Content warning for quotation of extreme transphobia.

In the time since we published our initial open letter to the BBC regarding their article ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’, it has come to light that one of the interview subjects, Lily Cade, has posted several blog entries online that actively call for the lynching, death, suicide, and murder of all transgender women.

She has called for the murder and lynching of several trans women by name, suggested her own willingness to commit the murders of trans women, and made the accusation that all trans women are paedophiles, child groomers and rapists, who should all commit suicide.

While her website is no longer online, as the hosting company WordPress found that the manifesto broke several of their terms of service, a member of WordPress administrative staff has confirmed the veracity of the posts. There was no evidence of the site being maliciously hacked to post the content, and the back end user data suggested that the author of the manifesto was the same person responsible for every other post on the site, which is verifiably Lily Cade. 

We can say with certainty that the following quotes were written and published by Lily Cade in the days following the BBC’s defending of the above mentioned article: 

“Trans women are men! Trans women are the weakest, vilest, most pathetic men on earth, too weak to even kill themselves rather than control the horrifying shadow monster they are grooming your children to serve. The ones who kill themselves are the strong ones. Weak men serve the dark lord, because it’s the path of least resistance.”

“Cancel this so hard that no man dare walk the path of the trans woman in public ever again! Enough is enough.Lynch Kaitlyn [Jenner]! Lynch the “Sisters” Wachowski! Lynch Laurel Hubbard! Lynch Fallon Fox! Make these men stand up as the men you all know they are and hold them accountable for their shame. Your fear of the truth has shovelled thousands of children down the hole of Buffalo Bill’s basement so he can harvest them for their skin”

“Pedos get the wall? Chomos get the rope? Where the fuck are the marines? Where the fuck is the army?” – Directed as a call for violent military action against trans women.

Regarding Jazz Jenning’s mother – “I thought pedos got the wall? How was this woman allowed to raise children? This woman sins against the law of God, against the law of nature, against the sacred duty of motherhood, against her own bloodline, for attention. How many other little kids were chopped up because of this bitch? Hang this bitch, gangrape this bitch before you hang her, how dare she, sacrifice her own child to the cult of fame. Scum sucking, dog cum guzzling, shit eating, lower than a worm hellfire monster of a woman. How could you put this on TV? Why haven’t you killed these people?”

“This is the softest pedophille cult that has ever existed and it’s brought your culture to it’s knees”.

“If you left it up to me, I’d execute every last one of them [trans women] personally.”

We can provide archived versions of the full post, but we believe that these excerpts clearly demonstrate that she, in a very literal sense, is accusing all trans women of being paedophiles and rapists who should be put to death, either by her hand or by others through her call to action.

If a single prominent trans woman had written anything of this nature about cisgender women, there would be a public outcry and it is very likely that it would be used to paint all trans women as violent and dangerous. But, here, the BBC has not even acknowledged that it happened, despite already being under intense criticism and public scrutiny.

In addition to this, she again admitted to being a rapist on the website prior to it being taken down, further supporting the allegations against her.

“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.”

It has also has been uncovered that on 11th July 2018 Lily Cade made a post on Tumblr regarding having sex with people under the age of 18. Lily Cade has previously linked to this Tumblr account in the past, including more recently than 11th July 2018, which makes it likely that the post is authentic.

This post is not an admission of crimes by Lily Cade, it is a piece of fiction, but it demonstrates a years-long obsession with gender dynamics playing into sexual encounters with people under the age of consent. This is an issue that seems to predate this week’s blog post accusation that trans women are part of a paedophile cult.

“I don’t think I have any murderers. Seventeen dead whores, ones with names, anyway.”

“Oh, that’s good, but it’s all downhill from there. May all of the rest of your women outlive you.”

“That’s not very nice, Reese Steele.”

I am not sure the words nice and Reese Steele have ever gotten so close. “It depends on how you see it. Speaking of 17, I have one for you. Ok. So, I met this girl on Lynx. The profile said she was 18. I didn’t think anything of it. I have sex with 18 year old girls all the time. Sweet girl. You know, the usual Reese Steele Experience. Have you ever been fisted? No. Look down. Moment of shock, position change. Oh my god, no one’s ever fucked me like this before. After it was over I gave her a pair of the fucking glasses, from back in the day. I have like 1000 of them. I’ll never sell them, so I just give them to girls. This one squeals like the literal high school student that she is and says ‘OMG this is the best birthday present ever!’”

“Nice,” says Harris, anticipating the outcome.

“So I ask her, ‘when’s your birthday?’ She says, ‘next week.” So I’m like, ‘Is it your 19th birthday?’ It wasn’t her 19th birthday. I told her not to let her parents find the glasses before then, because of course she lived with her parents.”

And the below:

“23 in high school,” he says, and then proceeds to tell me a whole bunch of stories about underage sex, my favorite of which involves a 15 year old Harris, a stripper with a dolphin tattoo, and what it feels like to contract herpes of the throat, but most of which involve attractive entries in his collection of prom queens, homecoming queens, cheerleaders and assorted female athletes.

“That seems like more than 23.” I say, after a while.

“Well, Reese,” he says, with his show voice on, “you do know what they say about high school girls, don’t you?”

“I do not.”

“I keep getting older, but they stay the same age.”

It is very clear that the lack of coverage of the Lily Cade abuse allegations, her apology, and the subsequent posts by Cade contradicts the BBCs statements to media outlets, and their initial response to those who complained to the BBC, claiming that the piece was well researched, with unbiased sources, and not platforming transphobes or transphobia.

Either through malice or incompetence, the BBC’s piece has platformed violent and dangerous people as impartial subjects on trans people as a wider group.

The BBC has stressed that they spent a long time working on the piece, however it has only taken a week to highlight the dangerous biases of at least one of the interviewees.

“The article was carefully considered before publication, went through a rigorous editorial review process and fully complies with the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards.”

“The journalist’s work involved months of speaking to many people about the topic and the article includes testimony from a range of different sources and provides appropriate context.”

At the time of this addendum, the BBC has not acknowledged the publicly available accusations of sexual abuse against cisgender lesbians by Lily Cade, or Lily Cade’s admittance to those assaults, despite that information being available prior to the article’s publication, and highlighted both in our open letter and the many complaints sent to the BBC.

Additionally, it has been claimed on Twitter by Chelsea Poe, a trans woman, that she was contacted for this piece, however, her response was not used in the article. In particular, she claims that she made Caroline Lowbridge aware of the Lily Cade abuse allegations prior to the piece’s publication. 

In an episode of The Performers Pod with Chelsea Poe, posted today, she discusses her side of the events. 

Here are some notable quotes: 

“So, I got an interview request probably January or February of this year. It was from the BBC, and it was asking me about if I wanted to talk about the cotton ceiling. And I said yes, I’m like, “BBC’s a major news publication, I can share my truth on what all of this stuff is, that it’s always been for me about being inclusive with [porn] casting, and that’s what the cotton ceiling really means to me…”

“And that’s what I really talked about the entire time. I also brought up that Lily Cade is no longer in the [porn] industry due to consent issues, but I feel like the whole general tone of the interview was much in a baiting way. There was a question that also included “What would you do if you were on a date with a girl, and she wasn’t comfortable with trans women?”, and my response was two fold that I have a committed partner, I don’t really go on dates, I always disclose that I’m trans because a lot of trans people have huge fears about getting attacked when people don’t know they’re trans, and all of that sort of stuff, even if you’re like me and do have cis passing privalledge where people aren’t necessarily going to read you as trans.”

“So, this whole interview was really bad. After it I almost wanted to message the woman who reached out to me and be like, “Hey, that made me feel really uncomfortable, I felt really dirty after it”, and that’s ultimately what caused me to launch this podcast.”

“I just got baited in this interview. I felt totally used. I had no idea what they were doing with it. It was a video only and I didn’t have any makeup on, so I was really hoping it wasn’t going on British TV”

“I saw the article come out last week, and then the whole wave of everyone talking about Lily Cade’s sexual assault allegations, all across the industry, and I’ve heard many cases first hand about what she has done, and some terms that they used that are extremely inappropriate.”

“Really, [the BBC are] giving her a platform, they didn’t vet that very well”

In a direct statement to us, Poe said that it was Lowbridge who she was interviewed by, and has shown us Twitter DMs that confirm Lowbridge did contact her to arrange an interview, though we could not verify the contents of the interview itself.

This suggests that Lowbridge deliberately covered up the context that Lily Cade is a known sexual abuser, and lied when stating that trans women contacted for comment did not respond. If true, this means that the article’s lack of Lily Cade context was deliberate rather than through error or ignorance. This seems to be evidence that Lily Cade’s status as a sexual abuser of cisgender lesbians was omitted because including it would have involved admitting that sexual abuse can be perpetrated by anyone of any background, further proving that this article was wholly intended to specifically target and paint all trans women as likely predators. 

It also suggests that a quote from a trans woman, where she stated that she discloses her trans status because not doing so is dangerous for many trans women, was deliberately omitted from the piece. In our open letter, one of our criticisms was that no trans women were able to give that specific context, and it seems that the BBC had a quote to that effect but decided not to use it in the article. 

It is clear that the BBC platformed a person with violently dangerous anti-trans views, and has not been quick to act in the wake of the manifesto being posted.

Whilst we have written confirmation that our open letter has been received by the BBC, notably Tim Davie the Director-General, we have yet to receive a response. 

This statement is in addendum to our original open letter, signed by more than 20,000 people, which criticises the article and the manner in which it endangers a marginalised group of people through its lack of journalistic integrity and its clear violations of the BBC’s own publishing guidelines, mission statement and ethics.

We demand a full and appropriate response to our criticisms of the above mentioned article. 

It is clear that the piece cited known hate groups whose anti-trans bias has a well documented history that the piece did not contextualise. It is clear that the piece uncritically platformed a dangerous anti-trans voice who should never have been used as an “impartial” interviewee on the trans community. It is clear that the piece’s author, Caroline Lowbridge, has made deliberate efforts to bury known issues with these sources. 

With this knowledge, the BBC cannot continue to stand behind the sentiment that its piece is impartial, properly researched, and not biased towards clearly transphobic rhetoric.