"We're being pressured into sex by some trans women" is the original title of a BBC News article written by Caroline Lowbridge and published on 26 October 2021. Produced by the BBC's regional service in Nottingham, the article says that lesbians are being pressured into sex by a number of transgender women and cisgender activists. The article received widespread criticism among the LGBTQ community for being transphobic. It drew particular attention for the inclusion of comments from Lily Cade, an American pornographic actress, who wrote a blog post after the article's publication calling for the "lynching" of high-profile trans women. Cade's comments were subsequently removed from the article.
Trans Activism UK, Trans Media Watch and at least one senior employee of Mermaids were critical of the article. An open letter with 20,000 signatories asked for the BBC to apologise. The Guardian and The Times reported that the article met backlash from BBC staff, including prior to its publication, while protests took place outside BBC offices. Criticisms centred on the inclusion of a social media poll from the anti-transgender group Get the L Out that was accused of having a low sample size and self-selection bias; it reported that 56% of the eighty lesbians polled had felt pressured into having sex with transgender women. Critics also believed that Lowbridge's chosen interviewees had a narrow range of viewpoints. A Stonewall executive is quoted on the subject, as is the co-founder of the LGB Alliance, which was created in opposition to Stonewall after they began to campaign for transgender equality.
Chelsea Poe, a transgender pornographic actress, reported that Lowbridge interviewed her for the article but did not include her comments. She also reported telling Lowbridge that Cade had been subject to sexual assault allegations. The BBC initially assessed that the article met its editorial standards but that allegations against Cade should have been mentioned. However, on 31 May 2022, the Executive Complaints Unit of the BBC ruled that although the article was a "legitimate piece of journalism overall", it had breached the corporation's editorial rules on accuracy for not making clear the statistical invalidity of the Get the L Out poll and for the title misleadingly suggesting that the article focused on pressure from trans women. As a result, the article was subsequently renamed "The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women".
Summary The 4,000-word article was written by Caroline Lowbridge and posted on the BBC News website on 26 October 2021. It originally included quotes from Lily Cade, an American female pornographic actress, but these were edited out following later comments made by Cade about trans people. A Portuguese translation was published in Brazil.
Lowbridge wrote that "there has been little research" on lesbians experiencing "pressure" to "accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ", but that such lesbians reported pressure coming from a small number of transgender women and cisgender "activists". An anonymous lesbian said she does not "possess the capacity to be sexually attracted" to transgender women, and that she suffered death threats for saying this. Another reported that her bisexual girlfriend broke up with her after she declined to participate in a threesome with her and a trans woman, saying that she could not be attracted to any trans women. A third woman recounted a sexual experience with a trans woman that occurred after she repeatedly expressed that she was uninterested; although she felt that the experience was not consensual, she said that she did not tell anyone about the incident because she felt worried that she would be excluded from the LGBTQ community.
Angela C. Wild, co-founder of Get the L Out, commented that "the trans ideology is so silencing everywhere", and that lesbians "are still extremely scared to speak". Her social media survey of eighty lesbians found that 56% were "pressured or coerced to accept a trans woman as a sexual partner"; four respondents' comments are quoted. The transgender YouTuber Rose of Dawn, who started her channel over debates about whether it is transphobic to refuse to date people because they are transgender, is quoted within the article; one of Rose of Dawn's videos responded to comments by the transgender academic and athlete Veronica Ivy, arguing that such decisions are not transphobic. Debbie Hayton, a transgender woman who works as a science teacher, said she is concerned by "shaming" of cisgender lesbians and commented on how difficult it is to form relationships as a transgender woman. A New Zealand TikTok content creator reported receiving messages from young lesbians who are unable to break up with their partners because they are trans.
The article also included a quotation from a statement by the Stonewall executive Nancy Kelley, who said "nobody should ever be pressured into dating... people they aren't attracted to", but that "it's worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions". Bev Jackson, a co-founder of LGB Alliance—an organisation founded after Stonewall announced it would campaign for transgender equality—said, based on people who contacted her, that "a sizeable minority of trans women... pressure lesbians to go out with them and have sex with them", although she was unable to provide statistics.
According to Lowbridge, the term "cotton ceiling" arose among trans people to describe difficulty in forming sexual relationships. The article states that several high-profile trans women had been contacted for the piece but that none of them had wanted to speak to Lowbridge. In place of interviews, the article summarised previously expressed views of two trans women YouTubers and the poet Roz Kaveney on the topic of the cotton ceiling, including one YouTuber who had already deleted the quoted video.
Analysis The article was produced by BBC Nottingham, a regional department of the corporation. It was subject to the BBC English Regions commissioning process, rather than that of the national BBC. Lowbridge, the author, said that she began investigating the subject after being contacted by people who said that they were concerned by pressure to "accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ". According to the BBC, Lowbridge's research "involved months of speaking to many people about the topic".
Range of views in the article According to NBC Out, three quoted lesbians are "figureheads from groups that push anti-trans messages", including the LGB Alliance. Trans Activism UK said that the LGB Alliance had been "discriminatory towards the LGBTQ+ community". Of the sources, one describes specifically being pressured into penetrative sex by a transgender woman. Though she did not dispute this source's experience, Linda Riley—the publisher of Diva magazine—commented, "I have never heard from a lesbian who says she has been pressured into having sex with a trans woman", and that "this is not a common experience in our community". James Kirkup, director of the Social Market Foundation, counter-argued in The Times that it was "bizarre" to criticise the article without "question[ing] the accuracy" of the source. Kirkup later wrote for The Spectator that the article's quote from Stonewall amounted to "the country's biggest gay rights campaign group suggesting that homosexual women who refuse to consider sex with people who have male genitalia is comparable to racism."
The BBC argued that the report incorporated a range of views, including some from trans women. However, a member of Trans Activism UK commented that the article omitted quotes from cisgender lesbians who had relationships with transgender women. PinkNews' Lily Wakefield said it "does not contain a single interview with someone who disagrees that trans women are coercing lesbians into sex". The BBC was questioned by members of Parliament about whether proper journalistic processes had been performed prior to the publication of the article and why no interviews with trans people were included.
In the article, Lowbridge wrote that she had "contacted several... high-profile trans women who have either written or spoken about sex and relationships", but said that "none of them wanted to speak to me." However, Chelsea Poe, a transgender pornographic actress and a former colleague of Cade, said that she had been interviewed for the article but that her quotes were not included. Poe told PinkNews that she was interviewed by Lowbridge in September 2020, who told her the article's topic was the "cotton ceiling", and that she felt "truly gross" after the "extremely baiting" behaviour by Lowbridge, who repeatedly asked her about "going on dates with people not into trans women". The BBC later confirmed to PinkNews that Poe had been interviewed for the piece but that her statements had been deemed not relevant to the article. On 31 May 2022 the BBC stated that whether a particular trans person is "high profile" is "a matter of judgement, in which there may be a subjective element" and justified the wording used in the article by saying that it was not "a serious inaccuracy" to describe Poe as not being high-profile.
Lily Cade sexual misconduct allegations and blog posts
Lily Cade, an American former pornographic actress quoted in the article, had been the subject of sexual misconduct allegations. Cade apologised for the incidents in 2017, later saying that she had thought they were consensual and had stopped working in the industry after the allegations. Poe, another pornographic actress, reported informing Lowbridge of those incidents, but the latter considered the topic irrelevant and all content from the interview was omitted from the final article.
After the article's publication, Cade published several blog posts on her website calling for the "lynching" of trans women. She specifically named high-profile trans women within the post, calling for their murder, and wrote, "If you left it up to me, I'd execute every last one of them [trans women] personally." Her blog also claimed that a paedophilic cult controlled the Western world, and called George Floyd, an African American man who had been murdered by a police officer, "an annoying piece of shit." Cade later described transgender women as "vile, weak and disgusting" and referenced the Great Replacement, a white supremacist conspiracy theory. Consequently, the BBC removed all Cade-related content from the article.
Get the L Out survey The article incorporated a social media poll held by the anti-trans campaign group Get the L Out. The survey, conducted in 2019 and titled "Lesbians at Ground Zero: How transgenderism is conquering the lesbian body", was self-published on the group's website. The survey introduction described the "lesbian body as a battleground" at risk of destruction, citing a quotation from Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire that said that "all transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, appropriating this body for themselves." The survey took the form of a 30-question questionnaire, distributed among Get the L Out's networks, and noted that the results did "not claim to be a representative sample of the lesbian community." The survey received eighty responses, of which 48% were from within the United Kingdom. In the results, Get the L Out reported that: 87.5% of respondents did not believe trans women were women and 98.8% would not consider a trans woman as a potential sexual partner; 50% of respondents said they had been excluded from LGBTQ groups and 66% said they had been intimidated in those groups, mostly online; 48% said they had visited lesbian dating sites and 5% said they had had a sexual relationship with a trans woman; and