BBC audiences might be surprised to learn that the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is committed to upholding the ban on puberty blockers. That is because on the same day as the puberty blocker story broke, our national broadcaster instead ran an interview with Venus Wailer, a trans activist who performs drag in a provincial city. 

Bizarrely, this is the second BBC puff piece on the same Bristol-based performer in the past few months alone. The article, which twangs on the heart strings with much the same effect as a Hallmark greeting card, describes Wailer as “developing a drag act to help mentor transgender youngsters.” 

The 32-year-old man, who identifies as a woman, reflects: “It gives me hope for the future because [the children] get it and I just want to lead the way for them.” No alternative viewpoint was offered about the existence of “transgender youngsters”, nor of the dangers of affirming a child in a cross-sex or nonbinary delusion. Tellingly, Wailer himself recalls that at his school in Venezuela, “there were kids in my school who were very flamboyant and getting bullied,” presumably these proto gay boys will today simply opt out of manhood by identifying as girls.

Granted, it takes skill to lip sync and dispense sarcasm while wearing skyscraper heels. But expert analysis of paediatric policy isn’t part of the drag package. So why did the BBC not opt to probe a little more deeply with an article on Streeting’s policy announcement? Why, instead of covering a major and controversial policy pledge did editors distract readers by digitally dangling a man in sparkly clothes in front of their eyes?

To many, drag queens are a sneering parade of gay male misogyny; of what feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys referred to as men who perform “woman face” in the same way as white people once “blacked up” for popular entertainment. Yet because Stonewall died for our sins (or something to that effect) drag has now been recast by the BBC as progressive, as fun for all the family.

And by now it seems clear that someone senior at the BBC has a thing for drag queens, or at the very least shares in bouffant wigs. It goes without saying that some of those paid from the licence fee will have children who identify as trans, making impartial coverage tough.

Writer Graham Linehan has other thoughts. He recently reported on what happened when a member of the public, who had been a senior media professional, sent evidence of the failings at World Professional Association of Trans Health (WPATH) to Fergus Walsh, the BBC’s medical editor. His first email appears to have been ignored, while the second ended up in Walsh’s spam folder.

It is unfortunate that Walsh did not make a stronger effort to pursue the matter. Doing so would at least have allowed him to distance himself from his familial connections to a well-funded trans-supporting organisation. As Linehan noted, Walsh’s wife is Dr Véronique Walsh, the vice president of Gilead Sciences UK and Ireland. Gilead Sciences is a pharmaceutical company that set up a $4.5 million fund to “to improve the safety, health, and wellness of the transgender community, particularly in light of the disproportionate impact of HIV on transgender individuals”. 

The BBC is a big machine, and Walsh is of course just one cog within it. Yet despite being bound to inform, educate and entertain without bias, our national broadcaster gives every appearance of having an agenda that is at odds with the public it purports to serve. 

The corporation’s obsession with drag is bait in the apparently “confected” culture wars. Gushing stories about drag allow the BBC to push gender ideology without explicitly stating the activist mantra that “puberty blockers save lives”. Wes Streeting can be cast as a baddie for seeking to implement the Cass Review without a journalist committing a single word to the page in their own name; all they need to do is to report on the half-baked thoughts of drag queens. And this is done by presenting a tough story about politics and health as instead a touchy-feely tale of community and human interest. In this way drag allows trans activist talking points to be snuck onto broadcasts and written into articles.

The BBC’s coverage of the puberty blocker scandal has all the characteristics of drag; the corporation’s journalists are taking part in a tawdry and offensive charade.