Remember that BBC article by Caroline Lowbridge about the pressure on lesbians to pretend trans women are lesbians too? Jo Bartosch reports (in the Daily Mail because the Quality papers won’t) that Nancy Kelley tried to get the piece spiked.

The BBC won much praise for its investigation, which prompted some lesbians to express their anger at how they felt ostracised for wishing to form relationships only with women.

Campaigner Kat Howard wrote that she was ‘incredibly grateful to Caroline Lowbridge, and the BBC for this article’, adding: ‘We need help protecting young lesbians everywhere from an LGBT community that would rather see them silenced than stand up to the male perpetrators of assault.’

Yet now it has emerged that months before the article appeared Stonewall’s chief executive Nancy Kelley wrote to the editorial director of BBC News to denounce Lowbridge’s work in an apparent attempt to get her piece stopped.

In her email, Kelley suggested that the BBC article would end up being ‘transphobic’ because it represented trans women as ‘sexual predators’, which was a ‘central anti-trans argument’.

Trans women are men. Some men are sexually predatory. We know this. It’s the stuff of drama and history and song and social life. Some men are sexually predatory, so it’s highly likely that some trans women will be sexually predatory. Nancy Kelley herself is being sexually predatory by proxy in arguing, however indirectly, that lesbians can’t refuse to have sex with men who say they are women.

And although she acknowledged that in sexual relationships ‘consent is paramount and we all want who we want’, she added that ‘structural oppression can influence who we want’.

Even if we accept that, you still have to convince us that men who say they are women are subject to “structural oppression” at all. I don’t believe it, myself. I think they’re subject to non-structural disapproval and/or distaste, but that’s a different thing. Their labor is not exploited, their child-bearing capacity is not exploited, their talents are not exploited. Unease with trans people is situational rather than structural, and bullying lesbians into having sex with trans women is not going to fix the situational unease, to put it mildly.

It is understood that it took many months of editorial discussions before the article was published on October 26.

Stonewall has appeared to confirm that changes were made to the original piece, although it remains unclear whether this was as a direct result of the leaked email, sent in September 2020.

I don’t much want Stonewall screening what we’re allowed to learn via the BBC.

Angela Wild, a member of lesbian campaign group Get The L Out who was quoted in the article, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘For years lesbian activists have been trying to get the message out that it is not bigoted to say “no” to sexual pressure from males who identify as women.

‘The fact that Nancy Kelley has framed the reporting of this issue as transphobia is disgusting. Stonewall are a disgrace and no longer represent the interests of lesbians.’

No longer represents them and sometimes sets fire to them and throws them overboard.