“We acknowledge that an admission of inappropriate behaviour by the same contributor should have been included in the original article.”
The “inappropriate behaviour” refers to sexual abuse allegations made against Cade over the years, by a number of women, which were mentioned by Cade herself in her blog posts.
She wrote: “If a rapist is someone who is accused in public of sexual misconduct, then I am a rapist.
“So, too, are three of your last four presidents, the men who sit in your halls of power, and the men who make judgments over your laws. So are all of your heroes, and you know it, and you don’t care.
“If a rapist is someone who pays women to have sex that they don’t actually want to have, then I am a goddamn f**king rapist, and your world is run by rapists.”
Trans sex worker and activist Chelsea Poe, who the BBC interviewed for the story but deemed irrelevant, previously told PinkNews that she made the broadcaster aware of the allegations against Cade.
The BBC published the story anyway.
The BBC maintains that its one-sided, anti-trans story is an ‘important piece of journalism’
Despite the fact that the almost 4,000-word story does not contain a single interview with anyone that disagrees that lesbians are being coerced into sex by trans women, the BBC doggedly insists that it abides by its own impartiality rules and was subject to a “rigorous editorial process”.
A BBC spokesperson told PinkNews: “This is an important piece of journalism that raises issues that should be discussed.
“We have updated this article, published last week, to remove a contribution from one individual in light of comments she has published on blog posts in recent days, which we have now been able to verify.
“We acknowledge that an admission of inappropriate behaviour by the same contributor should have been included in the original article.”
Trans Activism UK, which released the initial open letter against the BBC article, issued a statement titled: “The BBC quietly removing Lily Cade isn’t enough.”
The group said: “While the BBC have removed the quotes and statements by Lily Cade from the article, they did not mention Lily Cade by name in the retraction, or the nature of her genocidal transphobic manifesto in the days following the BBC’s article, the nature of the sexual assault allegations against her by cisgender lesbians, how they undermine the core point of the original article (that sexual assaults of cis lesbians are specifically being done by trans women as an overall societal group), or that Caroline Lowbridge was well aware of those allegations prior to the publishing of the article and chose to bury that information, as alleged by Chelsea Poe.”
It added: “By choosing to remove all mention of Lily Cade, rather than contextualise her as a cisgender lesbian accused of the same crimes levied in the piece against trans women, the BBC is again choosing to bury the rebuttal arguement that anyone from any background can be an abuser, and that to paint this as a trans woman specific issue is painting a minority group with a single brush stroke… This is not sufficient as a correction, or apology.
“The BBC needs to own up to the fact they have published something deeply dangerous, platformed dangerous individuals, and should not be allowed to quietly sweep this under the rug.”