Summary of complaint
We received complaints from people unhappy our reports on the conviction of Scarlet Blake have referred to her as a woman.
Our response
Scarlet Blake was tried as a woman and the pronoun ‘she’ was used throughout.
BBC reporting in this area follows the publicly available BBC News style guide. It says: “We generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question, unless there are editorial reasons not to do so.” In this case, we considered it editorially appropriate to include the fact that Blake is a transgender woman and did so across our output. We accept that should have been included in the report on the News at One on 26 February.
Update 18th April: We further acknowledge that a report on Scarlet Blake’s guilty verdict on BBC South Today also did not mention that Blake is a transgender woman.