BBC responds to complaint over its assertion biological sex ‘can’t be changed’

The BBC responded to a complaint over a report that asserted that “biological sex” cannot be changed, denying that the article in question was “misleading”.

The broadcaster’s response to a reader filed a formal complaint about the wording of the article was shared online.

Written by journalists Aoife Walsh and Euan O’Byrne Mulligan, and published on the BBC news website in March, the story shared insights into the Sullivan Report, an independent review which analysed the way gender identity is recorded in UK data sets.

Commissioned by the Conservative government of the time, and published on 19 March, the review, led by sociology professor Alice Sullivan, recommended that public bodies focus on collecting “biological sex” data to avoid what she described as a “widespread loss of data on sex”.

The report has been criticised for what experts called “factually incorrect assertions” about sex and gender. In addition, Sullivan was accused of bias because of her association with gender-critical groups such as Sex Matters.

Posting to Reddit, a user said they had submitted a formal complaint about the article in March, claiming that the assertion that “biological sex” cannot be changed was incorrect, and accusing the BBC of bias.

BBC says ‘biological sex’ line was to ‘provide context’

Responding, a member of the BBC complaints team specifically highlighted a line in the article that read: “While people can legally change gender, they can’t change biological sex. This means a woman who transitions to become a man may still need cervical smears, and transgender women may need prostate checks.”

In an email, shared by the Reddit user, the spokesperson added that the line was written to “provide context” and to help “aid readers’ understanding of the implications of decisions around how sex and gender data is collected in clinical settings”.

They went on to say: “We listen carefully to a wide range of audience feedback and aim to make our articles accessible and understandable for a wide range of people, some with expert knowledge and others with none.

“We acknowledge the former group may find some of our writing overly reductive.”

The BBC complaints team stated that it did not “share [the complainant’s] view that the article [was] misleading.”

It then linked to a BBC article on controversial Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, from 2024, which featured comments from Dr Emma Hilton, a trustee of gender-critical group Sex Matters, as an alternative source that they might be “interested” in reading.

The BBC declined to comment when contacted by PinkNews.

In their Reddit post, the original complainant accused the BBC of using a “dog-whistle” to deflect from the criticism and of continuing to “dumb down” the concept of sex and gender.

“I’d almost prefer if it was just plain ignorance but clearly their ideological bias runs deeper if they’re defending it,” they alleged, going on to say that the Khelif article featured “unevidenced” claims and contradicted their stance.

“The article later establishes that sex is made up of many characteristics, e.g. ‘it’s impossible to establish that everyone with a Y chromosome is a male,’ and ‘the biology of sex itself is complex’… nowhere does it claim sex, or its many component characteristics, can’t be changed”, they added.