-page memo from Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines committee, reveals what many have long suspected: the corporation’s LGBT desk has been “captured by a small group of people” who systematically censor any coverage that challenges gender identity ideology. Stories reflecting gender-critical perspectives, even when widely covered across other media outlets, are simply kept off air. The result is what Prescott calls “effective censorship” and a “constant drip-feed of one-sided stories celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity.”

This is not journalism. This is propaganda…

What the BBC chose not to cover: leaked documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health raising serious concerns about the medical treatment of gender-distressed children. The story ran in the Mail, the Economist, the Observer, the Washington Post, and the Times. The BBC ignored it. Darlington nurses taking their employer to court for allowing biological males into their changing rooms? Not newsworthy, apparently. Biological male police officers allegedly conducting strip searches on women and girls? Silence.

But a transgender wrestler winning trophies in women’s competitions? That received “gushing” coverage as a tale of liberation, glossing over the rather pertinent fact that a biological male was competing against women and beating them.

The memo reveals something more insidious than simple bias. It exposes a cultural problem in which BBC staff “have never considered the idea of ‘gender identity’ to be either spurious or offensive to many people.” In other words, ideology has so thoroughly captured the institution that its journalists cannot even recognise it as ideology. They think they are simply being kind, progressive, on the right side of history. They are, in fact, participants in one of the most successful campaigns to redefine language and erase women’s rights in modern history.

Some will argue that this is about protecting a vulnerable minority. Let us examine that claim honestly. The people most harmed by gender identity ideology are not wealthy celebrities who can afford private spaces and private healthcare. They are working-class women who depend on NHS services, state-funded rape crisis centres, and public changing rooms. They are the nurses whose employers allow biological males into their private spaces. They are the female prisoners locked in cells with male-bodied inmates. They are the girls whose sports competitions have been rendered meaningless.

“Time and again, programme editors were told no — the LGBTQ desk staffers declined to cover any story raising difficult questions about the trans debate,” Prescott writes.

The loudest champions of gender identity ideology, meanwhile, are insulated from its consequences by wealth and status. They will never find themselves in a women’s prison with a 6’4″ rapist who has decided his name is now Dolores. They simper from television studios about inclusion while their own daughters attend schools with single-sex facilities that remain rigorously enforced.

This is class warfare dressed up as social justice. And the BBC, our public broadcaster funded by a mandatory levy on every household, has chosen a side. It is not the side of the working-class women it claims to champion.

The BBC has turned impartiality into ideology, and biology into blasphemy.

The internal review led by David Grossman found “many shortcomings” in the BBC’s coverage. Significant voices were missing, including detransitioners (the review couldn’t find a single example of their experiences being covered). Stories questioning the quality of care for gender-questioning children received “little or no coverage.” When Newsnight did cover the Cass Review, which led to the closure of the Tavistock clinic, it “balanced” a doctor critical of the clinic with a trans woman happy with her care. As the review dryly noted, if Newsnight were covering concerns about a maternity unit, it would not seek “balance” by interviewing a mother satisfied with her experience.

The most revealing detail in the leaked memo concerns Scarlet Blake, a transgender woman convicted of murdering Jorge Martin Carreno. On the One O’Clock News, Blake was referred to simply as “a woman.” By the Six O’Clock News, this had been corrected to “transgender woman.” The BBC acknowledged this was a mistake. But Prescott asks the more pertinent question: how did the lunchtime news get it wrong? “It may well speak to capture by a particular lobby or a nervousness when reporting these subjects.”

Indeed it does. When your journalists cannot accurately describe a convicted murderer’s biological sex for fear of causing offence, you have ceased to be a news organisation. You have become a propaganda outlet for an ideology that demands the erasure of material reality.

The UK Supreme Court offered a path forward when it ruled that “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex, while maintaining protections for transgender people under the characteristic of gender reassignment. Balance is possible. Rights can be defended without erasing one group to validate another. But balance requires honesty, and the BBC has decided that honesty about biological sex is a controversial opinion rather than an observable fact.

Orwell also wrote that:

“political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

The phrase “pregnant people” is precisely this: pure wind given the appearance of solidity through institutional authority. Women get pregnant. This is not a controversial statement. It is biology. But the BBC has decided that saying so is a breach of impartiality.

Here are some truths that every woman knows, that the BBC would prefer you didn’t say: A woman is an adult human female. Women can get pregnant. Men cannot. These are not opinions. They are facts. And the determined effort to classify them as controversial viewpoints is not progressive. It is authoritarian.

The BBC’s position becomes even more absurd when you consider that no one voted for this. Gender identity ideology has been imposed from the top down by politicians, healthcare bodies, academia, sections of the media, and yes, broadcasters like the BBC. The vast majority of the public disagrees with the idea that biological sex can be wished away, yet this view is treated as beyond debate in our public discourse. People have lost jobs, been defamed, and had their lives destroyed for the crime of knowing that sex is real and matters.

Hannah Barnes, the Newsnight reporter who broke multiple stories about the NHS gender identity service, has left the BBC. Prescott notes grimly that “her work might well now not be possible at the BBC, given the culture I describe.” This is not speculation. This is a former editorial adviser stating plainly that investigative journalism challenging gender identity ideology can no longer be conducted at Britain’s public broadcaster.

When the history of this period is written, the BBC’s role will not reflect well. It will be recorded that when vulnerable children were being medicalised, when women’s rights were being systematically dismantled, when the very concept of objective truth was under assault, the BBC chose to platform only one side of the debate. It will be noted that the corporation charged with informing the British public instead chose to enforce an ideological orthodoxy, silencing dissent and punishing truth-tellers.

The memo is now circulating in government departments. One can only hope that those in power are paying attention. The BBC is funded by a compulsory license fee. Every household in Britain must pay for this propaganda, or face prosecution. We are being forced to fund our own gaslighting.

Martine Croxall knew what a woman was. That knowledge made her dangerous to an institution committed to pretending otherwise. The BBC has become the Ministry of Truth, and women’s reality is its first casualty.

In Orwell’s Oceania, the Party insisted that two plus two equals five. At the BBC, they insist that men can be women. The mathematics are different, but the tyranny is the same.